How this site is sourced — and where AI is used
A reference site earns trust by being checkable. This page sets out the rules the rest of the site follows: what counts as a source, how figures are dated, how the federation is handled, and the specific, visible way AI-assisted reasoning is separated from cited fact.
AussieLedger publishes 45 long-form pages and 19 short-answer pages about living in Australia. Every one of them carries a source list, a verification date, and a provenance note. Nothing on the site asks to be taken on faith.
The source hierarchy
A claim is sourced as high up this list as it can be. Where a lower tier is the only available source, the page says so.
- 1
Official
The Australian Government department, agency or statutory body that administers the thing being described — the ATO for tax, Services Australia for Medicare and Centrelink, Home Affairs for visas, the relevant state fair-trading or tenancy authority for anything devolved.
- 2
Legislation
The Act, regulation or legislative instrument itself, where the precise wording matters — for example the Australian Consumer Law in Schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, or a state Residential Tenancies Act.
- 3
Regulator
Ombudsmen, commissions and tribunals that decide disputes and publish how they decide them — AFCA, the TIO, the Fair Work Commission, state civil and administrative tribunals.
- 4
Statistics
The Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Reserve Bank, Geoscience Australia and other official data producers, used for anything numeric about the country.
- 5
Research / news
Universities, peer-reviewed work and established newsrooms — used for context and for dating events, never as the sole authority for a rule, rate or entitlement.
AI-assisted analysis is labelled twice
Once where it appears in the text, and again in the source list. It is never allowed to sit in a paragraph looking like a sourced fact.
AI is used on this site the way a research assistant is used: to read the source material, structure it, draft prose, and cross-check claims against each other. That work is invisible and unremarkable — the same as any editorial tooling.
What is not invisible is the second kind of AI output: a conclusion that no cited document actually contains. “A local SIM is better value beyond a fortnight.” “Escalate to the ombudsman before the tribunal.” “This is the step most people get wrong.” Those are judgements. No agency published them. They are reasoning over the sources, and they are marked as such:
Every page containing such a passage also carries a matching entry in its source list, in a separate block headed “Not a source — AI-assisted analysis on this page”, with no link, because there is nothing to link to. Machine-readable copies of the site (llms.txt and llms-full.txt) carry the same distinction, so a model quoting this site can carry it through rather than flattening our reasoning into an official-sounding fact.
Eight jurisdictions, not one
Getting this wrong is the single most common failure in Australian how-to content.
Tenancy, driver licensing, stamp duty, fines, school enrolment, workers’ compensation, ambulance cover and consumer-affairs enforcement are all state or territory matters. Tax, Medicare, social security, visas, superannuation and the Australian Consumer Law itself are federal.
Where an answer differs by jurisdiction, the page gives every jurisdiction rather than describing New South Wales and hoping. Where a page can only responsibly cover some states, it says which ones and why.
Everything is dated
Because in Australia a great deal of it changes on 1 July.
Each page shows the date its facts were last checked against the sources. That date — not the build date — drives the lastmod in the sitemap and the dateModified in the structured data. A deploy that changes no content changes no date. The site-wide review date is currently 2026-07-30.
Income tax thresholds, the superannuation guarantee rate, Medicare levy thresholds, minimum wages and most Centrelink rates change at the start of a financial year. Treat any figure from a previous financial year as indicative and confirm it with the agency.
What this site is not
- Not legal, medical, migration, tax or financial advice. It is general information about publicly documented processes.
- Not a government service. We cannot look up your record, chase your claim, or act on your behalf.
- Not a substitute for the agency. Where this site and an official source disagree, the official source wins — and we want to know so we can fix it.
- Not comprehensive on anything discretionary. Visa decisions, tribunal outcomes and hardship arrangements turn on individual facts we cannot see.
Questions about how we work
Is AussieLedger an official government website?
No. It is an independent reference site with no affiliation to, endorsement from, or funding by the Australian Government or any state or territory government. Where a page describes a government process, it links to the government page that governs it so you can verify the description at the source.
How do you decide what counts as a source?
In tiers. The administering agency comes first, then the legislation itself, then the regulator or tribunal that decides disputes, then official statistics, and only then research and news. A rule, rate or entitlement is never sourced to a news article alone.
Where exactly is AI used on this site?
AI is used to draft, structure and cross-check the writing, and to reason over the cited sources. Any conclusion that no cited document actually states — a comparison, a judgement about which option suits whom, an ordering of steps — appears in a dashed, labelled AI-assisted analysis callout and is repeated as an explicit AI-analysis entry in the page's source list.
Does that mean the facts are AI-generated?
No. Facts are taken from the sources listed on each page and are checked against them. The AI labelling exists precisely so that the two things stay visibly separate: what an authority says, and what we concluded from it.
How current are the figures?
Every page carries the date its facts were last verified, and that same date drives the sitemap and the structured data. Australian thresholds commonly change on 1 July, and fees change with each state budget, so a figure more than a year old should be confirmed with the agency before you act on it.
What if a page is wrong?
Tell us and it gets fixed and re-dated. Corrections change the verified date on the page; they do not silently rewrite history. Where a source itself has changed — a threshold indexed, a form retired — the page is updated to match the new source rather than left to drift.