Project Description
🧭 Red Tape Navigator — Project Description
Cutting through the spaghetti of Australian regulation.
One roadmap at a time.
[0] The Story
Imagine you’re starting a café in Sydney.
You’ve got the beans, the machine, and the dream. ☕
But instead of pulling espresso shots, you’re pulling permits — from three levels of government.
- Federal wants your tax compliance.
- State wants your workplace safety.
- Local wants to approve your signage.
And sometimes… those rules overlap or even contradict.
Welcome to the Regulatory Maze™.
It’s confusing, time-consuming, and expensive.
Enter the Red Tape Navigator — your GPS through government spaghetti.
[1] What It Does
📌 The Navigator takes a business scenario (e.g. “open a café in Sydney”) and delivers:
- ✅ A harmonised checklist of obligations
- 🗺️ A visual roadmap that layers Local → State → Federal
- 💬 Plain-English explanations anyone can understand
- 🚨 Conflict alerts when rules overlap or contradict
- 📊 Progress tracking so businesses know when they’re done
[2] How It Works
- Input: “Café in Sydney”
- Navigator fetches obligations from local, state, and federal regulators
- Harmonises them into one data model
- Flags overlaps and contradictions
- Outputs a compliance roadmap in seconds
[3] Key Features
- Checklist Generator → auto-builds to-do list by jurisdiction
- Roadmap Visualiser → interactive map of requirements
- Conflict Detection Engine → highlights overlaps
- Plain English Mode → no jargon, just clarity
- Progress Tracker → green ticks as you go
[4] Why It Matters
- For businesses: No more regulatory guesswork
- For governments: Clearer compliance builds trust
- For citizens: Lower costs, better services, faster innovation
[5] Storytelling Example
Alice wants to open a café in Sydney.
Without Navigator:
- Spends weeks searching websites
- Finds duplicate obligations
- Pays a consultant $$$
With Navigator:
- Enters her business idea
- Receives a checklist, roadmap, and conflict alerts in seconds
- Knows exactly what to do, when to do it, and who to do it with
Result: More time for flat whites. Less time fighting forms.
[6] GovHack Criteria Alignment
- ✅ Novel Insight → detecting overlaps across jurisdictions
- ✅ Use of Data → harmonised across local, state, and federal
- ✅ Impact → saves time, money, and sanity
- ✅ Design → visual, simple, accessible to everyone
- ✅ Storytelling → café case study makes the problem real
[7] Risks + Mitigation
- Risk: Incomplete datasets → Fix: Fallback to manual summaries
- Risk: Confusing outputs → Fix: Plain English layer
- Risk: Trust gap → Fix: Transparency with clear source attribution
[8] Demo Script (Hackathon Flow)
- User enters: “Start a café in Sydney”
- Navigator loads obligations across 3 jurisdictions
- Flags 2 conflicts
- Generates roadmap + checklist
- Visual flow shows green ticks as Alice completes them
- Close with: “Less red tape, more caffeine.”
[9] Conclusion
The Navigator transforms:
Confusion → Clarity
Overlaps → Insights
Red Tape → Roadmaps
It’s the GPS for government.
No more spaghetti, just straight paths.
Thank you for your time :)
Data Story
📊 Red Tape Navigator — Data Story
From messy datasets to clear roadmaps.
How we turned regulation spaghetti into structured compliance journeys.
[0] The Problem
Australia’s regulations are spread across local, state, and federal governments.
- Different formats (PDFs, portals, APIs)
- Different languages (legal jargon vs plain English)
- Different priorities (tax vs safety vs zoning)
For businesses, this fragmentation creates:
- Overlaps
- Contradictions
- Confusion
The data itself is the maze.
[1] The Approach
We designed a pipeline to:
- Ingest rules from multiple government sources
- Classify them by jurisdiction (Local → State → Federal)
- Harmonise them into a single data model
- Detect overlaps and contradictions across levels
- Translate into plain English for everyday users
[2] Data Flow
Input → Business scenario (e.g. “Café in Sydney”)
Step 1: Source Linking
- Pull obligations from local council docs, state legislation, federal registries
Step 2: Harmonisation
- Map all rules into a unified schema (actors, actions, deadlines)
Step 3: Conflict Detection
- Cross-check requirements across levels of government
- Flag duplicates and contradictions
Step 4: Output
- Roadmap + checklist + conflict alerts
- All in plain English
[3] Why This Data Story Matters
- Novelty: No current system harmonises across all three levels of government
- Impact: Saves time and money by reducing duplicated compliance work
- Transparency: Each item is tagged with its original source
- Trust: Plain English outputs make regulation accessible to all
[4] Example Walkthrough
Alice wants to open a café in Sydney.
Data story:
- Local Data: Council zoning + signage approval
- State Data: Workplace safety + food handling
- Federal Data: ABN registration + tax obligations
The Navigator pipeline ingests all three.
It detects overlaps (food handling rules appearing twice).
It outputs a harmonised roadmap with one clean, non-duplicated checklist.
Alice understands what to do — without needing a lawyer.
[5] Criteria Alignment
- ✅ Use of Data → multi-jurisdiction harmonisation
- ✅ Impact → lowers barriers for small businesses
- ✅ Design → visual, structured, easy to follow
- ✅ Innovation → conflict detection across levels of government
- ✅ Storytelling → café example makes the abstract problem concrete
[6] Risks + Mitigation
- Risk: Missing datasets → Fix: Use summaries + placeholders until live data links available
- Risk: Ambiguity in law → Fix: Mark “grey areas” and direct users to official sources
- Risk: Data overload → Fix: Plain English translation + progressive disclosure
[7] Conclusion
The data tells a story:
