simplelex/Australian-Tax-Legislation-and-Amendment-History

Australian Tax Legislation & Amendment History

The full text of every section of the 22 principal Acts the Australian Taxation Office administers — Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, Income Tax Assessment Act 1936, the GST Act, FBTAA, the Taxation Administration Act 1953, the superannuation and fuel tax Acts and more — each section joined to its complete amendment history: which Act changed it, which schedule item, and when it commenced. Sourced from the Federal Register of Legislation and structured for legal RAG, statutory retrieval, and LLM fine-tuning.

This rebuilds the "see history notes" view that commercial Australian tax services charge for — reconstructed entirely from the freely licensed, Crown-copyright FRL compilation endnotes, so it can be published under CC BY 4.0.

Companion dataset: ATO rulings, private advice, determinations and guidance are published separately at **simplelex/ATO-Australian-Tax-Rulings-and-Guidance**. The two are designed to be used together — ATO documents cite provisions; this dataset resolves them.

File formats

Each dataset is published in two parallel files with identical content and field order:

JSON keys are identical to CSV column names — the schema tables below describe both formats.

Contents

• —Dataset Splits
• —Quick Start
• —Schema
• —Principal Legislation
• —Amendment History
• —Legislation + History Notes
• —Acts Covered
• —Use Cases
• —Limitations
• —Attribution — required wording
• —Source & Licensing
• —Citation
• —Terms of Service

Dataset Splits

Quick Start

Option A — NDJSON via datasets (recommended for ML)

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset(
    "simplelex/Australian-Tax-Legislation-and-Amendment-History",
    "legislation_with_history",
    split="train",
)
print(ds[0])

# Available configs: principal_legislation · amendment_history · legislation_with_history

Option B — NDJSON via pandas

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_json("frl_legislation_with_history_all.jsonl", lines=True)

# What does ITAA 1997 s 6-5 say, and how has it changed?
s6_5 = df[(df["Act_Short_Name"] == "ITAA1997") & (df["Provision_Key"] == "s6-5")]
print(s6_5[["Heading", "Text", "Amendment_Count", "History_Notes"]].iloc[0])

Option C — join provisions to their amendment events yourself

import pandas as pd

provisions = pd.read_json("frl_principal_legislation_all.jsonl", lines=True)
events = pd.read_json("frl_legislation_history_all.jsonl", lines=True)

joined = provisions.merge(events, on=["Act_FRL_Id", "Provision_Key"], how="left")

# Most-amended sections of the ITAA 1997
top = (
    joined[joined["Act_Short_Name_x"] == "ITAA1997"]
    .groupby(["Provision_x", "Heading"])
    .size()
    .sort_values(ascending=False)
)
print(top.head(10))

Multi-value fields (Amending_Acts, History_Notes) use | as the internal delimiter in both formats.

Schema

The column tables below apply to both the CSV and NDJSON variants — every CSV column maps 1:1 to a JSON key of the same name in the corresponding .jsonl file, in the same order.

Encoding conventions

1. Principal Legislation (principal_legislation)

Current in-force text of every section of the 22 principal Acts the ATO administers. One row per provision.

2. Amendment History (amendment_history)

One row per amendment event: which provision changed, the action taken, the amending Act, and when it commenced. Reconstructed from FRL compilation endnotes (Endnote 2 abbreviation key, Endnote 3 legislation history, Endnote 4 amendment history).

3. Legislation + History Notes (legislation_with_history)

The flagship dataset. A left-join of #1 and #2 on (Act_FRL_Id, Provision_Key) — one row per current section, carrying its full text AND its complete chronological amendment history.

Acts Covered

The 22 principal Acts administered by the Australian Taxation Office, including:

• —Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 and Income Tax Assessment Act 1936
• —A New Tax System (Goods and Services Tax) Act 1999, plus the Luxury Car Tax and Wine Equalisation Tax Acts
• —Fringe Benefits Tax Assessment Act 1986
• —Taxation Administration Act 1953 (including the Schedule 1 administrative provisions)
• —Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993, Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 and related superannuation Acts
• —Fuel Tax Act 2006, Petroleum Resource Rent Tax Assessment Act 1987
• —Tax Agent Services Act 2009

Use Cases

• —Statutory RAG — each provision is a self-contained retrieval unit with a stable Source_URL; retrieve the section text and its amendment lineage together so generated answers cite both the current provision and when it last changed
• —Temporal legislation models — train or evaluate on dated amendment events (Commencement, Amending_Act_Year, Action) for legislative change prediction, version diffing, or "law as at date X" retrieval
• —Legislative graph construction — build provision-level change networks: which amending Acts touch which parts of the ITAA 1997, and how amendment activity clusters over time
• —Fine-tuning Australian tax LLMs — the full operative text of the core tax statutes, section-segmented and cleanly labelled, as a grounding corpus
• —Cross-referencing ATO guidance — explode Relevant_Legislative_Provisions in the companion ATO dataset and join on Provision_Key to see every ruling that interprets a given section
• —Compliance and drafting tooling — surface the current text of a provision plus what changed and when, without a commercial subscription

Limitations

• —Currency — compilations are checked for amendments automatically and the datasets rebuilt when a new compilation is registered. Between checks, a recently commenced amendment may not yet be reflected. Always verify against legislation.gov.au for official or time-sensitive purposes.
• —`Amending_Item` is ~58% filled — the remaining blanks are genuinely unattributable from the endnotes: inserted sections that no schedule item names individually, and Acts published in the older OLDF endnote format (notably the Superannuation Guarantee Charge Act).
• —History notes are reconstructed, not reproduced — History_Note and History_Notes are generated in our own wording from the endnote facts (provision, action, amending Act, commencement). They are not the ATO Legal Database's history notes, which are separately copyrighted.
• —Repealed provisions — the joined dataset covers sections present in the current compilation. Provisions repealed or renumbered out of existence appear in amendment_history but have no row in principal_legislation, so they drop out of the left join.
• —Text extraction — provision text is extracted from the FRL's compilation epub files. Complex tables, formulae, and diagrams may be flattened or lost; check Source_URL for anything structurally unusual.
• —Point-in-time text is not in this dataset — per-compilation-version provision text (what any section said on any past date) exists but is served separately and is not published here.
• —Australian Commonwealth jurisdiction only — no state or territory legislation, and no non-tax Commonwealth Acts.
• —Not legal advice — see Terms of Service.

Attribution — required wording

The Federal Register of Legislation licence requires attribution in specific words, not just a credit. If you redistribute this data or content derived from it, use the statement that matches what you are redistributing:

For provision text reproduced substantially unchanged (the Text and Heading columns):

Sourced from the Federal Register of Legislation at [full date of download]. For the latest information on Australian Government law please go to https://www.legislation.gov.au.

For the reconstructed history notes and any restructured or derived content (History_Note, History_Notes, Amendment_Count, and the joined dataset generally):

Based on content from the Federal Register of Legislation at [full date of download]. For the latest information on Australian Government legislation please go to https://www.legislation.gov.au.

Substitute the date you downloaded the data — for this dataset, the "Last updated" date shown on this repo. Most users of the joined dataset need the "Based on" form, since the amendment history is derived rather than reproduced.

Source & Licensing

Source: Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), © Commonwealth of Australia.

All content on the Federal Register of Legislation is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), with the exception of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and any material identified as third-party copyright. Neither is reproduced in this dataset.

The licence permits commercial use, redistribution and adaptation, provided the attribution requirements above are met. This structured compilation is published by SimpleLex under the same CC BY 4.0 terms.

The amendment-history notes are reconstructed in our own wording from the FRL's Crown-copyright compilation endnotes — deliberately, so that no third-party commercial history notes are reproduced.

Citation

@dataset{simplelex_au_tax_legislation_2026,
  author    = {SimpleLex},
  title     = {Australian Tax Legislation \& Amendment History},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/simplelex/Australian-Tax-Legislation-and-Amendment-History},
  note      = {Based on content from the Federal Register of Legislation,
               https://www.legislation.gov.au, CC BY 4.0}
}

Terms of Service

Last updated: July 2026

What this product is

A structured dataset of the principal Acts administered by the Australian Taxation Office, together with reconstructed per-section amendment histories, sourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au) and compiled into machine-readable CSV and NDJSON format.

Permitted use

You may use this dataset for any lawful purpose, including research, analysis, building applications, and commercial projects. You do not need to ask permission. You do need to carry the FRL attribution wording set out above when redistributing the source content — that requirement comes from the Commonwealth's licence, not from us.

Source material and copyright

The underlying legislation is © Commonwealth of Australia, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, excluding the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and any third-party copyright material. The Commonwealth retains copyright in the original materials. This dataset is a structured compilation and does not claim copyright in the original source material.

Not legal or tax advice

Nothing in this dataset constitutes legal or tax advice. It is a reproduction and restructuring of publicly available legislation, provided for informational purposes only. Always consult a registered tax agent or legal professional for advice about your specific situation.

Accuracy and currency

We make no warranties about the completeness, accuracy, or currency of the data. Legislation is amended continuously and a compilation may be superseded at any time. The authoritative text is the one published at legislation.gov.au — always verify there for official or time-sensitive purposes.

No liability

To the maximum extent permitted by Australian law, simplelex accepts no liability for any direct, indirect, or consequential loss arising from use of or reliance on this dataset.

Changes

We may update these terms at any time. Continued use of the dataset following an update constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

Support the Project

This dataset is free. If it saves you time on data engineering, a coffee is appreciated:

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