Team Name

Red Tape Navigator

Team Members

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)

1. User enters: “Start a café in Sydney”
   
2. Navigator loads obligations across 3 jurisdictions
   
3. Flags 2 conflicts
   
4. Generates roadmap + checklist
   
5. Visual flow shows green ticks as Alice completes them
   
6. 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:

1. Ingest rules from multiple government sources
   
2. Classify them by jurisdiction (Local → State → Federal)
   
3. Harmonise them into a single data model
   
4. Detect overlaps and contradictions across levels
   
5. 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: