Rules-as-code · Plain-English guide
The rules the Conservation Regulator's own officers follow when they assess an application to control wildlife (an ATCW) — who must sign off, when a property inspection is required, and who may approve it. This is the internal decision workflow, not the applicant's form.
How to read this guide
Where the other wildlife rulesets look at an applicant, this one looks at the assessment — the Conservation Regulator's internal review of an ATCW application. It sets a few obligations on officers, works out whether a property inspection is needed, and records who is allowed to make the decision. Several sections are deliberate notes or unfinished stubs, and the risk logic has gaps worth knowing about (see Observations). Colour code: Obligated / Required, Permitted, Forbidden, Rules work out.
An Authority to Control Wildlife (ATCW) lets a landholder take, disturb or destroy wildlife that is causing damage. Before one is issued, a Conservation Regulator officer assesses the application. This ruleset encodes three parts of that assessment:
The ruleset began as a separate project and was later merged into the wildlife-regulation project (its first section says so). That history shows: alongside the working rules are several empty placeholder sections, and the risk logic is only partly built.
Idea 1
The person who assesses an ATCW must not be the person who decides it. The rules compute whether the two recorded officers differ and make “they differ” an obligation — a machine-checkable integrity control.
Idea 2
Grey-kangaroo control can be sensitive. Rather than always inspecting, the rules require a property inspection only when one of a list of triggers fires — public land, plans in play, proximity to people, small properties, applicant-history concerns, or large numbers for the region.
Idea 3
The intent is that low-risk applications can be approved by the Permissions Lead, while identified risks escalate to a manager. The delegation half is encoded; the escalation half is not yet (see Observations).
The assessment record sits beside the application. Most of what drives this ruleset is on the assessment itself and on the two officers; the kangaroo-inspection rule also reads a set of application and region facts.
The Regulator's internal review of one application.
The assessing officer and the decision-maker.
Facts the kangaroo-inspection rule reads.
The “Assessment Officers” group encodes a separation-of-duties control in three moves:
This is the digital form of the ATCW policy that assessment and decision must be made by different people.
This group applies only to applications whose wildlife is an Eastern or Western Grey Kangaroo. For those, a property inspection becomes Required — and completing it becomes Obligated — if any one of a list of triggers holds.
Any single row triggers the inspection:
| Trigger | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Covers public land | The application includes public land. |
| A management plan is prepared | A wildlife management plan or a kangaroo management plan exists. |
| Adjacent to a licensed wildlife shelter | The property borders a licensed shelter / foster carer. |
| Method is not shooting | The proposed control method is anything other than shooting. |
| Within 1 km of suburbia | Less than a kilometre from an urban / peri-urban area. |
| Property under 10 hectares | The site is smaller than ten hectares. |
| Concerns about applicant history | Recorded compliance concerns about the applicant. |
| Over the region's kangaroo limit | Animals to control exceed the region's threshold — Hume 250, Loddon Mallee 250, Gippsland 100, Barwon South-West 100, Grampians 100, Port Phillip 20. |
The region test is per-region: for each of the six regions the rule compares numAnimalsToControl against that region's own limit constant. The “method is not shooting” trigger is worth a second look — it means any non-shooting method forces an inspection (Observation 4).
The “Risk assessment” group records a risk level and controls who may decide:
Because isLowRisk is hard-set to true and never re-evaluated against the risk factors, every assessment currently reads as low risk (Observation 1).
Four of the ruleset's seven sections carry no working rules. They are recorded here because their presence shapes how the ruleset should be read — and what is still to be built.
Coverage at a glance
0 test suites and 0 scenarios are defined for this ruleset.
None of the behaviour above — the separation-of-duties obligation, the grey-kangaroo inspection triggers, the per-region thresholds, or the delegation rules — is pinned down by an automated test.
This is a meaningful gap for a ruleset that encodes integrity controls. Worthwhile first tests would be: the same-officer case (expect the “different officers” obligation to fail); one positive and one negative per inspection trigger, including a boundary case at each region's kangaroo limit; the assessor-is-Permissions-Lead case (expect the decision-maker forbidden); and — once the escalation logic exists — a high-risk case expecting isLowRisk to become false.
1 · Risk is hard-coded to “low”
isLowRisk is set to true outright, with no dependence on the risk factors the ruleset collects. As encoded, every assessment is low risk and eligible for delegate approval, regardless of the identified risks.
2 · The escalation branch is empty
The final group evaluates ten risk factors in its condition but has no rules in its body (comment: “[LAST 4 DOT POINTS NEEDED]”). The factors are therefore computed but unused — no escalation to the Manager, Regulatory Operations, and no change to the risk level or approver. This is the ruleset's largest unfinished piece.
3 · Inspection logic is grey-kangaroo only
The property-inspection rule is nested entirely inside the Eastern/Western Grey Kangaroo guard. No other species — including the “Common Wombats” heading, which is an empty stub — can trigger an inspection through this ruleset.
4 · “Method is not shooting” is a broad trigger
Among the inspection triggers is “the control method is not shooting”. Taken literally, any non-shooting method (or an unspecified method) forces an inspection. That may be intended, but it is a wide net and worth confirming against policy.
5 · Region thresholds rely on supplied constants
Each region carries its own limit as an input constant (e.g. Port Phillip 20, Hume 250). The comparison is only as reliable as those constants; there is no lookup enforcing them, so an incorrect or missing limit would quietly change when an inspection is required.