Rules-as-code · Plain-English guide
A February 2020 Governor-in-Council Order that reverses an earlier declaration. Where a previous Order had made the Common Wombat unprotected, this one puts the species back under protection. Like the other GIC Orders, it is a single switch feeding the licensing rules — not a licence of its own.
How to read this guide
This is one of several Governor in Council (GIC) Orders encoded alongside the main wildlife-licensing rules. On its own it grants nothing and forbids nothing; it sets a single computed fact — whether a species counts as protected — that the licensing and control rules then read. This Order is a revocation: it turns the protected flag back on for the Common Wombat. Colour code throughout: Rules work out, applies / true, does not apply / false.
Under the Wildlife Act 1975 native animals are generally protected. A Governor in Council Order can declare a species unprotected; a later Order can revoke that declaration and restore protection. This ruleset is the machine-readable version of the 2020 revocation for the Common Wombat.
The rule checks one fact — “is the animal in this application a common wombat?” — and, if so, records that the species is protected again. That restored conclusion is what the rest of the rules build on; the Order itself decides no licence, fee or offence.
Idea 1
A revocation Order is the mirror image of a declaration. Where a declaration sets isProtectedSpecies to false, this one sets it to true, restoring the default protection the Act gives native wildlife.
Idea 2
The Order's output is the computed protected-species flag. What that protection means in practice — the licences and authorities needed to interact with a wombat — is decided by other rules that read the flag.
Idea 3
The rule is guarded by “is this a common wombat?”. For any other animal it does nothing, so it coexists with the possum, dingo and deer Orders without interfering.
This Order touches only a corner of the shared wildlife data model: it reads one species flag and writes the protected-status flag.
The animal described in an application, and the animal covered by a licence.
“Is a Common Wombat” is a yes/no the applicant supplies; the ontology notes it “will be a lookup eventually”, i.e. driven from a species list rather than a manual tick.
The ruleset is a single labelled group — “revokes the Declaration of Common Wombats to be Unprotected Wildlife” — containing one guard and two writes:
| When | The rule sets | To |
|---|---|---|
| Application's wildlife is a common wombat | application.wildlife.isProtectedSpecies | True (protected) |
| licence.wildlife.isProtectedSpecies | True (protected) |
Both writes sit under the same guard — “the application's wildlife is a common wombat”. So when that is true, both the application-side and the licence-side protected flags are switched on together. If the animal is anything else, the group does nothing and the status is left as it was. (This single-guard shape differs slightly from the possum Order, which guards each side separately — see Observation 1.)
Points a reviewer of the encoding might want to confirm. None is necessarily a defect.
1 · The licence flag is set from the application's guard
Both writes — including the one to licence.wildlife.isProtectedSpecies — sit under the single condition “the application's wildlife is a common wombat”. There is no separate licence.wildlife.isCommonWombat guard. If an evaluation ever carries a licence-side animal that differs from the application-side animal, the licence flag would follow the application's species, not its own. The sibling possum Order guards each side independently; aligning the two shapes would remove the ambiguity.
2 · Revocation is modelled as “set true”, not “undo”
The Order restores protection by writing isProtectedSpecies = true whenever the animal is a wombat. Because the flag is recomputed every run, this is robust — but it means the earlier “unprotected” declaration and this revocation must not both be active for wombats, or the result depends on which rule runs last. Only the revocation is present in this ruleset.
3 · No area or time limit encoded
The rule has no location or date condition, so it applies wherever an animal is flagged a common wombat and stays in force until the ruleset is changed.