Au MCP Server

MCP server for Australia's Federal Register of Legislation: search and cite Commonwealth Acts.

Local serverstdioPython

What is the Au MCP server?

MCP server for Australia's Federal Register of Legislation: search and cite Commonwealth Acts. Exposed over MCP by the au mcp server, that capability becomes something an assistant can invoke while it works, not something you go and do afterwards.

What it actually does

An MCP server for Australia's Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), the official source of Commonwealth legislation. It searches, fetches, and cites Acts, with a verifiable citation on every response.

Adding it to your client

The server ships on PyPI as au-eli-mcp, so your MCP client can launch it on demand — there is no separate build step. Add the server block to your client's configuration, restart it, and the tools register themselves.

Its toolset

Everything the assistant can do here goes through one of these:

  • au_search_acts — Search Commonwealth Acts by (partial) title
  • au_get_text — The current consolidated text of an Act (truncated at ~300,000 characters)

Configuration

You will need one environment variable: AU_ELI_BASE_URL. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.

Caveats

  • It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
  • Missing credentials fail quietly in some clients — if no tools show up, check the environment block first.
  • MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the au mcp server does with a few real requests.

When to reach for it

This sits in the developer tooling group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Au's toolset — au_search_acts, au_get_text — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by matematicsolutions; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.

Available tools

ToolWhat it does
au_search_actsSearch Commonwealth Acts by (partial) title.
au_get_textThe current consolidated text of an Act (truncated at ~300,000 characters).

How to install the Au MCP server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "au-eli": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["au-eli-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "AU_ELI_BASE_URL": "your-value"
      }
    }
  }
}

Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.

Configuration

VariableDescriptionRequired
AU_ELI_BASE_URLEndpoint or connection string the server talks to.Yes

Example prompts to try

  • Use Au to au search acts.
  • Use Au to au get text.

Frequently asked questions

It connects Au to MCP-compatible AI assistants such as Claude and Cursor, exposing 2 tools (au_search_acts, au_get_text) that the assistant can call on your behalf. Instead of copying data back and forth by hand, the assistant works with Au directly.