Related workbenches / external sites
Different places to continue exploring.
This Treaty Atlas remains the Australian inherited-agreements workbench. These sibling sites have their own scope and participation paths; neither speaks for a nation or replaces nation-led sources. Both links open in a new tab.
Why this room
A republic is more than removing the Crown.
Becoming a republic is often pictured as a single edit: take out the Crown, leave everything else as it is. But the Crown is threaded through a great deal of inherited machinery, including thousands of treaties entered over more than a century, most of them signed by the executive without a public vote.
This room treats that as an opportunity rather than a chore. If the country is going to re-found itself, it is a rare chance to re-read every promise it has made in its own name and in others', and to keep, renew, modernise or retire each one on purpose. The aim is not to rid ourselves of the Crown alone, but to improve the democracy while the lid is off.
What it is
A shared map and a gentle method
An explorable picture of the agreements Australia is bound by, and a calm way of reading any one of them together. Fork it, annotate it, argue with it.
What it is not
Not a verdict list or a demand
Nothing here is settled policy, a call to tear anything up, or legal advice. It is exploratory. You are free to disagree with any part of it.
A lens, not a verdict
Five questions you can ask of any agreement.
A treaty is easier to think about when you have a steady way in. These are questions rather than judgements, so two people can use the same lens and still reach different conclusions.
Run them on a headline pact or a quiet technical one. The point is not to score treaties, but to make their shape visible before anyone argues about them.
01
Who it touches
Every party at the table, and everyone who never sat there: neighbours, First Nations, future generations, living systems, and people bound by rules they had no hand in writing.
02
Who it serves
Who gains, who carries the cost or the risk, and whether the balance still looks fair from more than one seat at the table.
03
Whose consent it rests on
What kind of agreement it is, and how it was made. Was the public ever asked? Would the same choice be made again, freely, today?
04
Whether it is still alive
Active, dormant, superseded, or quietly shaping daily life in the background. Some promises outlive the reasons that made them.
05
Keep, or change, and how
A calm menu rather than a guillotine: keep as-is, renew, modernise, sunset on a timeline, or replace with something freely chosen, and the real path each would take.
The map so far
Nine clusters, one inherited web.
Australia is party to a very large number of treaties. The last officially enumerated total was about 2,920 (1,669 bilateral and 1,251 multilateral) at the end of 1999, and it has grown since. Rather than list them, this map groups them so a person can find a thread to pull.
Each cluster carries a plain-English note and an open question. None of the questions has a fixed answer here.
Trade and data
Trade and the digital economy
The densest, fastest-moving cluster: free-trade and digital-economy agreements that set rules for tariffs, cross-border data flows, data-localisation and source code. They shape everyday prices and the digital sovereignty this site cares about.
Pacific
Neighbours and climate-statehood
Landmark agreements with our nearest neighbours: recognising continuing statehood despite sea-level rise, opening mobility pathways, and carrying mutual-security clauses. Relationships more than transactions.
Rights
Human rights and who we answer to
Seven core UN human-rights treaties, several joined with reservations still on the books. Worth asking which of those reservations still reflect who a self-governing people wants to be.
First Nations
Country, law and data sovereignty
One treaty protects visa-free traditional movement across a sea border; a global Indigenous-rights declaration is endorsed but not binding; a recent trade deal carries a First Nations chapter. Whose law, whose Country, whose data are questions a machine should hold lightly and defer on.
Environment
Climate, nature and Antarctica
Climate accords, the biodiversity and wetlands conventions, and the Antarctic instruments that reserve a whole continent for peace and science with an indefinite mining ban. Long-horizon promises to places and generations not in the room.
Peace
Disarmament, and the one not signed
Australia sits inside most disarmament treaties, from non-proliferation to the test-ban and the chemical and biological weapons conventions, yet is not party to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. A quiet gap worth noticing, and asking about.
Alliances
Agreements of alliance and force
A full inventory cannot skip the security and alliance instruments. This room holds them the same way it holds the rest: as inherited promises to read calmly, asking who they bind and on whose consent they rest. The aim is understanding, not alarm, and never the drum of any current conflict.
Frontiers
Sea, sky and space
The law of the sea underpins maritime boundaries and island jurisdictions; the outer-space treaties set peaceful-use rules we have barely begun to test. Frontiers where the rules were written before the pressure arrived.
The quiet many
The administrative majority
Most treaties are quiet workhorses: double-taxation, air services, extradition, mutual legal assistance, social security and consular conventions. Rarely debated, widely felt. A fair review looks here too, not only at the headline pacts.
Where consent lives
How these promises get made right now.
In Australia today, entering a treaty is largely an executive act. Agreements are usually tabled in Parliament and reviewed by a standing committee, but Parliament does not formally ratify them, and the public is rarely asked directly. Domestic effect often needs separate legislation.
That is not an accusation; it is just how the plumbing works. It does raise a fair republican question: of all these inherited promises, which would a self-governing people choose to re-sign in their own name, and which would they let quietly lapse? The details below are the kind of thing the Law Engine and Truth Engine should verify case by case.
Now
How it is made today
Negotiated and signed by the executive, tabled for a set number of sitting days, reviewed by a joint committee, then binding internationally. Worth verifying instrument by instrument.
Public
Where the public sits
Mostly downstream: consulted unevenly, seldom asked to consent, and often unaware which treaties already touch their lives.
Maybe
What a republic could try
Options to explore, not demands: a plain-language public register, standing sunset reviews, and a consent step for the weightiest commitments.
How you could explore this
From a single treaty to a rehearsed change.
You do not need to hold the whole web at once. Pick one thread and walk it through the rooms that already exist on this site. Each step leaves something behind for the next person.
1
Pick an instrument
Choose any cluster from the map, or a single treaty that touches your life, work or place.
2
Read it plainly
Use the Law Engine to retrieve and translate it, with citations, dates and uncertainty labels attached.
3
Map the table
List who is party, who is affected, and who never got a say. Note the seats that were empty.
4
Ask the five questions
Run the lens: who it touches, who it serves, whose consent, whether it is still alive, and whether to keep or change it.
5
Rehearse a change
Take it into the Cyber-Republic room and model what keeping, modernising or sunsetting it would actually touch.
6
Leave a note
Record what you found in the Civic Ledger, with sources and open questions, so the next person starts further along.
Sources and honesty
Sourced in the open, held lightly.
The starting map for this room came from a Claude deep-research run on 8 July 2026. It is a reference sketch to think with, not an official register.
The authoritative list is the DFAT Australian Treaties Database and the AustLII Australian Treaties Library. The last officially enumerated total was about 2,920 treaties at the end of 1999; the number has grown since, and the long administrative tail is not fully catalogued here. Everything on this page is exploratory, open to correction, and neither legal advice nor adopted policy.
reference not registerDFAT and AustLII master listcounts approximatenot legal adviceopen to correctionexploratory
