How we choose and review resources
SquadSpot publishes a curated index of legislation, registration schemes and administrative guidance for Australian club committees. We also sell software to those committees. This page explains how the two things sit together, what we include, what we refuse to publish, and how to tell us when we have it wrong.
The test we apply
A resource earns a place if it changes what a club committee has to do. That is the whole test. A regulation that alters a participation record, a permit condition that gates a member's registration, a grant round with an eligibility rule, a governance deadline that arrives whether or not anyone noticed it — these are the things a volunteer secretary needs and rarely has time to find.
We favour the primary source. A state regulator's own page beats a news article summarising it, and where we include journalism it is because the reporting reached something the regulator has not published plainly. Peak body guidance sits in between: authoritative on practice, but not the last word on law.
What we never include
Some material is excluded categorically, regardless of how much traffic it might attract.
We do not publish crime coverage. Not offences involving firearms, not vehicle theft or street racing, not illegal fishing prosecutions. We do not publish coverage of violence, and we do not publish stories whose reason for existing is a tragedy, even when a regulatory change is buried inside them. When that change becomes an actual obligation, we cover the obligation, from the regulator's own material.
We also leave out advocacy. This index is not the place to argue for or against firearms ownership, historic vehicle concessions or recreational fishing access. Committees dealing with a compliance deadline are not served by a position piece, and there are better places to have those arguments.
How the reviews are written
Every summary is written from scratch. We do not reproduce a source's text, republish its introduction, or pass off its own description as ours. Where we quote, it is brief and attributed.
Each entry names who in the club needs it — the registrar, the competition secretary, the treasurer — because a resource that matters enormously to one office holder is often irrelevant to the rest of the committee. Each entry also says where the source stops short. A government page that explains how to get an approval but not what to report afterwards is genuinely useful and genuinely incomplete, and saying so is more helpful than a recommendation that pretends otherwise.
Everything is tagged by jurisdiction. Obligations diverge sharply across state borders, and applying one state's rules in another is the most common way a club gets this wrong. Where a resource is undated, or old enough that we cannot vouch for its currency, the review says so and tells you to confirm before relying on it.
Our commercial interest, stated plainly
SquadSpot builds membership, compliance and competition software for the clubs this index is written for. We have an obvious interest in being useful to that audience, and in you thinking well of us afterwards.
What that does not mean: nothing on this site is paid placement. No organisation has paid, or can pay, to appear here or to be described favourably. We include resources published by companies that compete directly with us where they have produced something good, and we say so. We also apply the same standard to our own material — marketing dressed as guidance does not make it into this index, including ours.
Where a resource describes a problem our software solves, we may say so at the end of the page. We keep that separate from the review itself, so you can take the resource and leave the sales pitch.
Keeping it current
A curated index decays. Regulations are amended, government pages are restructured, grant rounds close and reopen with different rules. We review each category on a regular cycle, check that every linked source still resolves, and remove or update entries where the underlying rule has changed. Where a category page shows a last reviewed date, that is when a human last read through it.
This is also the honest limit of what an index like this can be. It is a starting point that saves a committee the search. It is not legal advice, and for eligibility, deadlines and permit conditions the regulator's own current page is the only source that counts.
Tell us when we are wrong
If an entry is out of date, a link is broken, a summary misrepresents a source, or we have been unfair to a publisher, we want to hear about it and we will fix it. The same goes for anything obvious we have missed — particularly from smaller state bodies and discipline associations, which are the hardest material to find and often the most useful.
If you run a club and something on this list saved you a problem, or should have and did not, that is worth telling us too. It is how the index gets better.