Terms of use

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

Wattle Branch (the service) is provided by Acacia Data Pty Ltd ABN 23 701 056 046 (we, us, our). These terms govern your access to and use of the service, including the public pages at https://wattlebranch.au and, if you hold an account, the signed-in product.

By accessing or using the service you agree to these terms. If you use the service on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that organisation, and these terms bind it too. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

Account holders are also asked to accept these terms inside the product before using it, and we record that you have done so. If you decline, you are signed out and your account cannot be used.

2. The service is in an early phase

The service is under active development. Access is by invitation only and no payment is currently taken. Features may be added, changed, suspended or withdrawn at any time without notice, and periods of unavailability may occur.

3. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time, for example to reflect a change to the service, to our data sources or to the law. The date above shows when they last changed.

Where a change is not material, your continued use of the service after it takes effect is acceptance of the updated terms. Where a change is material, we will ask account holders to accept the updated terms in the product before continuing to use it. If you do not accept them, you may not continue to use the service, and we may end your access.

4. What the service is

The service collects, joins and presents information that the Australian Government and related bodies publish about public spending, including contract notices, grant awards, standing offers, budgets, staffing disclosures and parliamentary expense claims. We do not create the underlying records and we do not decide what goes into them. The service is an aggregation and presentation of material published by others.

5. We are independent

The service is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or otherwise connected to the Australian Government, any of its agencies, or any business or organisation named in the information. Nothing on the service should be read as suggesting any such connection.

6. The information, and its limits

The information on the service is reproduced from public registers and disclosures without adjustment. It may contain errors or omissions that exist at the source, and errors introduced by collection, matching or processing. It may be incomplete or out of date: the archive is still being filled in, records are published in arrears, and a total shown on the service should be treated as a floor rather than a complete history. Where the service states the limits of a figure, those statements form part of the information.

The information is provided for general information only. It is not legal, financial, investment, procurement, tax or other professional advice, and it is not a substitute for the official registers or for your own enquiries. You must verify any information against the official source before acting on it or relying on it, and you are solely responsible for any decision you make or action you take on the basis of the service.

A figure on the service is a statement about published records, not about the conduct, merit or standing of any person, business, agency or official. The service presents data neutrally and draws no conclusion of wrongdoing, and no content on the service should be read as making or supporting such an allegation.

7. Accounts

• Accounts are created by invitation. You must provide accurate information and keep it current.
• Your account is personal to you. You must keep your credentials confidential, must not share your account, and must tell us promptly at support@wattlebranch.au if you suspect unauthorised use. The service permits one active session per account, uses two-step sign-in, and signs you out after two hours without activity.
• You are responsible for all activity under your account, except activity that occurs after you have notified us of a compromise.

8. What you may do with the information

While your access is current and you are not in breach of these terms, you may use the service and the information in it for your own purposes and those of the organisation whose account you are using. That expressly includes using it to inform your own analysis, research and decisions, to prepare reports, submissions, bids, briefings or advice for yourself or for your own clients, and to quote figures from it in that work, provided you attribute the underlying publisher and do not present the figures in a misleading way.

What that permission does not extend to is passing the service, or a substantial part of the information as we have assembled it, to people who have not obtained access themselves. The test is whether what you share is your own work drawing on the information, which is fine, or a copy of ours that stands in place of the service, which is not.

9. What you must not do

You must not, and must not permit or assist anyone else to:

• use the service in breach of any law or these terms;
• use the service, or information obtained from it, to make or publish a claim that the information does not support, including any assertion that a person, business or agency has acted improperly or unlawfully;
• systematically extract, scrape, crawl, harvest, copy or download the service or a substantial part of the information, whether by automated means or by hand, except through the export and reporting features we provide and within any limits we set on them;
• use any robot, spider, scraper, headless browser, script or other automated means to access the service, or access it other than through the interfaces we provide;
• copy, republish, resell, redistribute, sublicense, rent, lend or otherwise make available the service or a substantial part of the information to any third party, including by putting it into a database, feed, application or report that stands in place of the service;
• use the service or the information to create, train, improve or evaluate a product, dataset, model or service that competes with the service, or to benchmark it for that purpose;
• use the service or the information as input to train or fine tune a machine learning model, or to build a derived dataset for that purpose, without our written consent;
• share your account or credentials, or allow anyone else to use your access, whether at the same time as you or otherwise;
• interfere with the operation or security of the service, place an unreasonable load on it, probe or test its vulnerabilities without our written consent, circumvent access controls, rate limits or usage limits, or misrepresent your identity to us;
• remove, obscure or alter any attribution, notice, caveat, watermark or identifier that the service attaches to information, or present the information in a way that suggests it came from somewhere else;
• reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any part of the service, except to the extent that restriction is prohibited by law.

We may set and change reasonable limits on access, export volume and request rates, and may suspend access that appears to breach this section. Nothing in this section restricts anything you are entitled to do with the underlying public records obtained from their own publishers.

10. Intellectual property

The name Wattle Branch, the wattle mark, the design and copy of the service, its software, and the selection, arrangement, categorisation and presentation of the information belong to us or our licensors, as do the measures, groupings, matches and derived figures we compute rather than reproduce. A trade mark application for Wattlebranch is pending; it is not yet registered. Except for the rights section 8 grants you, no right, title or interest in the service passes to you.

We do not claim to own the underlying public records, and we do not claim any right in the raw facts they contain. Those records belong to their publishers, much of the material is published under Creative Commons Attribution licences, and your use of a record obtained from its own publisher is governed by that publisher's licence rather than by these terms. What section 9 restricts is your use of the service and of the information as we have assembled and presented it, which you obtain under a contract with us rather than under those licences.

11. Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions or ideas about the service, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use them without restriction or obligation to you.

12. Privacy and cookies

Our collection and handling of personal information is described in our privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

The service stores only what it needs to work on your device: the session that keeps you signed in, a record that you have seen the cookie notice, and a few settings your browser keeps for you. We use no analytics, advertising or third party tracking cookies. The privacy policy sets this out in full, and if we ever add anything that is not strictly necessary we will ask you before setting it.

13. Third-party sites and services

The service links to external sites, including the official registers the information comes from. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or availability. A link is provided for convenience and is not an endorsement.

14. Australian Consumer Law

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, condition, warranty, right or remedy conferred by the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) or any other applicable law that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or modified. To the extent a consumer guarantee applies and the service is not of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use or consumption, our liability for failure to comply with that guarantee is limited, at our option and to the extent permitted by law, to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having the service supplied again.

15. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

This section applies to the maximum extent permitted by law and is subject to section 14.

• The service and the information are provided on an as-is and as-available basis. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, or that the information is accurate, complete or current.
• We are not liable for any loss or damage arising from or in connection with the service or the information, including any decision made or action taken in reliance on either, whether the claim is in contract, tort (including negligence), statute or otherwise.
• We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, data or opportunity, even if we were advised of the possibility of that loss.
• If, despite the above, we are liable to you, our total aggregate liability for all claims in connection with the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim and one hundred Australian dollars.

16. Your responsibility to us

You indemnify us against loss, damage, cost and expense (including reasonable legal costs) that we incur arising out of your breach of these terms or your unlawful use of the service or the information, except to the extent we caused or contributed to the loss.

17. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the service at any time, including for breach of these terms, for security reasons, or because the service or your invitation ends. You may stop using the service at any time. Sections that by their nature should survive termination, including sections 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16 and 19, survive it.

18. General

• If part of these terms is invalid or unenforceable, that part is severed and the rest continues in force.
• A failure or delay by us in exercising a right is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign your rights under these terms without our written consent. We may assign ours as part of a restructure, sale or transfer of the service.
• These terms, together with the privacy policy and any notice or caveat the service attaches to information, are the entire agreement between you and us about the service.

19. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Australian Capital Territory and the applicable laws of the Commonwealth of Australia. You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts exercising jurisdiction there.

20. Contact

Questions about these terms can be sent to support@wattlebranch.au.