Civic & Government /Drafting interactive demo field guide · 8 min

Consultation Submission Drafter

Turns a council or agency consultation notice plus your own prior submissions, policy positions and meeting resolutions into a structured, fully cited first draft — mapping each consultation question to a recorded position and flagging anything unrecorded for an officer to decide.

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theater/demos/civic-gov_consultation-submission-drafter.html · sandbox · read-only

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FIG. 1

The live demo, running on fabricated data. Open it to step through the full flow — every output is shown for a person to approve before anything happens.

How it would work

Reads the open consultation and your recorded positions, maps each question to a cited prior source, and hands an officer a grounded draft to review and approve before anything is lodged.

Input 01

The notice + your positions

An open consultation — the draft plan, its numbered questions and the close date — plus your own notes, prior submissions, policy papers and board or committee resolutions.

Agent 02

Maps, cites, drafts

Extracts the consultation questions and your position points, matches each to a recorded source, scores how cleanly it mapped, and drafts a sectioned submission with a citation against every claim and unrecorded questions flagged as gaps.

Output 03

A cited draft, gaps flagged

A sectioned draft submission with every claim sourced, the gaps flagged and the lodge-by date and channel stated — for an officer to refine, resolve the gaps and approve before it is lodged through the portal.

Where it works well

It rebuilds the cited evidence trail every time, in full, under a closing clock.

Done by hand it is days of hunting through drives and inboxes — and the source-tracing is the first thing skipped when the close date is two days out.
Best for an officer or advocacy lead who responds regularly: a peak body, a traders' association, a community organisation, or a council unit answering state and federal consultations.
At several consultations a quarter, the recaptured days go back into the framing, the relationships and the politics — not into reconstruction.

The slow, invisible cost of a consultation submission is consistency under deadline — showing that what you say now lines up with what you've said before, with the evidence reassembled from scattered old submissions, policy papers and minutes each time a window opens.

Where it works badly

It is confidently wrong when your records are stale and unmarked — a clean draft built on a superseded position.

With no archive — your first submission, or positions never written down — there is nothing to retrieve and most questions come back flagged as unrecorded.
It accelerates synthesis of positions you already hold; it does not invent a stance you have never taken, and should flag the gap rather than guess.

The honest test

Pull your last three submissions: can you point, today, to the document behind each major claim and say which is current? If that takes you an afternoon of digging, the tool will have the same problem.

Point it at a library where a 2022 submission has been overtaken by a later board resolution that was never filed, and it will surface and cite the old position as if it still stood. The failure mode is plausible and well-cited.

What it doesn't do — and shouldn't

It drafts and cites. A person decides the position and lodges. That boundary is deliberate.

WHAT IT DOES

Surfaces each position it used and the source it cited it from

Maps each consultation question to a recorded position, or flags it as a gap

States the lodge-by date, channel and any stated submitter requirements

WHAT IT WON’T

Decide what your organisation's position should be

Lodge anything through the portal on its own

Treat an unrecorded position as a settled one

A submission is a public, attributable act. Under the Local Government Act 2020 (Vic) councils consult under a community engagement policy, and planning and consultation submissions are public documents a council makes available for inspection. Lodging a position your governance never endorsed has real consequence, so the accountable officer stays on the decision and the lodgement.

What your data has to look like

A retrievable library of dated, recorded positions, with superseded ones marked as superseded.

Typical readiness

across orgs we see, before the first job

Prior submissions and policy papers, retrievable

Needs shaping

Board and committee resolutions, with dates

Usual weak point

Superseded positions marked as superseded

Needs shaping

The consultation notice itself

Usually ready

The real first job

The prior-position library is the weak point — usually a mess of PDFs and Word files across drives, with no record of what supersedes what. Deciding what counts as a position of record, where it lives, and how a new resolution retires an old one is the real first job — bigger and more durable than the drafting layer on top, and the part we help with.

Right fit if…

You respond to consultations regularly — a peak body, traders' association, community org or council unit

You have a real archive of prior submissions, policy papers and resolutions to draw on

You can point, today, to the document behind each of your major positions

Your recorded positions carry dates, and superseded ones are marked as such

Walk away if…

This is your first submission, or your positions were never written down

Your prior positions live only in someone's head or an unkept email thread

Stale positions sit unmarked beside current ones in your records

You want a tool that decides the organisation's position for you

Open questions

The worried-buyer questions, answered straight

No — it only drafts from positions it can cite back to one of your own sources: a prior submission, a policy paper, a board or committee resolution, or the notes you supply. Where a consultation question has no recorded position behind it, it flags the gap rather than inventing an answer, so the officer decides what to say. Nothing is lodged until a person has read the draft and approved it — and under the Local Government Act 2020 (Vic), a submission is a public, attributable act.

Partly, and it is honest about where it can’t. It cites the specific source for each claim, but it can only retrieve a position that is actually written down somewhere retrievable. If your real position lives only in someone’s head or an email thread no one kept, that question comes back flagged as unrecorded. Getting the prior-position library into a consistent, findable shape is usually the first piece of work, and the part we help with.

No. It replaces the cold-start rebuild, not the officer. The judgment about what your organisation should say to this council on this plan stays with the person — the tool removes the days spent hunting through old files and assembling the evidence trail. The officer’s time shifts from reconstruction to refining the argument and the politics, which is where their experience earns its keep.

Currency is the real risk, so it cites the date and source of every position it uses and surfaces them for review rather than silently merging them. If a 2022 submission has been superseded by a 2025 resolution, the tool will still surface the older one unless the newer position is in your library — which is exactly why the officer reviews each cited claim before sign-off. Keeping superseded positions clearly marked is part of what makes this reliable.

Your prior submissions, notes and resolutions are processed within a private retrieval setup, not used to train a public model, and the draft stays inside your review environment until an officer chooses to lodge it. In Victoria, council handling of personal information sits under the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic). Treat the output as a draft submission — once lodged, it becomes a public document the council makes available for inspection, so the human lodgement step is also your last privacy check.

What it takes to build

4–6 weeks · 4 phases

Reused from template~65%

Bespoke to this skin~35%

stack · Claude · private RAG · review UI

What it would cost

Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed dates.

Bite-sized first piece

One contained change, low risk

Pilot build

Most builds land here

Embedded support

Scale on proof

Considering this for your org?

The honest place to start is a bite-sized first piece — getting one consultation's evidence trail into findable, cited shape. Tell us where it hurts; we'll play it back, scope it, and show you what's possible.

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