Secondary Legislation Access To Be Improved
A bill to make it easier to find and comply with the law and to digitise government services by improving access to secondary legislation has passed its first reading, Attorney-General Judith Collins says.
'Secondary legislation includes regulations and many types of orders, rules, exemptions, bylaws, notices and instruments with many different names,' Ms Collins says.
'The Legislation Amendment Bill promotes high-quality legislation for New Zealand that is easy to find, use and understand.
'Currently most secondary legislation is drafted and published by agencies and is difficult to access. In fact, no one knows how much there is, with estimates ranging from 7500-10,000 published by about 100 government and non-government agencies, plus every local authority.
'Some is published on the agency's website, some is published in the New Zealand Gazette or in newspapers or, sometimes, it appears to not be publicly available at all.
'These variable publication arrangements undermine the rule of law, increase compliance costs, hamper digital government and impair scrutiny of delegated law-making powers.'
'The bill will standardise publication practices, making it a requirement that secondary legislation drafted by agencies is published on the agency website or another approved internet site.'
Alongside the Bill, the Parliamentary Counsel Office is redeveloping the official New Zealand legislation website using data collection technology to find, index and link agency-published secondary legislation and make it searchable from the website.
A public demo of the new legislation website is available for users to test and already includes a lot of agency-published secondary legislation.
'This will turn the website into a one-stop shop for legislation matters,' Ms Collins says.
'My vision is that the public will soon only need to visit one website to find all New Zealand legislation and related information.'
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If the Government agreed, this could pave the way for a much cleaner referendum question, along the lines of: I do/I do not support four-year parliamentary terms. Kate MacNamara is a South Island-based journalist with a focus on policy, public spending and investigations. She spent a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before moving to New Zealand. She joined theHeraldin 2020.
