Impetus for the LSP

---

The importance of statute law has increased both generally and in Tasmania, with an associated increase in its volume and complexity. Governments are creating policy in areas previously only covered by common (case) law. While a reprint of Australian Commonwealth Legislation in 1950 involved about 5,000 pages, a similar exercise in 1982 was estimated to include 150,000 pages (Ward, 1981). The trend towards more statute law has not slowed since that time.

These trends, prevalent in most other Australian jurisdictions, were intensified in Tasmania from 1992 to 1996 due to a majority government in parliament, and a general lack of funding. Compared with other Australian Offices of Parliamentary Counsel, the Tasmanian OPC was under-resourced and the standard of the statute book consequentially suffered. It was the poor state of the statute book, plus the perceived need for a greater throughput of legislation, that prompted the push for automatic consolidation which is central to the LSP.

Access to consolidated legislation was an ongoing problem in Tasmania. Amendment acts were not consolidated into the principal acts and anyone wishing to use acts which had since been amended had to manually include these updates. That is, they would physically cut out sections of the amendment act and stick them into the principle act or correct the principle act by pen. There were three major periodic consolidations of Tasmanian legislation, in 1902, 1936 and 1959. In 1978 a rolling reprint scheme was introduced but fell into disuse due to lack of resources.

The result was a cumbersome statute book that was difficult to understand and apply. For example, the Racing and Gaming Act was last reprinted in 1974 and by 1994 had been the subject of 39 amendment acts resulting in over 300 separate amendments which had to be manually incorporated into the principal act. Incorporating these amendments into the principal act was time consuming, prone to error, and directly increased the costs of obtaining legal advice or using legislation. The manually consolidated versions of the legislation, termed 'paste-ups', were cumbersome, even when correct. Significant effort was required to interpret the law, and resulting mistakes impinged on the effectiveness of the judicial courts. Law based on unconsolidated statutes is complex, requiring legal expertise to interpret and so imposing financial burdens on the community. It also impinged on the effectiveness of parliament, and parliamentarians complained about the difficulty of interpreting amendment legislation they were to debate.

The Legislation System Project

Very little computerised technology was used to aid the production of legislation in Tasmania prior to 1993, and advances in information technologies suggested solutions to the identified problems. The project's Business Case Document stated:

The OPC has not benefited from improvements in information systems which have increased productivity in other areas of Government activity. Although at its core, drafting is essentially an intellectual and creative task, the process of producing legislation involves many stages which could be significantly improved by automation and access to better information systems (p. 2).

The LSP formally aimed to provide:

• A legislation drafting and consolidation system within the OPC;

• A legislation database controlled and maintained by the OPC; and

• A communications network that provides access to the Bill drafting and consolidation system, and the legislation database.

Most other state jurisdictions now use document management systems but, while all State and the Federal governments in Australia have the problem of consolidating legislation, this is the first time automatic consolidation has been attempted. Initiated in 1993, the project was planned to be completed by 1995, but was not implemented until late 1997/early 1998 due primarily to unforeseen technical difficulties.

---