Parker David: Legislation Bill — First Reading 
Parker David: Legislation Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:665;Page:12874] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I say to Mr Tremain that he might still be suffering under a mystery by the end of the sitting today because I suspect that the vote on the Legislation Bill will not go to a party vote either so he might have to wait. 
As the Attorney-General has said this is mechanical legislation which none the less is very important. It relates to the rules that go to ensuring the integrity of our legislation. I think the Law Commission put it very well when it stated this in its report: “The state has an obligation to make law accessible to citizens. People have to obey the law; ignorance of it is no excuse. So they need to be able to find it and understand it. They will not respect the law if they cannot. Moreover law which is not accessible is expensive in terms of both time and money.” So the objective of this legislation is to make sure that the law is accessible to people and that the content of what is printed is reliable in terms of what this House has passed. 
I will deal with a couple of the issues that the Attorney-General has touched upon. The first is the issue of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel being able to include amendments in reprints. Clause 24 of the bill states that changes authorised by clauses 25 and 26 may be made in a reprint. It states that they “do not permit any change of text that changes the effect of the provision” and of course we all agree that that is an appropriate intention. Then in clauses 25 and 26 the bill sets out some examples of changes. Clause 26 deals with changes to format. They are potentially less contentious than some of the changes that are made pursuant to clause 25. 
These things are apparently simple but at times they will be difficult because the changes that are permitted to be made include changes to punctuation to make legislation consistent with current drafting practice. 
David Garrett 
: Nothing’s simple David. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Well that is an admirable ambition but as Mr Garrett and I am sure the Attorney-General will agree at times changes to punctuation will change the ambiguity of legislation. We have legislation that is currently ambiguous and it will be interesting to see whether faced with ambiguity the Parliamentary Counsel Office tries to fix it. I would suggest that it ought not to; it is actually for Parliament to fix ambiguity. It is not for parliamentary staff to choose which of two meanings it thinks is appropriate. That is one example of where we need to take a wee bit of care in the drafting of this provision and to have a bit of a think as to whether we have the wording of clause 25 quite right. 
Clause 25(1)(h) states: “conjunctives and disjunctives may be inserted omitted or changed so as to be consistent with current drafting practice:”. Again I am sure the Attorney-General will have had similar experiences to me in finding conjunctions used in current legislation that are ambiguous as to whether “and” means “or” or whether “or” means “and”. Depending on whether “or” is used in a way that means “and” or a way that means “or” the meaning of the statute is different. So again we have to be a bit careful that we are not giving carte blanche to the authorities to change wording in cases where they might see ambiguity because Parliament might have intended something different. If there is ambiguity it is for the courts to resolve and if the courts resolve it in a way that Parliament does not like then it is for Parliament to change the law. If we do not like the ambiguity in the meantime then it is up to us to change the law; we ought not to be relying on parliamentary draftspeople to do it. 
Some other changes have been made. I like the idea that we will be moving to more regular systematic revision of Acts. I think that is a good thing. It is made easier these days because of electronic technologies. We might as well take advantage of those changes in technology and move to that more systematic system of revising Acts and as the Attorney-General has said include in those reprints all of the amendments that have been made to the Act rather than asking people who are reading those Acts to read the principal Act then refer separately to an amendment Act for a provision that is not caught by an annotation because it is not a minor change to an existing Act but a substantive change. 
David Garrett 
: Handwritten annotations have always caused problems in my experience Mr Parker. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Handwritten annotations always cause problems? Well— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: The debate is through the Chair. We are not having subcommittees in the House. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: One of the other changes being proposed is the change to the modern drafting style. I am not sure that all of this is progress I say to the Attorney-General. In fact he may know one of my former partners Stuart Walker who has been one of the leading proponents of plain English drafting for decades. He and I were sadly I have to admit talking about this very issue a couple of months ago and lamenting the fact that maybe it is because we are used to the previous style of drafting that we find some of the drafting devices used by the Parliamentary Counsel Office these days harder to understand than the previous versions. They might be briefer but they are harder to understand. That is probably not something we can fix through this legislation but we need to take care that the ambition here is to have easily understood legislation. To the extent that we can make it simpler that is good but the greater and more important objective is clarity. So we ought not to pursue simplicity to the extent that we sacrifice clarity of meaning. 
The other changes that have been made to the Act largely update the existing legislation. I do not think I can spin this speech out to 10 minutes so at this point I will resort to saying that I am somewhat surprised that when there is such a big wage gap with Australia we are not debating something of somewhat more important economic input— 
Hon Christopher Finlayson 
: This will be important economically. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: Well I am not denying that it has some importance but I do not think it will cause a substantial bridging of the wage gap with Australia. On that note I say that Labour will be supporting this bill going to the Regulations Review Committee.