Page 709 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 May 1992
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The Attorney-General's Department has, for some time now, through the legislative drafting area, been working up its capacity to improve the speed with which reprints are published. Mr Humphries, having been an officer in the Territory's legal section before self-government, would know that the reprint of Territory ordinances was seen as the poor relation in the Commonwealth drafting office. Through the 1980s reprints of ACT Acts were really out of date, and it took forever, it seemed, to get a reprint. It was a major problem for anybody who wanted to see what the law was in this Territory, because, apart from the financial cost of having to buy half-a-dozen or a dozen reprints, it is very difficult for a lawyer, let alone a person who is not legally trained, to take a dozen amending Acts and try to make sense of a substantive Act and answer the simple question: What does the law say about a certain subject?
One of the areas to which we have been devoting resources and effort - although not a vast amount of resources in dollar terms - has been to speed up the way in which we can get reprints out. The eventual goal is that we will have all the ACT Acts on an electronic database which will give members of this chamber, the profession and anyone who is interested, for a fee to the profession but not to members of this chamber, access to the law as it presently stands. At the moment, there is only, in effect, one copy of the law as it stands in the ACT - unless the Supreme Court library keeps a paste-up - and that is the paste-up that is kept by Parliamentary Counsel.
That is not a satisfactory state of affairs. If we get to the position - we are heading fairly quickly towards it - that we have this full electronic database, we will be leading the States and the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth has an instantly retrievable electronic database of all its laws, but it has not done it by way of a paste-up - which I always thought was a rather foolish process because it means that you can get off an electronic database a Commonwealth Act and 12 amending Acts, but you cannot get the Act in its present form. We are working very closely towards that; we are now able to reproduce reprints very, very quickly. Members who have a set of Acts in their offices may be noticing that they are getting reprints much more regularly. So, that, I do not think, is a valid criticism of omnibus legislation; on the contrary, it is a process of efficiency.
The problem with the Crimes Act, which Mr Humphries mentioned, can be solved, as the committee indicated, by a process of juggling the commencement to make it neat, or by the Chief Minister signing both things simultaneously. At least in the Labor Party the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing, as opposed to this lot opposite from whom we seem to get conflicting views on things. So, that can be resolved. But, in any event, even if we have the older form here when the new Act commences, subsection 5(1) of that simplification Act contains a provision which says that any old form references are to be taken to be new form references; so it would be picked up. But we can do it fairly neatly.
It would have been a dangerous course for the Government, given the urgency of getting this through to correct that duplication of section 152, to have assumed that this Act would have been passed and into law when this Bill was being prepared. So, the prudent course has been taken by using the current language of the Crimes Act rather than the language that will come into force when the earlier amending Bill that was passed this week comes into law.
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