Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As is the case in an imperfect world, people make mistakes and these mistakes at times manifest themselves in various ways. Sadly, occasionally in acts of parliament the mistakes come in the form of typos, spelling errors, omissions, leftovers that should have been omitted as a result of consequent amendments, and other small nuisances.

The Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2005 has the purpose of rectifying some 80 mistakes and cancellations of acts that have been identified at this point in time in our laws. The parliament this year will consider some 128 bills, 79 that have had their genesis in 2004 or 2005 and approximately 49 from 2006. With this quantity of legislation under consideration for the good of all Australians, it is not unexpected that some minor hiccups will occur along the way.

This is not the first time I have spoken on bills of this nature and it will probably not be the last. These bills are required to ensure that our acts of parliament are as clear and as readable as was originally intended. The member for Gellibrand pointed out that many people without legal training are now logging on to obtain information with respect to the laws of Australia, and it is important that those laws be as clear and concise as possible. The errors that creep into documents are not usually found until the documents, in this case legislation, are utilised by everyday users.

This bill has been divided into three sections. Schedule 1 is designed to correct errors in what are principal acts, with the corrections to come into force from the date of the original act. Schedule 2 has the aim of correcting some misdescriptions that have occurred in amending acts, and these are errors that have occurred in the course of introducing amendments to an act. Schedule 3 enables the repeal of obsolete acts. These include the repeal of the Defence Forces Retirement Benefits Fund (Distribution of Surplus to Pensioners) Act 1976. It is, as you would be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, a long name for an act, and it deals with a one-off pensioner payment that is long gone. It finished as long ago as 1977.

Schedule 3 also repeals some 16 acts that were once administered by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. They deal with spending on specific programs that are no longer in place, making the acts obsolete. Subsidies were given to certain consumers between 1980 and 1985 through provisions in the Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Grants) Act 1980. That grants scheme expired in 1985, so it is no longer for the parliament to retain this act on its statute books. It will be repealed under the bill currently being debated.

Schedule 1 of the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2005 includes 26 changes. These relate to items such as inserting the number ‘51’ in the Aged Care Act 1997 to correct a misleading reference to the Constitution, removing a subsection (2) from the Australian Federal Police Act 1979 as a result of subsections (1) and (3) being repealed in an amendment in 2000, and correcting the use of the two words ‘can’ and ‘not’ and replacing them with the one word ‘cannot’ in the Crimes Act 1914. This indicates that typos and small spelling errors are still being identified in our laws—which is, I suppose, quite concerning—some 90-plus years after the laws were introduced. Schedule 2 includes changes to amending acts, including corrections to titles, such as updating a reference in the Audit (Transitional and Miscellaneous) Amendment Act 1997 to the Public Accounts Committee Act 1951 to its new name, the Public Accounts and Audit Committee Act 1951. There are 27 such modifications outlined under this bill.

As pointed out by the member for Gellibrand, I have great admiration—as does the Attorney-General—for those people who draft our laws. But those people are not perfect. Some of the matters being corrected by this legislation are mistakes and others are matters being simply updated as time goes on. Drafting bills is a mostly unseen task. For those of us who debate the bills, it seems that they magically appear and we often do not consider how long it takes to pull together the necessary clauses in what are often very intricate and complicated pieces of legislation. Wording must be clear and precise, and this often involves considerable cross-referencing and the inclusion of definitions and explanations, and often acts have to be rewritten when amendments are passed by this House. It is a taxing and thankless job.

I have had a theory for a while that, when ministers introduce new subordinate legislation by regulation, the minister ought to surrender a similar number of words of regulation. I think, as time goes on, we seem to be ever more legislated for and more regulated. I think at one stage the Department of Finance and Administration was looking at a project whereby if a department wanted to bring in a new set of regulations containing X number of clauses or X number of words, the minister enacting these extra regulations would be required to surrender a similar number of words.

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