Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition fully supports the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2005. This bill is part of a continuous process to ensure that our statute books are free of errors and cleared of obsolete legislation. This bill contains no substantive policy changes. It corrects errors of a minor and technical nature and repeals legislation relating to special appropriations that are either fully spent or expired. It is a credit to our Office of Parliamentary Counsel that it takes the time periodically to examine our statutes for these kinds of problems.

As I recently noted here on another occasion, I believe that Australia is particularly well served by OPC, which manages to keep our legislation, especially the published compilations, in very good shape. This is not a trivial matter; it is a crucial requirement of the rule of law that citizens should be able to access and understand the laws of the land. Making sure that our legislation is free from mistakes and that unnecessary legislation is cleared from the books goes a long way to achieving this goal.

We have been fortunate in recent decades that information technology has actually brought Commonwealth statutes even closer to the people through SCALE, SCALEplus and now ComLaw, but that also makes it even more important that the law is as accessible in its content and form as it is to download. As more and more non-lawyers are going straight to the web to find out about our laws, legislators need to be even more conscious about maintaining statutes that can be easily understood without having to wade through out-of-date laws or wrestle with the meaning and consequence of minor and technical errors. Statute law revision bills are a part of that process.

I want to take this opportunity to compliment the staff at OPC and the other public servants who had a hand in preparing this bill. I am grateful for the painstaking and time-consuming work that has been done to improve the quality of the Commonwealth statutes. Labor is very pleased to support this small, noncontroversial but nonetheless worthy bill.

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