Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I would hope that the chief government whip is not being too precious about this. Let me give you an example. When the Prime Minister drops the word ‘multicultural’ from a parliamentary secretary’s title and then merely days later decides to insert the word ‘multicultural’ in a title for political purposes, this bill will make it much easier for her to do that.

As for the purpose of attempting to modernise the language in our statutes and laws, I am certainly in favour of that. After all, even a reading of Shakespeare invites some to observe: to modernise or not to modernise, that is the question. In fact, the many changes—and the explanatory memorandum runs to some 26 pages of amendments; this is a substantial matter—grapple with issues such as the use of a capital ‘I’ for internet in legislation, as included, for example, in the Corporations Act 2001. So this bill seeks to replace ‘Internet’ with an uncapitalised common noun—that is, ‘internet’. In case you think this is an arcane point, there is an internet standards community which has differentiated between ‘the Internet’, a proper noun with a capital ‘I’, and ‘internet’, a common noun which is a contraction of the term ‘interconnected network’. I am pleased that this bill has now sorted that one out.

One of the other provisions contained in the bill is to change ‘authorize’ to ‘authorise’. It specifies the Marriage Act of 1961. I think this is just indicative of the perils of Microsoft autocorrect in word processing. I am not sure why this particular piece of legislation has been singled out for the correction of this drafting style. I am led to believe by the Parliamentary Library that there are literally hundreds of examples of such verbs, synonyms, typonyms and troponyms. Take the word ‘modernise’ itself as opposed to ‘modernize’. We have at least corrected that as far as the Marriage Act is concerned.

As to the third purpose of repealing obsolete acts, it is important that we review our legislation from time to time to reflect contemporary circumstances. Times change and societies change, but this is not always reflected in the rules and the laws that govern us. Complexity in life begets complexity in legislation, and it can be a monumental task to simplify legislation once it has become complex and elaborate and also to remove from the statute books unnecessary or obsolete legislation. In fact, there is a global website dedicated to obsolete laws. Its address is www.dumblaws.com. It canvasses some of the quirky laws across the world that remain on the statute books. I would recommend that members read the section on Australia because it goes into some of the state, territory and federal laws that would go in the category of downright crazy laws.

Nevertheless, I do support this attempt to correct errors, modernise the language of some of the acts and repeal obsolete acts. This bill should be supported. More importantly, in fact, it should be supported because the government informs us that there are no financial implications arising from it.

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