Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Under the circumstances, I guess I can fill the remaining minutes talking about the bill. As has been said, there have been a lot of aspects of Commonwealth law that have been locked in the past. When the member for Blair talked about women and children as chattels—and I know that he was not referring to a law that is actually to be amended here—I noted that that is something we are very glad to have seen the end of. Unfortunately, it is those parts of legislation that do appear in other countries, so it would be good if more countries around the world actually had bills such as the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) 2010.

When we look through what we have here in the various schedules and amendments, we can see that there are a lot of interesting things that have been changed. I take up an issue that the shadow minister for foreign affairs spoke about: the use of ‘s’ and ‘z’ in the legislation. It always surprises me how things like this can occur, not just when you have things such as US to Australian spellcheckers but also when you have so many people involved in a process—the public servants, the department and the drafters of laws that are tasked with getting these things right—yet these sorts of things still slip through. Mistakes are still made and it is bizarre, isn’t it, how you can have so many people looking over pieces of legislation yet mistakes are still made. That is unfortunate.

A number of unfortunate things have happened in the past and there is plenty of room for further amendments in the future with regard to a lot of laws. Since the Attorney-General is still here, I will say that I think there will be plenty of room in the future to make other changes. Whilst they might not be described as minor errors—they could be major errors—there are a number of aspects to do with electoral law reform and the reform of the way in which the electoral rolls are conducted in this country. As we know, there are some people who will stop at nothing—

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