25 June 2010 : Legislation Bill introduced

The Attorney-General has today introduced the Legislation Bill to the House of Representatives.

Amongst other provisions :

• the Parliamentary Counsel Office (the PCO) will be required to publish legislation electronically as well as in printed form:
• the PCO will be able to issue official versions of legislation in electronic and printed form (being versions that are presumed to be correct):

March 2010 : digitisation project for historical statutes

In March, the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) initiated a programme to digitise historical New Zealand Acts, from 1841 to 2007. The intention is to provide free, on-line access to all New Zealand Acts in their original form (as enacted), whether or not they have subsequently been repealed. The format is to be searchable PDFs. This will make legislation available that in many cases is currently only held in printed volumes in a limited number of libraries around the country, and is expected to be available by December 2012, probably at the Knowledge Basket site.

This project, referred to on the PCO’s website as the first project is to be followed by a second, as yet unfunded, wherein the historical statutes prepared for the first project will be incorporated fully into the main statutes website. This would be an exciting moment for the NZLLA, whose identification of the “shattering statutes” problem and work with the PCO in the writing of the Rubacki Report, first gave the impetus for a programme to digitise ALL of New Zealand’s legislation.

New Zealand Statutes online

1998 : the PCO issued a discussion paper proposing digitisation of the statutes. The original submission made by the the NZLL proposed many changes. The website was first launched as PAL (Public Access to Legislation), using the Brookers’ statutes as its basis. After many tribulations – cost overruns and disputes with vendors – the Legislation website was launched in January 2008, celebrated by ADLS Librarian Helga Arlington.

Tertiary legislation 

In an NZ Lawyer article, New Zealand Law Librarians' Inc. urged the Government to adopt the recommendation made by the Regulations Review Committee for a centralised tertiary legislation register. Then President Helga Arlington suggested that this could be achieved by extending the Government's Public Access to Legislation project.

 3.7.10 HA