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Improving Public Access to Legislation: the New Zealand experience

Positioning for the Future
Legal Information Symposium 2004
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, 22-24 July 2004

Geoff Lawn

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Outline of the PAL Project: objectives and solution
3. Sale of the Government Printing Office
4. Particular issues arising in the PAL Project
5. Justifying the project
6. The importance of paper
7. The development of an annual reprints programme
8. The interim website of New Zealand legislation
9. Increasing public interest in legislation and legislative matters
10. Positioning for the future
11. Conclusion

1. Introduction

This paper is in large part an updated version of a paper presented to the Law via the Internet Conference 2003, held in Sydney in November 2003. A copy of that paper will be made available on the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) website in due course [now located at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/pal/gla2.shtml]. This paper also incorporates some of the material made available on the PCO website about recent work undertaken on the PAL Project and the current state of play with respect to the project.

A central theme of my earlier paper was the inherent complexity, or messiness, of the legislative process, and how that impacts on any initiative to improve public access to legislation. The following quotation from Jeremy Bentham appropriately captures the essence of the problem:2

As if from a rubbish cart a continually increasing and ever shapeless mass of law is from time to time shot down upon the heads of the people, and out of this rubbish, and at his peril, is each man left to pick out what belongs to him.

A second area of complexity or messiness is the historical backdrop against which the PAL Project has to be played out. This includes the sale of the Government Printing Office in the late 1980s, and the role that the Knowledge Basket and other commercial legal publishers have taken over the last few decades. Recent developments in this area, that I will cover in detail later in this paper, illustrate the nature of the problem.

And a third area of complexity is the fact that legislation is only one part of a complex web of interconnecting systems that make up the legal and constitutional environment. The legislative process is part of the Parliamentary system, and the output, legislation, is the basis on which much of the judicial system functions. There are many different institutions, agencies, and professional groups with different roles, perspectives, priorities, and requirements. Collaboration and cooperation is happening or is planned in a few areas, and will hopefully provide impetus for further progress.

The fact that legislation is at the heart of this complex web, that it is one of the key processes of government, is what makes the successful completion of the PAL Project so important. Indeed, to draw on the theme of this conference, the PAL Project is one of the building blocks to enable us to position ourselves for a future where there is proper access to legal information.

However, I think that people generally fail to appreciate the complexity of trying to achieve improvements in access to legislation. To achieve real improvements, it is not just a case of building a website and making legislative material available in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). In New Zealand, we have taken a holistic view of the process of improving public access to legislation, and part of the project involves improving access to the legislative process as well, not just its output. The public face of the system (the website) is probably the simplest part. The back end—designing and building a system that will provide improvements in access to legislation and that is robust, reliable, and can be put into operation with absolute confidence—is the tricky part.

At the time of writing, the PAL Project remains paused while the New Zealand Government and Unisys, the PCO’s implementation partner for the project, work through various technical and commercial issues. The Government has yet to make a decision on whether or not the project will proceed. I know that there is a great sense of frustration that it is taking so long to resolve these issues. Those of us who are intimately involved in the project appreciate and share that frustration. A great deal of enthusiasm and support for the project and its objectives has built up over the past few years, and continues to be expressed whenever I talk to legal information and other professional groups about the project.

My earlier paper examined—

This examination shows that New Zealand has a long history of access to legislation projects, and that the task of improving public access to legislation gives rise to issues and problems that are neither novel nor of recent origin.

I will focus in more detail in this paper on some of the issues that are relevant to, or have arisen in the course of, the project. These are—

I will then discuss the following:

2. Outline of the PAL Project: objectives and solution

I don't intend in this paper to traverse the background to the PAL Project, or the details of the project. Those matters are extensively explained in material freely available on the PCO website.3 For those unfamiliar with these details, the project can be simply summarised as follows.

The objectives of the project are—

The project involves the PCO acquiring a copy of an electronic database of New Zealand legislation, and a set of legislative Document Type Definitions (DTDs) from a private sector publisher. The database and DTDs developed by Brookers have been selected for this purpose.

The technical solution is based on an Extensible Markup Language (XML) platform. The current components of the solution are as follows:

The PAL Project therefore provides a comprehensive and fully integrated drafting, printing, publishing, and reprinting system. It is a "big bang" approach.

The PAL system is based on an XML platform. There has been some comment in the IT news media about the wisdom of using XML rather than Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML).4 This was one of the issues considered by the independent technical review of the PAL solution.

Following the decision to delay the implementation of the PAL Project in February 2003, Ministers directed that an independent technical review of the PAL solution be carried out. The objective of the review was to obtain independent assurance that the PAL system will be operationally stable, maintainable, and capable of future enhancement and development. The review focused in particular on the customisation of the individual components of the new system, and the integration of the components into the overall system. Unisys participated fully in the review.

The technical review was undertaken by InQuirion Pty Ltd, an Australian company that is a spin off company of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). The InQuirion team was led by Dr Timothy Arnold-Moore, who is a world expert in the development of legislative drafting and publishing systems, and was a major contributor to the Tasmanian EnAct system (www.thelaw.tas.gov.au). Dr Arnold-Moore has published widely on this topic.

The technical review was completed in late October 2003. The review concluded that the PAL system and the architecture behind it are generally sound, and that, if certain issues identified in the technical review report and separately by the PCO and Unisys are satisfactorily addressed, the New Zealand Government can confidently deploy the PAL application.

InQuirion concluded that while New Zealand has selected a different tool combination from other jurisdictions, all of the pieces fit into the standard category of tools with some more advanced tools and some less advanced tools reflecting the different emphases, priorities, and experiences of the New Zealand environment.

InQuirion also confirmed the choice of XML as the platform for the project. The report concluded that using XML rather than SGML should ensure the availability of quality tools for the lifetime of the current PAL system and beyond.

SGML and XML are both international, non-proprietary standards for modelling and capturing the structural components of textual data and for storing it in a neutral format that can be read and understood by specialised applications. They are designed to avoid data being trapped in proprietary software and publishing systems, and are particularly applicable to data that is of high value, has a long life-span, is subject to change, and is required to be re-used and published in multiple formats (for example, in print and on a website). XML (which is a simplified subset of SGML) is now the dominant standard, designed particularly for website applications.

In a paper presented to the Law via the Internet Conference 2003,5 Dr Arnold-Moore examined the nature of legislative documents, and the application of XML-based technology in the creation, management, and delivery of legislative data.

Dr Arnold-Moore's paper identifies a number of key features of legislation that make the application of XML technologies particularly appropriate. These features include the relatively rigid and predictable structure of legislation; the fact that legislation (unlike other sources of law such as case law) is frequently amended, and therefore that knowing what the law currently is, and what it was at particular points in time, is important; and the State's unique responsibility to ensure effective public access to the law in a complete, authoritative, and timely manner, and in a range of formats that make it accessible to all citizens. Other features include the fact that items of legislation are often quite large in size; the extensive use of cross-references (both within individual items of legislation and between items); and the long lifespan of legislation.

In Dr Arnold-Moore's view, the advantages of using generalised markup technology in the creation, management, and delivery of legislation include "the longevity of the data, vendor independent tool sets, the ability to validate the structure of each document against drafting standards, and the separation of the creation of content from the presentation of that content".6 He states that XML's flexibility in supporting multiple markup styles (and therefore multiple presentation formats) makes it particularly relevant, given the distinctive characteristics of legislation outlined above.

XML technology is an integral component of the new PAL solution. This will help to ensure that the PAL system provides a good platform for the integrated creation, management, and delivery of New Zealand legislation well into the future.

The use of XML technology, because it is an internationally recognised standard, is also consistent with the New Zealand E-government Interoperability Framework (NZ e-GIF),7 which the PCO is required to adopt.8 The Framework governs how public sector organisations are to achieve electronic interoperability of their information, technology, and business processes. The fact that the PAL system is XML-based should make it easier to integrate as part of some of the initiatives which I will refer to later, such as a Parliamentary portal.

3. Sale of the Government Printing Office

The appropriate choice of technology is an important aspect of the PAL Project. It will assist in future-proofing the solution. There are also some historical matters that have had an important influence on the progress of the project. The sale of the Government Printing Office is one that is particularly important.

The Government Printing Office was sold in 1989. From then on, New Zealand has relied on a private contractor, Blue Star Print Group New Zealand Limited, through its subsidiaries Legislation Direct and SecuraCopy, to provide prepublication and printing services with respect to New Zealand legislation. That contractor has provided those services exceptionally well and to a very high standard.

However, the sale had 2 consequences that I consider relevant in this context. The first is that New Zealand started down the path of improving public access to legislation without the State owning a comprehensive database of New Zealand legislation. The sale of the GPO was conditional on the Crown entering into contracts with the purchaser (Rank Group Limited) for Parliamentary printing, and included transfer of ownership of the GPO's collection of legislative data. In this respect, New Zealand was different from many other overseas jurisdictions, including most Australian jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions owned and had access to their own legislative data. They could be reasonably confident that the data was correct, comprehensive, and properly formatted.

By contrast, New Zealand left the private sector to develop comprehensive databases of New Zealand legislation. Status Publishing (now a part of LexisNexis) and Brookers (part of the Thomson Corporation) both invested in the back-capture of New Zealand Acts and Statutory Regulations, and produced their own commercially available databases of legislation.

As part of the PAL Project, the PCO has therefore had to buy a database of New Zealand legislation from a private publisher, Brookers. The database has not been produced by the PCO, and has not undergone the checking processes employed in the production of the official version of New Zealand legislation. This is not to say that the data that the PCO is acquiring is not of a high standard. But it was produced by a non-official agency for a different purpose (a commercial product). Official versions of legislation must be formatted to strict specifications and the content must be as accurate as is reasonably possible. These factors introduce complexities when it comes to reformatting the data for use in drafting and publishing legislation, and require extensive quality assurance processes before the data can be made available as an official version of New Zealand legislation.

The second consequence of the sale of the Government Printing Office was the introduction of a distinct organisational separation between drafting legislation and the technology employed in prepublication and printing legislation. I think that it is fair to say that drafters in the PCO had a much greater appreciation of the technology employed in pre-press and printing work in the days of hot metal than they did when computer typesetting was introduced. Although the PCO and Legislation Direct did subsequently collaborate on a system that enabled drafters to produce drafts on a word processor, and to send these electronically to Legislation Direct for typesetting, the system at the PCO end employed a reasonably simple user interface using WordPerfect customised with a limited number of macros. The Legislation Direct end was very much a "black box", and it was a system that was developed for a commercial purpose and considered to have a commercial value.

This meant that the PCO did not begin the process of improving public access to legislation with an intimate, or even a passing, organisational knowledge of the technologies involved in printing and publishing legislation. Drafting offices in Australia had this knowledge in-house. They knew their own data and their own processes. This has meant a steep learning curve for the PCO and Unisys.

Further, this situation introduces some rather complex dynamics when it comes to gaining access to that technology, and the knowledge of the prepublication and printing processes that surround it. Both are the intellectual property of a commercial organisation, and arise in the context of a project that will eventually make the prepublication component of that organisation redundant.

The Government Printing Office was sold to Rank Group Limited for around $23 million. It might fairly be argued that the cost of the PAL Project should be offset against that money. The PAL Project involves buying back from the private sector the legislative data that is at the heart of the project, and developing within the PCO the technical knowledge and expertise required to design, implement, and operate the new drafting and publishing systems. Both those components were sold off to the private sector with the sale of the GPO. The implementation of the PAL Project will mean that ownership and control of what is in essence a fundamental public asset, an electronic database of New Zealand legislation and the data necessary to keep that database up-to-date, will reside in the Crown.

The Knowledge Basket

The Knowledge Basket [www.knowledge-basket.co.nz], and in particular the recent issues with respect to its access to legislative data and the public availability of its collection, are also related to the commercialisation of the Government Printing Office and the lack of Crown ownership of key legislative data.

The Knowledge Basket collection of legislative data is made up of Acts, Statutory Regulations, Bills, and SOPs. The collection was begun in the late 1980s, as a result of initiatives taken by the GPO to establish a legislative database service for Parliament and for a wider audience through Kiwinet. The GPO undertook a project to retrospectively capture New Zealand Acts. The Knowledge Basket service was established in the early 1990s.

Many people tend to regard the Knowledge Basket collection of legislative materials as a government-sponsored service. In fact, the Knowledge Basket has always sourced its legislative material from Legislation Direct under a commercial arrangement to which the PCO has never been a party. The PCO has come in for a lot of criticism over recent years for the issues that have arisen with respect to public access to the Knowledge Basket's collection. Those issues have not been of the PCO's making, nor its direct responsibility.

Before February 2003, the Knowledge Basket provided free public access to its collection of Acts and Statutory Regulations, as well as Bills and SOPs. The public were able to browse this material free of charge, while those wishing to search across the data had to subscribe to a commercial service from the Knowledge Basket. The supply of legislative data from Legislation Direct to the Knowledge Basket would have ceased at the end of January 2003 when the new PAL system was originally scheduled to go live and Legislation Direct ceased operation. It was anticipated that the Knowledge Basket, like other legal publishers, would then have sourced its data from the PCO. In the event, the new PAL system did not go live, and while Legislation Direct continued to provide prepublication services to the PCO, the supply of legislative data to the Knowledge Basket was discontinued.

In March 2003, the PCO, Legislation Direct, and the Knowledge Basket entered into an arrangement under which Legislation Direct would supply Bills in electronic form to the Knowledge Basket, and the Knowledge Basket would make them freely available on its website. It was not possible to restore the supply of legislative data for new Acts and regulations, but the Knowledge Basket's collection of historical material remained freely available to the public for browsing. Then, in June 2003, the Knowledge Basket announced that it was ceasing to provide free public browse access to its collection of legislative material. The reason given for this was the detrimental impact (both in terms of cost and system performance) of large downloads of data by individuals and robots.

I should point out that the PCO was not, and is still not, in a position to supply legislative data itself to the Knowledge Basket or any alternative supplier. While the PCO is the originator of the legislative material (Bills, Acts, Statutory Regulations, and SOPs), the PCO remains totally reliant on the prepublication processes provided by Legislation Direct to produce legislative material in a form that is suitable for printing. Although the PCO authors material in WordPerfect, much of the material is still produced by a combination of manual and electronic processes, and only Legislation Direct holds the final complete version of every item of legislation.

The cessation of the free service provided by the Knowledge Basket in the middle of 2003 left quite a hole in the availability of free public access to legislation in New Zealand. Although the PCO and Brookers had provided an interim website of Acts and Statutory Regulations since September 2002, that website was only ever intended to be a temporary measure until the PAL Project was completed and the new PAL website became available. Because of the delays to the PAL Project, the PCO and Brookers have since entered into a longer-term arrangement to enable the interim website to continue in the meantime.

The cessation of the Knowledge Basket service impacted on 2 groups of people in particular. These are the blind or visually impaired, and certain advocacy groups.

The blind and visually impaired, and certain other disabled people (such as those unable to turn pages in hard copy material), accessed legislation on the Knowledge Basket because the data was available in a format that enabled the use of screen readers and Braille-printing equipment. The interim website cannot be accessed in this way. This is because the interim website utilises frames technology, and does not comply with the New Zealand Government Web Guidelines (the Guidelines)9 as to website accessibility. This was clearly understood at the time the arrangement was entered into with Brookers to provide the interim website (which was part of the contractual arrangements with Unisys to build the new PAL system). The technology employed in populating the website is connected with the Brookers processes for producing their commercial products. It was not technically feasible to make the website compliant with the Guidelines, nor was it considered to be necessary since the website was originally intended to be available for only a few months and then superseded by the PAL website. The new PAL website has been designed to comply with the Guidelines.

The Knowledge Basket collection was also particularly useful for certain advocacy groups because it provided access to legislation that has been repealed. For example, advocacy groups dealing with Accident Compensation issues often have to refer to previous versions of ACC legislation because the repealed legislation remains relevant for transitional purposes. The interim website does not provide access to historical (repealed or revoked) legislation, but simply provides access to current versions of Acts and Statutory Regulations.

The loss of currency of the Knowledge Basket website also impacted on users with an interest in tracking the progress of Bills through the House, and when and why certain amendments were proposed and adopted. These users were no longer able to access electronic versions of Supplementary Order Papers for this purpose.

It took some time to find a way to resolve these issues. But it was very pleasing for the PCO to be able to announce on 22 June 200410 that the PCO, Blue Star Print Group New Zealand Limited, and the Knowledge Basket had entered into an arrangement that provides a way forward.

The arrangement is part of an agreement between the PCO and Blue Star to extend, until the end of March 2006, the current contract with SecuraCopy (a Blue Star subsidiary) for the printing, distribution, and sale of legislation. Under the arrangement, Blue Star agreed to resume the supply of legislative data to the Knowledge Basket through Legislation Direct (also a Blue Star subsidiary and the provider of prepublication services to the PCO). This enables the Knowledge Basket to restore free public browse access via its website to Acts and Statutory Regulations in an uncompiled form (that is, without their amendments incorporated), and SOPs, and to continue to provide free public access to Bills. In addition, Blue Star agreed to backfill the gap in the Knowledge Basket collection that had occurred since the Knowledge Basket stopped receiving legislative data from Legislation Direct in early 2003, and permit the Knowledge Basket to restore free public browse access to its collection of historical legislative material.

At the time of writing, free public access to Acts has already been restored. Regulations and SOPs are scheduled to become available again by the end of July 2004.

A further part of the agreement with Blue Star relating to the SecuraCopy contract is also particularly pleasing and significant. Blue Star has also agreed that, at the end of the term of the SecuraCopy contract in 2006, a copy of the entire collection of legislative material held by the Knowledge Basket will be provided to the PCO. This will enable this unique and very significant collection to be preserved in the public domain. The PCO has yet to decide how this collection will be preserved and made publicly available. One option would be to eventually integrate it into the new PAL website, to enable users to browse and search across the entire collection.

Blue Star and the Knowledge Basket are to be commended for their willingness to enter into these arrangements. Without in any way detracting from that, it is worth noting that the restoration of free public access to legislation that results from these arrangements was dependent on a commercial arrangement to gain access to both the collection of legislative data to which access is restored and the legislative data that is required to keep that collection up-to-date. A fundamental objective of the PAL Project is to ensure that the Crown (the New Zealand public) owns and is able to maintain a comprehensive electronic version of New Zealand legislation so that the State can adequately fulfil its statutory responsibility to make legislation available to the public. In addition, the new PAL system will enable the PCO to make legislative data available free of charge to legal publishers and others who wish to add value to the data through their commercial products.

The issues relating to free public access to the Knowledge Basket collection also illustrate another point. This is the importance of easy access to legislation in a variety of electronic forms for a wide variety of people and for a wide variety of different purposes. It is certainly not a case where one size fits all.

It is probably useful to compare what is or will soon be currently available from the Knowledge Basket and the interim website, with what will be available when the PAL Project is completed. This is set out in the following table.

Comparison of content and features: Knowledge Basket, Interim Website, and PAL Website
Functionality
Knowledge Basket
Interim website
PAL website
Bills yes no yes, current as at launch date
SOPs
 yes no yes, current as at launch date
Acts      
As enacted (annual) yes no yes, from launch date only
Compiled (with amendments incorporated) no, some reprints available yes yes
Amending Acts yes no yes, from launch date only
Superseded versions no no yes, from launch date only
Repealed Acts yes no yes, from launch date only
History notes no no yes
Regulations      
As made (annual) yes no yes, from launch date only
Compiled (with amendments incorporated) no, some reprints available yes yes
Amending regulations yes no yes, from launch date only
Superseded versions no no yes, from launch date only
Revoked regulations yes no yes, from launch date only
History notes no no yes
Other features      
Accessibility to visually impaired yes no yes
Browsing yes yes yes
Searching no yes yes
Easy to print properly formatted documents no no yes
Order hard copy online no no yes
Persistent IDs (deep linking) yes no yes
Point in time no no yes
Links to cases no yes, for subscribers only no
Frequency of updating Daily Monthly Daily

The material that will be available on the new PAL website will not meet everyone's needs or wishes. It is intended to provide only "plain vanilla" access to New Zealand legislation, leaving the commercial legal publishers to provide more value-added features (such as links to cases, and legal commentary) for specialist users. However, the fact that free public access to the Knowledge Basket's collection of legislative material is now assured on an ongoing basis is a very significant advance, and will complement the material available on the new PAL website.

4. Particular issues arising in the PAL Project

I now want to explore in more detail 2 issues that have been relevant to, or have arisen in the course of, the PAL Project. These are—

5. Justifying the project

The PAL Project is sponsored and funded solely by the New Zealand Government. As with any other publicly funded government project, it was necessary to present a case to the New Zealand Government to gain approval and funding for the project.

The environment that existed at the time the project was first conceived would not have appeared particularly conducive to the idea of the State entering the "marketplace" with respect to the provision of legislative materials. The GPO, a state agency that had existed since 1864,11 had been privatised in the late 1980s. And the private sector had made a considerable investment in the production of legislative materials, including comprehensive electronic databases of New Zealand legislation, for the local market. One commentator, in a paper presented to the Law via the Internet conference in 1999,12 remarked that "New Zealand has probably crossed the threshold of the 'free market' too completely now for an artificial subsidized service to be reintroduced".

I think there are 2 points to be made here. First, the provision of public access to legislation is not a matter that can or should be left to the private sector. Second, the matter is not primarily an economic one.

As to the first point, I simply repeat the points that I and others have made on previous occasions.13 Up-to-date legislation that is easily accessible and comprehensible to the public may be regarded as part of the basic infrastructure of society, as essential as the roading system or a reliable telecommunications system, and without which the everyday functioning of society is made more difficult. Does relying on the private sector to make New Zealand legislation available in electronic form make legislation as widely available as it should be? It may suit the needs of the legal profession, which can generally afford to pay, but does it meet the needs of the general public for access to "their law"? Does it simply entrench the position of the legal profession as a sort of "priestly caste", the interpreters of the law for those unable to access it for themselves?

Further, can the State afford to run the risk that private sector providers might some day decide to pull out of the market, leaving the State, and therefore the public, without any central electronic database of legislation? And is it satisfactory for the only official version of legislation to remain in printed form, and for legislation in electronic form to remain unofficial, unable to be relied on as authoritative?

In one sense, the PAL Project is simply the State taking advantage of advances in technology to make its laws available to its citizens in the most efficient and effective way possible. It is using the appropriate medium to make legislation available, as it always has. I think that this is now accepted by the private sector providers of access to New Zealand legislation, and they are keen to take advantage of the benefits that the PAL Project will deliver.

The second point really flows from the first. To what extent, if any, does a project to improve public access to legislation have to satisfy economic measures to justify the investment of public money?

That it is necessary to enable the Government to fulfill a basic duty might be regarded as sufficient in itself. But government agencies are used to weighing the merits or desirability of government initiatives on the strength of robust cost-benefit analyses. In most cases, such analyses are probably necessary and appropriate.

It is possible to identify financial benefits and cost savings through the introduction of new technology to the drafting, publishing, and reprinting processes. There would be cost savings in current subscription costs that government departments and agencies pay to private sector electronic publishers. There are also cost savings to the Government and Parliament through projected reductions in the costs of printing and publishing.

Further, there are undoubted, although unquantifiable, community benefits, including—

There are also benefits to the legal publishing community. The availability of an official source of electronic data should result in efficiencies in the processes used by legal publishers to produce their commercial products, and incentives to provide better value-added products and services.

It might be possible to establish that the quantifiable benefits from the project would exceed the costs in the long term. However, these benefits, savings, and efficiencies do not really do justice to the fundamental imperatives that justify the project. In the end, the project is not about savings or efficiencies. The basis of the project is in fulfilling the State's obligation to make its laws available to its citizens. This is primarily a public interest issue, rather than an economic one.

As Lord Oliver of Aylmerton has observed:

For every legislative enactment constitutes a diktat by the state to the citizen which he is not only expected but obliged to observe in the regulation of his daily life...That is why it is so vitally important that legislation should be expressed in language that can be clearly understood and why it should be in a form that makes it readily accessible. Edmund Burke observed that bad laws are the worst form of tyranny. But, equally, well-intentioned laws that are badly drafted or not readily accessible are also a form of tyranny...14

The business case for the PAL Project15 was not argued on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, but it took some lengthy discussions with the more fiscally-minded parties to the process to establish the merits of the public interest argument. In the end, the PAL Project was not approved on the basis of a detailed discounted cash flow analysis or a financial rate of return to the Crown. It was accepted as a true "public interest" project. Very few public sector projects are approved on this basis. I hasten to add that this does not imply the absence of economic or financial discipline or constraints on the project!

Providing legislative data to legal publishers and others
The public interest nature of the PAL Project subsequently became relevant to another issue—the basis on which data from the new PAL system should be made available to legal publishers and others, including the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII). The New Zealand Government has established a framework of principles for determining whether or not government agencies should charge for government-held information.16 Those principles require agencies to consider such issues as whether or not the dissemination of the information is desirable for a public policy purpose, the feasibility of recovering a charge, and the purpose for which the information will be used.

After taking into account those principles, the fact that the rationale for the PAL Project is based on benefits for the public good rather than on any quantified rate of return to the Crown, and that the project has not been approved or funded on the basis of any expected revenue opportunities, the PCO determined not to charge legal publishers or other recipients of legislative data any royalty or other fee for the data, or for the use of the PAL solution to download the data.

In a sense, the PAL Project is therefore a bit like the 1931 Reprint project, in which both the New Zealand Government and a private legal publisher participated. The PAL Project builds on the work undertaken by the private legal publishers such as the Knowledge Basket, Brookers, and LexisNexis in establishing the viability of electronic legislative products in the New Zealand marketplace. Key inputs into the project are the electronic database of New Zealand legislation that the PCO is acquiring from Brookers, along with Brookers' legislative DTDs. And, in turn, the proceeds of the project, an authoritative source of New Zealand legislation, will be freely shared with anyone, including legal publishers.

6. The importance of paper

It is very easy, in the context of discussions on improving public access to legislation, to focus on the huge benefits that the electronic delivery of legislative data brings. That there are huge benefits is undeniable. However, it is also easy to overlook the continuing importance of printed legislative materials, both to the public and in the context of the legislative processes that generate them.

In New Zealand, the Parliamentary processes relating to legislation are entirely paper-based. On the introduction of a Bill, the member in charge must provide printed copies to the Clerk of the House for circulation. A Bill must be reprinted when it is reported by a select committee or committee of the whole House if it is reported with amendment or is divided by the committee (except Bills passed under urgency, or that are set down for third reading forthwith, or as approved by the Speaker in respect of any minor textual amendment), and if a Bill is reprinted, the member in charge must provide printed copies to the Clerk and the Bill is not available for debate until copies are circulated to members.17 Although these rules have been expressed in this form only recently by the House, they reflect longstanding practice and general expectations.

Amendments to a Bill during its passage through the House also relate to the Bill in its printed form. Line numbers are printed on Bills to facilitate reference to specific provisions of the Bill, and proposed amendments in SOPs are drafted by reference to page and line numbers.

A Bill is passed into law by virtue of the Royal assent given on the printed assent copy. The 2 assent copies signed by the Governor-General, the Administrator, or sometimes by the Sovereign herself, are the ultimate and original source document for the Act of Parliament. The "statute book" is both conceptual and tangible given that currently only printed copies of Acts of Parliament, in both pamphlet and bound volume form, have any official status in New Zealand as correct statements of the law.

These things are highly relevant in the context of a project to improve access to legislation. Both the ability to produce printed copies in a timely way, and the quality of the printed output, are very important measures of its success.

Timeliness

Timeliness in the delivery of printed legislation is a critical requirement. The New Zealand Parliament has a very long sitting season. Sittings typically begin in early February each year, and last until early to mid-December. There are breaks of 1 or 2 weeks throughout the year, but select committees often continue to meet even though the House is not sitting. This puts sustained and unrelenting pressure on the PCO, the Office of the Clerk, and the IRD drafters, and the systems supporting their operations.

The pressure that arises from the lack of respite for personnel and systems is compounded by the demands from a legislative process that provides many opportunities for change to Bills as they progress. Bills cannot be pre-baked and left to cool until Parliament is ready to rubberstamp them. The ingredients are being mixed, and some still added or removed, up until the last minute.

And the short order cooks have to work fast. Politicians have no patience when it comes to the production of printed copies of Bills. A Minister intent on getting his or her legislative measure through the House will not accept any delay on account of printing difficulties. The preparation and printing of legislation is very much a demand-driven process, and the demands, when they are made, are very great.

This means that systems need to avoid any unnecessary or inefficient processes, and that automatic processes are to be preferred over manual interventions if this is possible. The necessity to tweak and nudge, if this introduces delay, is not desirable. A single preparation process that produces all the different outputs, both printed and electronic, is also desirable if expectations of timely access to print and electronic versions of legislation are to be met. Indeed, as indicated earlier in this paper, this is the reason why the new PAL system is designed around an XML-based structured markup system. An XML-based system has the capability to render content automatically into several output formats—in the case of the PAL system this is PDF for print, and HTML and PDF for website delivery. Any necessity for manual tweaks and changes undermines a fundamental benefit of using XML-based technology.

Since several versions of a Bill are often produced during its passage through the House, it is of course important to ensure that the right version is printed at each stage. For this reason, the new PAL system is designed to incorporate a strict version control component. The new system also facilitates the production of the right version at each different stage by incorporating a lifecycle component that mirrors the logical sequence of steps that Bills usually follow. The promotion of a Bill to the next step in the lifecycle must be married with the stylesheet associated with that stage to produce the correct format required at that stage.

However, apparently logical steps in the public progress of a Bill often belie the complexities of the practical steps that need to be taken behind the scenes to ensure that a Bill reaches its destination on time. These complexities also have to be factored into the design of the system.

The production of advance proofs is a good example. If there is pressure to get a Bill passed, and therefore have an assent ready for signature by the Governor-General, the Office of the Clerk may require the production of a proof assent before a Bill has even passed through its Committee stages. Therefore, a proof will have to be prepared that assumes that the amendments in any Government SOPs currently proposed for consideration at the committee of the whole House will be adopted. The document management system, as well as providing a tight system of version control (to ensure that the right version gets printed), therefore also needs to allow for the production of a version that is, strictly speaking, out of sequence. Maintaining a tidy system of version control is also complicated by the need to accommodate the splitting up of Bills at various stages.

Quality

Just as important as timeliness is quality. There are 3 reasons for this. First, the constitutional importance of legislative documents. Second, the purpose of legislation in conveying meaning. And third, the nature and requirements of the legislative process.

Legislative documents are inherently important documents. Acts of Parliament encapsulate the legislative expression of the highest lawmaking body in the land. The "statute book" is the tangible record of the deliberations of Parliament. Subordinate legislation cannot claim quite the same parentage, but in many ways its impact is more direct since it prescribes the detailed rules foreshadowed in the broad policy of the Acts that authorise it. Laws also remain important for a very long time. Even repealed enactments can remain relevant to matters that occurred in the period during which they applied. The format in which legislative documents is produced, and the typesetting and similar standards achieved in their production, should reflect their status as "the law of the land" and their potential longevity.

Second, legislation conveys meaning, and it is important that meaning is conveyed accurately and unambiguously. Quality in format and layout, as indicators of meaning, is therefore important for Bills, Acts, and other legislative documents.

Section 5 of the Interpretation Act 1999 provides that the meaning of an enactment must be ascertained from its text and in the light of its purpose, and that the matters that may be considered in ascertaining the meaning of an enactment include the indications provided in the enactment. Examples of those indications are preambles, the analysis, a table of contents, headings to Parts and sections, marginal notes, diagrams, graphics, examples and explanatory material, and the organisation and format of the enactment.

Errors in format and layout can therefore affect the interpretation of an enactment, and can be costly if litigation is required to settle the meaning of an enactment, and if Parliamentary time and resources are required to correct the error.

Accuracy in format and layout are also important during a Bill's progress through the Parliamentary process. Clarity in meaning is essential so that members, officials, and the public can understand the effect of the legislation and any proposed changes to existing legislation. For the same reason, changes to a Bill that occur during a Bill's progress also need to be captured and presented clearly and accurately. Proposed changes set out in SOPs also need to be clear and unambiguous, so that members know what they are voting on. Further, changes to a Bill during its passage may also be relevant in the subsequent interpretation of the Act, since the courts may consider Parliamentary history in ascertaining meaning.

A further factor relevant to the legislative process is time. Parliamentary time is valuable, especially to the Government when it is seeking to implement its legislative programme. Errors and ambiguities can give rise to argument and lengthy debates. An opposition seeking to delay a measure can legitimately seize on any matter that provides an opportunity to question the integrity of the measure under consideration or to raise procedural issues. Ministers, quite legitimately, do not look kindly on delays caused by such matters.

Summary

The principal objective of the PAL Project is of course improving public access to legislation. The project is not about business process re-engineering or improvement, nor about introducing new technology for its own sake. However, the success of the project will not only be measured by the benefits that it provides to the public in terms of better access to legislation and the legislative process. It will also be judged by how well the backroom systems and processes work for the people that have to use them. This is equally true for the drafting process. The front-end requirements cannot be based on a drafting system so difficult to use that the business of drafting becomes so complex that productivity (that is, meeting the Government’s and Parliament's demands for legislation) is sacrificed for improvements in public access.

With respect to the processes for prepublication and printing, it is relevant to note that the current processes used by Legislation Direct are based on mature systems and technology that have been developed over many years, and the Legislation Direct staff are very familiar with New Zealand legislation and their own technology. The service and quality standards achieved by Legislation Direct are very high. This sets the benchmark against which the new PAL system, which will employ new technology, will be judged.

The importance of paper and the PAL Project

There have been some problems in the course of the PAL Project relating to format and layout issues. It is essential that the systems used to produce legislation can be relied on to produce accurate, high quality, and timely print renditions of legislation in both draft and final form. The ability to do so is crucial to the PAL Project's success. It therefore means that the new PAL system can be deployed only when there is absolute confidence that it will be able to deliver.

A large amount of the time spent since the technical review of the PAL solution was completed in October last year has been devoted to print rendering issues. The InQuirion report concluded that the formatting requirements of the New Zealand Parliament appeared to be stretching the existing print rendering engine (ArborText Print Composer) beyond its limits. InQuirion therefore recommended that the PCO explore alternative print rendering solutions.

The PCO subsequently commissioned InQuirion to undertake an evaluation of a number of alternative print rendering engines, and make a recommendation. This work began in December 2003, and was not finally completed until May 2004. The evaluation involved the preparation by the PCO of a large example document (over 2,500 pages) containing a mix of all different provision types in as many different contexts as practicable in a single document. InQuirion also developed a tool that automatically produces test examples of Bills and other legislative documents at each stage in their life cycle. These included Bills randomly coded with revision tracking markup. InQuirion then assessed a number of alternative print rendering engines, with a particular focus on the most complex of the PCO's requirements (such as line numbering, 2-column tables of contents with single column body text, and revision tracking).

The evaluation, and subsequent work by Unisys, InQuirion, and the PCO, has concluded that, with an upgrade to the latest version of the existing ArborText print rendering engine (E3), the current technology (based on Format Output Specification Instances, or FOSIs) is capable of supporting the PCO's requirements for print rendering. The development of a comprehensive set of print output specifications and example documents, and a more iterative, integrated, and collaborative approach to the design, development, and testing of stylesheets, will also assist in ensuring that the PAL system is capable of correctly producing the full range of printed legislative documents required by Parliament and the Executive.

7. The development of an annual reprints programme

The continuing importance of printed legislative materials is particularly relevant in the context of the publication of hard copy reprints of legislation. A reprint is a version of a principal enactment with its amendments incorporated. It has official status as a correct statement of the law,18 but is not re-enacted by Parliament. Reprints are produced by the Reprints Unit of the PCO.

In 2001, the PCO undertook a survey of users of legislation about the future provision of legislation in printed form.19 The survey was a follow-up to the public discussion paper20 issued by the PCO in September 1998 regarding public access to legislation. In particular, the 2001 survey asked users about the PCO's proposal to discontinue the publication of reprints of legislation in bound volume form, and make them available in pamphlet form only.

The survey also sought comment on a proposal to adopt a reprinting policy that would see the PCO concentrate on reprinting best-selling titles that are frequently or heavily amended. The reprinting policy would replace the previous policy underlying the production of reprints for the Reprinted Statutes of New Zealand series, which was that a reprint of every public Act would be available in a form that was not more than 10 years old, with more frequent reprints of Acts in common use that were heavily amended. This objective was never achieved. Reprints of Statutory Regulations were also produced very infrequently, and published in the annual bound volume of the Statutory Regulations Series under a new number.

As a result of the responses to the survey, the PCO confirmed its decision to discontinue the publication of bound volumes of reprints, and adopted the proposed reprints policy. The last bound volume of the Reprinted Statutes of New Zealand series (the brown volumes) was published in 2003. Of course the annual bound volumes of Acts and Statutory Regulations will continue to be published.

Reprints are now published only in pamphlet form. This includes reprints of Statutory Regulations, which are no longer published in the annual Statutory Regulations Series under a new SR number. There have been some complaints about the discontinuation of the bound volumes of reprints. Some users have found it inconvenient that the reprints are unbound, and have queried whether or not they will be annotated by Brookers.

The policy of producing pamphlet copies of reprints underpins the change in approach to reprinting as set out in the PCO reprinting policy.21 The new policy focuses principally on best-selling titles that are frequently or heavily amended, on the basis that these represent the priorities of users of legislation. A pamphlet-based approach facilitates a more responsive and user-friendly reprinting system for the following reasons:

Brookers provides binders for the storage of pamphlet copies of reprints, and its annotation service includes the annotation of such copies.

The PCO now also publishes on its website a list of legislation that is scheduled for reprinting, and a list of reprints published. The list of published reprints is made available in a printer-friendly format, so that users can print a copy and use it as an index to their collection of reprints.

Development of an annual reprints programme
The PCO reprinting policy provides that a reprinting programme will be established each year, in consultation with key users of legislation. The programme is to establish what legislation users would like reprinted, and how often (for example, after significant amendments). The programme is to be published, and reviewed from time to time in the light of information about public sales of legislation, proposals to amend or repeal particular legislation, and other relevant factors.

A formal reprints programme has not yet been established. Since the establishment of the Reprints Unit in 2003, and because of the delays to the PAL Project, the Unit has operated on the basis of an interim reprints programme, focusing on reprinting best-selling Acts and Statutory Regulations, and a small number of enactments suggested for reprinting by PCO staff and external agencies or persons.

The PCO is now taking steps to establish a formal reprints programme for the 2004/05 year. Based on the PCO's previous experience in undertaking a user survey on the provision of printed legislation, the PCO decided to undertake a survey of users of legislation as to what they want the PCO to reprint. Rather than relying principally on sales data, the objective of the survey is to provide the PCO with more comprehensive information about user requirements for reprints, and enable the PCO to take into account a broader range of factors in developing an initial annual reprints programme. In particular, the survey should enable the PCO to take into account the usefulness of particular legislation to general and specialist users, including the legal profession, the judiciary, and government departments.

The survey also provides the opportunity to raise the profile of reprints among the user community, publicise the recent changes in the format of reprints, and encourage ongoing feedback on reprints so as to make the development of future annual reprints programmes easier.

Like the 2001 survey on printed legislation, the survey on an annual reprints programme can be completed on-line via the PCO's website. A form asks respondents to indicate which Acts and Statutory Regulations they would like the PCO to reprint, why the particular enactments should be reprinted, and how often. Other suggestions and comments are also invited.

The survey has been publicised in LawTalk and on the New Zealand Government web portal, by way of notice on the NZ-libs list, and through emails sent to government departments and many of the respondents to the 2001 survey. Letters have also been sent to the various Heads of Bench of the judiciary.

The survey has a closing date of 30 July 2004, but responses will still be accepted after that date. Responses have already been received from a wide variety of users of legislation. The responses also reflect the very wide range of purposes for which people require legislation. Suggestions for reprinting range from the more well-known enactments such as the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act 1989, the Education Act 1989, and the Immigration Act 1987, to more obscure enactments such as the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act 1966. It looks as though it is going to be quite an interesting and challenging task to distill the responses to the survey into a coherent reprints programme for the next year. The results of the survey will be posted in due course on the PCO website.

For now, the annual reprints programme will determine what hard copy reprints of legislation are produced by the PCO's Reprints Unit. On completion of the PAL Project, the PCO will also use the programme to assist in determining a work programme for the officialisation of the database of legislation to be acquired from Brookers. As indicated earlier in this paper, the PCO will undertake an extensive quality assurance process on that database. This will include changes to make the format and style consistent with current legislative drafting practice, as authorised by the reprint powers contained in the Acts and Regulations Publication Act 1989. On completion of that work, it is intended to promote legislation to make the database an official source of New Zealand legislation. It is anticipated that the work required to officialise the database will take a number of years.

8. The interim website of New Zealand legislation

Those of us who are involved in improving public access to legislation have no doubts about the necessity to make legislative materials more readily accessible. While some people find it hard to believe that the public really are interested in getting access to this material, recent experience is to the contrary. I understand that legislation is the item most commonly searched for on the New Zealand Government web portal. And the issues arising out of the temporary loss of public access to the Knowledge Basket's collection of legislative material show its importance to a wide variety of people. It is also interesting to look at what has happened since we launched an interim website of legislation a couple of years ago.

The PCO, through an arrangement with Brookers, has made an interim website of legislation available since September 2002. Since its launch, the website has seen a steady growth in usage. For example, overall activity almost tripled over the period 9 September 2002 (when the website was launched) to 30 September 2003. The total number of hits on the website per month increased from around 816,000 in September 2002 to over 2 million in September 2003. The number of hits peaked at 4.2 million in July 2003.

Statistics relating to the usage of the interim website over the period June 2003 to June 2004 show that usage is now starting to level out. The following graph shows the total number of home page hits by month for that period.

Total homepage hits for interim website.

The total number of unique visitors has increased from 18,366 in June 2003 to 25,291 in June 2004.

Total number of unique visitors to interim website.

These statistics show that, for an average month, the interim website will receive around 3 million hits, and 26,000 unique visitors. This is considered to be a relatively high usage for a Government-provided legislation website. The new PAL website will provide additional content, such as Bills and SOPs, and will also provide more sophisticated browsing and searching functionality. It will be interesting to see how usage of that website compares with current usage of the interim website.

9. Increasing public interest in legislation and legislative matters

The provision of free public access to legislation also provides the opportunity to increase public knowledge about legislation, the Parliamentary process, and drafting. Drafting offices are traditionally backroom operations, about which the public have, until recently, known very little. The only time we tend to hit the headlines is when there is supposedly a drafting error in a piece of legislation, or when difficulties are encountered when trying to implement measures to improve access to legislation.

One impact of the PAL Project has been to raise public interest in legislation, the Parliamentary process, and drafting. The PCO has suddenly developed a much more immediate and direct relationship with users of legislation. We have had to respond to a large number of public inquiries relating to the interim website, and other legislation-related matters. We have therefore employed a communications adviser, to ensure that adequate systems are in place to respond to these inquiries.

It is not the role of the PCO to give advice about the interpretation or operation of legislation. This is the responsibility of the government agency that administers the legislation. Nor is it the role of the PCO to provide legal advice to members of the public. That is the role of lawyers in private practice, citizens advice bureaux, and community law centres. However, in practice, the line between providing advice and being helpful is not an easy one to draw. And knowing the difference often requires fine judgement and an awareness of quite complex legal issues. Frontline PCO staff often have to refer PAL-related queries to more senior legal staff for consideration.

Here are some of the kinds of questions or queries we have received:

We have even had a couple of questions sent to us in French and German, which we have managed to translate and answer successfully! We struggled with one in Spanish. Interestingly, we haven't had one yet in Maori.

This is also where the point that I made at the start of this paper is particularly relevant—the fact that legislation is only one part of a complex web of interconnecting systems that make up the legal and constitutional environment. The legislative process is part of the Parliamentary system, and the output, legislation, is the basis on which much of the judicial system functions. There are many different institutions, agencies, and professional groups with different roles, perspectives, priorities, and requirements.

The PCO is only one part of that complex web, and the PAL Project, in improving public access to Acts, Statutory Regulations, and Bills, is only part of the picture.

However, members of the public do not see or care about the organisational delineations between government agencies. They do not like to be bounced around a number of different agencies because their query or problem or issue happens to straddle the internal jurisdictional boundaries of several government departments or organisations. The PCO does try to be helpful to enquirers, but there is obviously a limit to the time and resources we can devote to matters that are not strictly the PCO's responsibility and for which we are not funded.

However, I can see the time when the PCO has to provide a more comprehensive information service about legislation. In New South Wales, for example, comprehensive and up-to-date information about the currency and status of legislation is available from the NSW Legislation website (www.legislation.nsw.gov.au), and is also available via email and telephone through the Legislation Information Hotline Service operated by the NSW Parliamentary Counsel's Office. This service received almost 2,000 enquiry calls and over 450 email enquiries in 2002-2003.22

We have included provision on the new PAL website for a glossary and a series of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) that seek to explain some of the more basic legal and legislative terms, and provide a simple guide to how laws are made. This will be of some assistance to users, but I am sure that this is something that we will need to build on and develop in the future.

Of course other agencies also have a role to play here. Collaboration and cooperation is happening or is planned in a few areas, and will hopefully provide impetus for further progress. Indeed this is one of the key outcomes envisaged by the NZ e-GIF referred to earlier. By interoperating, agencies can—

The fact that legislation is at the heart of this complex web, that it is one of the key activities of government, is what makes the successful completion of the PAL Project so important. Indeed, to draw on the theme of this conference, the PAL Project is one of the building blocks to enable us to position ourselves for a future where there is proper access to legal information.

10. Positioning for the future

This discussion leads on to the final part of my paper. How the PAL Project will provide a platform for future developments, and so position New Zealand for the future in terms of access to legislative and related material.

Moira Fraser and Mary Harris, who are both presenting papers at this conference, will already have outlined some of the initiatives that are under way or are being investigated in relation to Parliamentary information. The concept of a Parliamentary portal, that enables members of the public to access Parliamentary information without having to be concerned about which agency is providing it, and being able to follow links between collections of information, is very appealing. Legislation, and proposed legislation, clearly has a place in this kind of portal. Links between Bills and Supplementary Order Papers (which will be a feature of the new PAL website), and between Bills, the Bills Digest, and Hansard would be very useful for some users.

The proposal to establish a New Zealand Legal Information Institute (NZLII) is another initiative to which the PAL Project will provide an input. The PCO has already agreed to provide legislative data to AustLII when the new PAL system is completed. The ability to search across various collections of New Zealand legal material, such as legislation, judicial decisions, legal periodicals, and Law Commission reports would be a wonderful tool for legal researchers and others.

As I have already indicated, one of the outputs of the PAL Project will be the ability to supply legal publishers with raw legislative data from the official source. The PAL system will provide only "plain vanilla" access, leaving the commercial legal publishers to provide value-added features such as links to cases, commentary, and the like. I am sure that the boundary between the two will blur over time, as the public demand more features in the officially provided version. Indeed, it is also possible that the availability of an official source of New Zealand legislation will impact on the way that the private sector publishes its legislation-related materials. There is scope for at least the electronic products to simply link to the official legislative materials, rather than incorporate them, which might make maintaining currency easier.

Then there is the issue of access to tertiary legislative materials. The PCO decided very early on that the PAL Project would cover only the legislative material that the PCO publishes—Bills, Acts, and Statutory Regulations. There is of course a myriad of tertiary level subordinate legislation that is produced by other government agencies and independent bodies. Access to this material is haphazard, but much of it is of significant importance to the public. The Regulations Review Committee has made a number of recommendations about improving the quality of, and access to, this material.24 The PAL Project will, I am sure, provide an impetus for further work in this area. Indeed, some of the technology developed as part of the PAL Project (such as the authoring tool, the DTDs, and the website) could be utilised by other agencies in their own processes to improve accessibility to tertiary legislation.

11. Conclusion

The public-facing parts of a project to improve public access to legislation are only part of the story. Equally important measures of the PAL Project's success include the provision of backroom processes that enable timely and high quality output to be produced. The PAL Project should also be judged by the opportunities it presents for further initiatives and developments, since the expectations of the public and other stakeholders will not remain static.

The following quotation from a history of the New Zealand Government Printing Office25 is rather interesting:

William Colenso, New Zealand's first printer, busily working overtime at the Church Missionary Society's press at Paihia on the night of 29 January 1840, had a rush job to do for the Lieutenant-Governor: two proclamations, 100 copies of each, and a circular calling on the Maori chiefs to assemble at Waitangi were to be ready for the morning.

Expectations have changed very little in 164 years! I am not sure that meeting expectations has got any easier either.

Footnotes
1 Deputy Chief Parliamentary Counsel and PCO Project Director, Public Access to Legislation (PAL) Project, Parliamentary Counsel Office, Wellington, New Zealand. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office.
2 This quote is taken from Burrows JF Statute Law in New Zealand, 3rd edn, LexisNexis, New Zealand, 2003, at p 98.
3 www.pco.parliament.govt.nz
4 Bell, Stephen, PAL database 'beyond rescue', Computerworld, Monday, 28 July 2003. Available on the Computerworld website at www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/UNID/CC256CED0016AD1ECC256D6D0071E113?OpenDocument&Highlight=2,PAL
5 Arnold-Moore, T, XML and legislation, paper presented to Law via the Internet 2003, the 5th AustLII Conference on Computerisation of Law via the Internet, Sydney, Australia, November 2003.
6 Above, note 5, section 2 para 2.
7 New Zealand E-government Interoperability Framework (NZ e-GIF), Version 2.1, 14 May 2004. Available on the State Services Commission (SSC) website at www.e.govt.nz/standards/e-gif.
8 See Cabinet Office Circular CO (02) 12, 25 September 2002. Available on the Cabinet Office website at www.dpmc.govt.nz/cabinet/circulars/co02/12.html.
9 New Zealand Government Web Guidelines, Version 2.1 (last revised 13 February 2004). Available on the SSC website at http://www.e.govt.nz/standards/web-guidelines/web-guidelines-v-2-1/.
10 Media Statement, 22 June 2004. Available on the PCO website at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/corporatefile/pressrelease.shtml.
11 See Glue, WA History of the Government Printing Office, R.E.Owen, Government Printer, Wellington, New Zealand, 1966.
12 Treadwell, Jane "Free access to the law: the strange case of New Zealand", paper presented to Law via the Internet '99, the 2nd AustLII Conference on Computerisation of Law via the Internet, Sydney, July 1999. Available at www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/2000_1/austlii/treadwell/
13 See Lawn, Geoff "What makes Parliament tick? Access to Legislation", a paper presented to the What makes Parliament tick? Conference, Parliament Buildings, Wellington, August 1999. The paper is available on the PCO website at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/pal/access.shtml. A condensed version of the paper was published in the New Zealand Law Journal (see Lawn, G "Format of Legislation and Access to Law" [1999] NZLJ 418-422).
14 Rt Hon Lord Oliver of Aylmerton, A Judicial View of Modern Legislation, Statute Law Review (1993), Vol 14, No 1, p 2.
15 Public access to legislation project: summary of business case. Available on the PCO website at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/pal/ipal/sumbuscase.pdf.
16 Policy framework for New Zealand Government-held Information. Available on the SSC website at www.ssc.govt.nz/display/document.asp?docid=4880.
17 Standing Orders of the House of Representatives, SO 266 (originally adopted as a Sessional Order on 17 December 2002). The background to this change is set out in the Interim Report of the Standing Orders Committee, Review of Standing Orders: The publication of legislation and parliamentary information 2002 (I. 18A). Available at www.clerk.parliament.govt.nz//content/1400/i18a.pdf.
18 Evidence Act 1908, section 29A.
19 A summary of the results of the survey, together with the survey form and guidance material, are available on the PCO website at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/pal/palsurveyresults.shtml.
20 Public Access to Legislation: A Discussion Paper for Public Comment. Available on the PCO website at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/pal/papers.shtml.
21 Available on the PCO website at www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/legislation/reprints.shtml.
22 New South Wales Parliamentary Counsel's Office Annual Report 2002-2003, p. 12. Available at www.pco.nsw.gov.au/pdf/Annualreport.pdf.
23 Above, note 7, para 3.2.
24 See Inquiry into Instruments Deemed to be Regulations—An Examination of Delegated Legislation 1999 (I. 16R), and Government Response to the Report of the Regulations Review Committee on its Inquiry into Instruments Deemed to be Regulations—An Examination of Delegated Legislation 1999 [A5], and Further Government Response to the Report of the Regulations Review Committee on its Inquiry into Instruments Deemed to be Regulations—An Examination of Delegated Legislation 2000 [A5].
25 Above, note 11.