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Excited for a Bill about Bills

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"Excited for a Bill about Bills? That's like getting excited about the Acts Interpretation Act!"

Keen followers of Western Australian legislation, would be pleased to see the progress of the Legislation Bill 2021 (WA) pass through the Third Reading in the Legislative Assembly yesterday. (Long time readers would remember this post from 2018).

Even keener followers of Hansard would have noticed the Attorney General, John Quigley provides a summary of the Bill: 

The bill proposes to modernise the processes for publishing WA legislation. It will enact a new Legislation Act that sets out the responsibilities for publishing WA legislation, provide for the official status of both hard copy and electronic versions of WA legislation and give the PCO a more useful set of editorial powers so that WA legislation can be kept up-to-date, modernised and simplified, and errors corrected, without the need for the changes to be enacted by Parliament. Important restrictions on the exercise of those editorial powers will remain. The Reprints Act 1984 will be repealed. In line with conferring official status on electronic versions of WA legislation, the electronic version of the Government Gazette also will be given official status.

Key benefits of the Bill, as outlined in the second reading speech, include:

  • It will improve public access to subsidiary legislation.
  • It will bring the legal status of electronic versions of legislation into line with hard copy versions.
  • It will also help allay any concern about the accuracy and reliability of the electronic version compared with the hard copy version, and promote confidence in its use. 
  • It will bring the legal status of electronic versions of WA legislation into line with that in the majority of other Australasian jurisdictions and many other overseas jurisdictions.
  • It will enable the editorial improvements currently authorised by the Reprints Act 1984 to be delivered to users of legislation sooner.

You know law librarians are a special lot when we are excited about the progress of a Bill that has a second reading speech that the the House Speaker called "one of the most soporific second reading speeches I have ever heard".

Super keen followers would have spotted a fellow law librarian being quoted in the debates:

Image of Western Australia, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 01 June 2021, 1042 (Chris Tallentire)

The ALLA (WA) Committee thanks Kelly for her pioneering work in using Strava for the good of all law librarians, but remains slightly disappointed about not yet having to march, in a suitably cranky fashion, upon Parliament.
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