The Attorney-General’s Department has spent $700,000 in its bringing-law-to-the-people program on work already done by private enterprise, according to computer industry sources.
The department has confirmed spending the money on creating an electronic database of consolidated Commonwealth legislation which has just been completed.
A consolidation of the legislation, however, had already been done by Diskrom Australia and been available and constantly updated since last October.
There are 92,907 sections in just over 4300 Acts of Commonwealth Parliament.
The department, however, says there has to be an official version; that the commercial version would ultimately be more expensive for public subscribers; that its version will be available by modem updated daily, rather than the less frequently up-dated CD-ROM.
The department is now letting contracts to improve the way computers access the new database (with a Windows version) and expects it to take six months.
Diskrom says it has already done the task and its software provides easy access and searching.
The department’s package is called Scale. Initially it was for departmental use only, but became publicly available about seven years ago through a private company now called Info-One at about $60 an hour.
For seven years the department has made virtually no improvements to its software to make it easier to use and other than the consolidation only minor changes to the data. It is widely known as expensive, hard-to-use and inaccessible. It requires training on codes like most mid-1980s database programs, instead of using the intuitive point-and-click 1990s technology.
And the Scale consolidation is still not on one database. It has consolidated all Acts that have been amended on one database called Pasteact, amounting to 44,076 sections. However, the remaining 48,000-odd sections in Acts that have never been amended have to be accessed on the Comact database, requiring a separate search.
Industry sources say the department has jealously guarded its domain over the database, refusing joint ventures or contracting out to improve it, but until now doing nothing to improve it itself.
The new Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, moved on it shortly after coming to office in 1993 with a program that would bring the law electronically to the people cheaply: so they could go to AGPS shops and access it free or access it my modem from office or home.
By then Diskrom had done the improvement job, but its product was too expensive for ordinary members of the public, though a bargain for law firms who hitherto had spent a fortune buying and storing bound volumes of law.
Mr Lavarch has made it clear his program is a public-interest project with budget subvention; not a user-pays enterprise.
None the less, industry sources say the department would have been better off looking at what had already been done instead of reinventing the wheel. It could have then bought some of that work and provided it through Budget subsidy cheap to the public and business.
Diskrom says the “”official version” argument is weak: commercial paper versions of the law are used and accepted in the courts every day, and says its consolidation is at least as accurate than the departments.
Mr Lavarch has promised that sometime next year that up-to-date Commonwealth law will be accessible cheaply throughout Australia _ either by computer at home or the office or through AGPS shops accessing it electronically and providing prinouts on demand at lower cost than the present paper system.
He has said regulations will not be effective unless they are on the database and accessible.
Despite the duplication and expense over the consolidation and perhaps more duplication and expense over the creation of a easy-to-use user interface, he is on target for meeting his promise.
In the meantime, however, private industry is moving several steps ahead to keep their products saleable in the legal market with very sophisticated legal research tools on computer and simultaneous searching of state and federal law.
However, even after Mr Lavarch has met his promise, business will still have the problem of access to state Acts and regulations in a cheap, up-to-date accessible form, and nearly all business legal issues require a search of both.