The Canberra Times library has cancelled its subscription to the ACT legislation series. This is not in a huff after taking offence at a small part of the contents (as some CT readers do), but rather to get the same material in a different form … on CD-ROM.
We have at last achieved the desire expressed by Napoleon 200 years ago to have the laws of the land being able to fit in the pocket of its citizens.
The technological and intellectual achievement (culminating in the first issue last week) is undoubted, but I am not sure it is such a good thing.
Two decades ago, when I dare say the ACT was as well governed as today, the laws of the ACT fitted into three volumes. Now they stretch to three metres of shelf; I estimate some 25,000 pages.
Have we really been that much naughtier in the supervening years that we require that much more law? And even if we have been that much naughtier, it does not appear that all the extra law is doing much good.
The trouble with putting it on CD-ROM, of course, is that our politicians can pass more and more of it with out anyone noticing its growth, because it can still be compacted to one small chrome disc. It is important for politicians, lawyers, political scientists, journalists and other professionals to keep an eye on just how increasingly meddlesome our legislators have become. Pre-CD this was encapsulated in the phrase “”wasting trees” and measured in pages. This cannot be replaced with an electronic equivalent because they keep compressing the files to fit more and more words in less and less disk space.
And despite the growth in the amount of legislation, ignorance of it is no excuse. At least now ordinary non-legal mortals are not faced with three metres of paper. They can search in seconds for any word’s occurrence throughout the 400 Acts; they can glance down the titles of the Acts; print out any of them and so on.
Indeed, the ACT can be proud of this remarkable software application, developed here by Softlaw, a company incubated in the Canberra Business Centre in Downer. The software, called Statute E-Publish, is a delight for legal research. Any word that is defined in an Act’s definition section is highlighted in green; you can click on the word and a small window containing the definition pops open. You can also have several windows with different statutes in each open at the same time. It allows you to bookmark; annotate; search within a statute and so on.
There is no manual; and there is no need for one.
It is put out by the publications and public communication section in the ACT Department of Urban Services (2050254) and costs $395 which includes an update during the year. The ACT seems to have done a better job than their federal and most inter-state colleagues who are still struggling to get user-friendly electronic publications of their law. Former federal Attorney-General Michael Lavarch promised his department would do it, but they are still working on it. Commercial firms have filled that breach, notably Aunty Abha, Law Book Company and Disk-ROM Australia.
But I think, without being parochial, that the software access to the ACT legislation is a finer product, mainly because of the cross links with the definition section and the multiple windows.
The quaintly named Aunty Abha (02 2614288) is the only provider of Queensland legislation on CD. It does Federal, Victorian and NSW statute law and some High Court cases (on the same CD) … and does it cheaply with next best to software (Folio Views) to the ACT’s (E-Publish). Law Book (02 99366444) does the heavy value-added legal research CDs comprehensively but expensively. Diskrom (2496888) has the best range of Federal, Victorian and NSW statute and case law on CD. Free, but painfully slow, is the Australasian Legal Information Institute internet site http://www.austlii.edu.au which has a large range of federal case and statute law among other things.
And cost is important. There is no point fulfilling the Napoleonic dream of fitting the law into the citizen’s pocket, if no citizen’s pocket will run to the cost of it.
Incidentally, my whacky column on daylight saving last week appeared under Mike Taylor’s mug shot, instead of mine. My apologies to him.