T HE CHIEF Justice of the High Court, Murray Gleeson, was bemoaning regulatory overload this week. He cited the Corporations Law, which had increased tenfold in the past 20 years. My guess is the volume of various taxation Acts would have gone up perhaps twenty-fold in that time. ”We have a constant problem in the High Court, for example, with identifying the statute that’s relevant to the case that we have to decide because these statutes are amended so often,” Gleeson said. ”If you compare the amount of legislative output of a modern parliament with the legislative output of 100 or 50 years ago, the change is extraordinary.” Indeed it is. I did the comparison. In 1955 the Commonwealth Parliament passed a single volume of legislation of 580 pages. In 2005 it passed seven volumes of legislation. It was not even courageous enough to number the pages. The numbering begins afresh with each Act. There were at least 4000 pages in 2005.
The Commonwealth is passing more Acts and the average length of them is increasing. Last year it passed 210 Acts. The federal, state and territory parliaments churn out legislation at an absurd rate. NSW was the worst offender last year. It passed 250 Acts; the Feds 210, Victoria 180, the ACT and Queensland 60 each, and Tasmania 50. I am rounding these off, and as some legislation comes into force a year after it is enacted they may not be completely accurate. You could add at least another 100 for Western Australia and South Australia. Time prevents me from extracting a more precise number of Acts from those states. In all, more than 800 Acts were
passed by Australian Parliaments last year, say 200,000 pages. Sure, quite a few were amending Acts. Precious few were repeals at least without longer and more detailed versions being enacted in their place. Mercifully, in this electronic age, fewer people and institutions are buying the printed versions or we would have no forests left. We have about 1500 consolidated federal Acts in force about 30,000 pages. You can treble that if you add the states’ and territories’ legislation. But wait. There’s more. I haven’t even counted the regulations made under these Acts. Often the regulations are longer than the Acts they are made under. You wouldn’t mind so much if it did some good. But all the evidence points the other way. Take the tenfold increase in Corporations Law mentioned by Gleeson, for example. We still got HIH, the biggest corporate collapse in Australia’s history, which made the 1960s Reed Murray and the Poseidon nickel collapses of the
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 31 march 2007 Swamped by law”