New Zealand Legislation website proves useful tool

The The Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO), which drafts and publishes most New Zealand legislation, launched the New Zealand Legislation website (http://www.legislation.govt.nz/) in January 2008. The site provides free public access to up-to-date versions of New Zealand Acts of Parliament, Regulations, Bills, and Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs).

David Noble, Chief Parliamentary Counsel, says that he is delighted at users' response to the website. "They have said that they appreciate the huge step forward that it represents in terms of access to New Zealand legislation. The PCO's emphasis for the immediate future will be on making the legislation in the database an official source for use in and by the courts." The website is the final part of the new combined drafting and publishing system, which went into production within the PCO in November 2007.

Legislation on the website has amendments incorporated, to provide a snapshot of the law as it currently stands. These amendments are added as soon as possible. A Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed is available to help people keep up with legislation, and will show what is new since the last time a user checked the feed, without them having to visit the website. As the data held on the website grows, users will be able to track legislation over time, from Bill to Act, through the Act’s various amendments, and if applicable to eventual partial or full repeal.

The PCO aims to make legislation available as quickly as possible:

• new Acts within five working days of Royal assent
• new Regulations the day after the date they are notified in the Gazette
• new Bills the day after they are introduced to the House and
• SOPs the day after they have been circulated to Members of Parliament.

The electronic versions of legislation on the site do not currently have official status and are made available for information only. It is intended to make them an official source of New Zealand legislation in the future. Official copies of legislation (including reprints) can be purchased from selected bookshops and Legislation Direct and are available in many public libraries.

This service is used by many people and organisations, including the website TheyWorkForYou.co.nz (http://theyworkforyou.co.nz/), where people can see parliamentary debates going back to November 2005 and find out what current Bills are open to public submissions.

Rob McKinnon, of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, identified some areas for improvement "I consume PCO's RSS feed, and when I find a match with a Bill on TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, I create a link from the Bill page on my site to the page on their site. However, the URL changes for an old version when a new version of the Bill is published, so these links will break. Also, there is no agreed unique Bill version identifier between parliament.nz and the legislation.govt.nz RSS, so an algorithm is required to match Bills on both sites - matches aren't always found by my current algorithm."

The PCO noted that users can create their own stable links or bookmarks to the site, by linking to the contents page of an Act or Regulation. The link will remain stable whether the legislation is amended, or whether it is repealed or revoked. Stable links to specific versions of a Bill can also be created, although each new version will have its own URL.