Statute Law Revision Bill 2012 – Second Reading Speech delivered in Parliament 20 June 2012
Mr PALLAS (Tarneit) — It gives me pleasure to rise to speak on the Statute Law Revision Bill 2012. In doing so I recognise that the work of this Parliament and the need for constant revision of statute law are important. On occasion the drafters of bills do fail to pick up each and every drafting change that is required. On occasion history overtakes the language used in legislation and there is a need, necessarily, to fix it up.
The Statute Law Revision Bill 2012, as its name would suggest, is a bill that seeks to revise a number of acts on the Victorian statute book. In particular there is a schedule to the bill containing something like 57 acts which are affected by this bill. At this point I should recognise the work of the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee in relation to the bill.
In particular it has identified that the bill proposes to make revisions to acts in four succinct and specific areas: correcting minor errors or omissions, such as cross-references; spelling and drafting or grammatical errors; updating nomenclature and repealing spent subsections, sections, divisions or parts of acts; and remedying ineffective legislation instructions or amendments. This bill is almost self-described by its nature — that is, it is a bill that leads to regular and uncontroversial housekeeping. As has been indicated, the opposition will be supporting the bill’s passage.
In many ways this is a bill where you dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Indeed, if you did not cross your t’s, for example, in the word ‘Ted’, you would end up with ‘IED’, which would be an improvised explosive device. We would not want that. The state of Victoria would not want that. It may be in fact that we have got it!
To continue the Shakespearean allusions, and I acknowledge the greater capacities in that respect of the member for Broadmeadows, this is not what Shakespeare alluded to as being ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’. In the legislative context much more needs to be done. We are filling the time of this Parliament with a bill that, dour though it may be, is nonetheless critically important. As the member for Sandringham, when he was talking on the bill and not seeking the return of a painting that had been — —
Mr Wells — It was a photo.
Mr PALLAS— It was a photo, was it? He was seeking the return of a photo that had been in some way stolen from him. If we do not get the legislative drafting right, we get very clear consequences of that.
There are some very unfortunate cases in British statutes, and the Westminster tradition law that applies in this country has arisen from them. One case that takes me back to my succession days when I was studying law is In Re Baden’s Deed Trusts, a case where the drafting of a will ultimately led to a family fortune not being appropriately allocated, largely because of a spelling mistake contained in one word and one word only. Ultimately some of the partners in the firm responsible for that drafting error committed suicide out of a sense of shame that flowed as a consequence of that very tragic outcome.
Increasingly the courts have moved to a recognition and understanding of the intent and the mischief that legislation seeks to address, but we, as legislators, also need to recognise that where errors have been made — and they do occur from time to time — they should be rectified.
Importantly, as legislators we also need to understand that the greatest error that can be made is the misuse of this Parliament’s time when it comes to spending too much of it looking at legislation of this nature. That is why I largely rely on the contributions of the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee in oversighting the bill. I recognise the diligent work done by parliamentary counsel in what would best be described as the dour effort of looking through bills to recognise and collate errors and ultimately move towards rectifying them.
The greatest sin when it comes to governance and Parliament is the sin of omission, and the greatest omission is a misapplication of this Parliament’s time when much more needs to be done. As we have seen, this is a housekeeping bill which does not contain any substantive amendments and does not fix the problems that the government was elected to fix. In many ways it is about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, to continue the Shakespearean theme.
Shakespeare wrote, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars’; the fault here is not that this bill is before this place; the fault essentially lies in the misapplication of effort.
Many of the 57 bills amended by this legislation cry out for substantive action from the government, and that includes bills relating to freedom of information. Who can forget the language of the Premier when he was Leader of the Opposition concerning freedom of information, saying, ‘Ask and you shall receive’? What have we subsequently received? We have received a freedom of information commissioner who cannot even look into the actions of secretaries or ministerial officers. If we are going to look substantively at amendments that need to be made, let us look at the substance. Let us look into the heart of legislation and not simply the language and the form that apply to it, because in many ways the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.
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If we fail to look into those things that guide government, if we fail to look at the heart of what legislation seeks to achieve, if we only look into the housekeeping, if we look after the pence but not the pounds, if we cannot see the forest for the trees in terms of things that need to be fixed in this community, we will be consistently spending a lot of time pulling lint out of our navels but not ultimately substantively advancing the cause and the needs of the people of Victoria.
It goes without saying that when you look at the bills that are amended by this legislation and the need for the effective and continuing operation of those acts, the opposition supports those changes. The Road Safety Act 1986 is one of the 57 acts that are amended by the bill, but still we have not seen what this government’s road safety strategy will be going forward. It is incomprehensible.
We have the time, in a legislative sense, to look at rectifying all of these acts, but we do not have time to think about what our next step will be in order to bring our road toll down.
Substantive action can never be replaced by the need to look only at the micro issues. It has been and remains my view that the government has done the right thing in bringing forward a bill that revises statute law, but much more needs to be done. It speaks volumes about the priorities of this government when you recognise that of the many acts that are revised by this bill, some have not come before this Parliament previously other than to have errors fixed up or unnecessary double quotation marks removed or the insertion of missing commas. All of that is dutiful, diligent work done appropriately by parliamentary counsel, but in many ways it reveals a government that has lost its way.
The government has lost sight of what it needs to do and has so misapplied the time of this Parliament that it cannot recognise that parliamentary time should be more about how we can substantively lift the material terms of the people of Victoria, how we can debate the issues that matter to the people of Victoria and how we should not spend time on or misapply our efforts to what is nothing more than self-described, non-substantive amendments. This will not fix the problem. To refer to Shakespeare again, in this situation he might have said. ‘Frailty, thy name is Ted’ — and that frailty in terms of government vision and action ultimately will be reflected in how little substantive action this government has taken.