Modernising Legislative Drafting: A Case Study of the Parliamentary Council Office in New Zealand
Modernising Legislative Drafting: A Case Study of the Parliamentary Council Office in New Zealand
About the Parliamentary Council Office in New Zealand | Written on January, 2024
Introduction
The Parliamentary Council Office (PCO) in New Zealand is the governmental body responsible for drafting and publishing legislation. This critical function is central to ensuring that New Zealand's laws are accessible, fit for purpose, and constitutionally sound. As part of its mission to deliver great law, the PCO has embarked on a journey of digital modernisation. This essay explores the PCO's efforts to enhance its legislative drafting and publishing processes through digital innovation, focusing on two key strategic priorities: enhancing the ability to sustainably deliver better-designed legislation and reimagining the access and use of legislation.
The Current State of Legislative Drafting and Publishing
The PCO's current drafting and publishing system is a multi-step process that includes drafting in an XML editor called Arbortext, storing XML in Documentum (a document management system), and transforming XML drafts into PDFs and HTML for publication on the legislation.govt.nz website. Despite being functional, this system is heavily reliant on manual processes, such as paper-based editing, proofreading, and manual consolidations. These inefficiencies highlight the need for digital modernisation.
Strategic Priorities for Modernisation
The PCO has identified three strategic priorities for its modernisation efforts: enhancing the ability to sustainably deliver better-designed legislation, strengthening system leadership and influence, and reimagining the access and use of legislation. This essay focuses on the first and third priorities.
Enhancing the Delivery of Better-Designed Legislation
The PCO is exploring several areas for modernisation within its drafting and publishing system, each at different stages of consideration and implementation.
Security is a paramount concern in these modernisation efforts. Protecting legislative information is critical to maintaining stakeholder trust and the integrity of the democratic system. Continuous improvement in this area is essential to safeguard sensitive data against potential threats.
Revision tracking presents one of the most promising opportunities for efficiency gains. This would allow acts to be marked up with proposed amendments and introduced as bills, streamlining the legislative process. If parliament accepted a revision-tracked bill, the consolidation process would be semi-automated, as the amendments would already be integrated into the act. This approach could significantly reduce the time and effort required to consolidate legislation.
Collaborative drafting is another area of interest. The PCO aims to develop systems that enable staff and officials to contribute to the same document simultaneously. This would eliminate the need for emailing attachments and foster a more dynamic and interactive drafting process. Implementing such a system could enhance communication and collaboration across government departments, leading to more coherent and well-crafted legislation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being cautiously explored within the PCO. While there is potential for AI to semi-automate certain tasks, reduce staff workload, and improve the quality of drafts, the PCO is not rushing into AI adoption. Instead, a staff working group is exploring how new technologies might augment staff capabilities. One potential application of AI is in developing tools that suggest improvements to drafts, such as the use of standard clauses or plain language edits. By leveraging AI in these areas, the PCO could enhance the consistency and clarity of legislative texts.
The approach to digital modernisation within the PCO is methodical and iterative. It begins with identifying business insights, such as difficulties in understanding the impact of unconsolidated amendments. From there, the PCO experiments with different options, develops proofs of concept, and tests these with staff. This structured approach ensures that modernisation efforts are grounded in practical needs and user feedback.
Reimagining the Access and Use of Legislation
Reimagining the access and use of legislation is another critical aspect of the PCO's modernisation strategy. Good access to legislation is characterised by ten properties, all driven by a user-centred focus. These properties include the use of plain language, a complete record of all current and obsolete legislation, free availability, accessibility for individuals with impairments, equitable access, trustworthiness, and findability.
The data properties of legislation—interoperability, connectivity, and reusability—are central to the PCO's aspirations for the future. Interoperability involves mapping legislation to international standards, which could facilitate shared technology solutions and support harmonisation efforts. For example, the adoption of controlled vocabularies and standardised terms in legislative metadata can provide new ways to navigate and find legislation, enhancing legal research and analysis.
The PCO is interested in techniques such as natural language processing to identify and extract data from legislation. This could include identifying professions, place names, organisations, historical dates, and physical objects mentioned in legislative texts. Enriching metadata with this information could provide novel ways to query and navigate legislation, aiding users in their legal research and practical applications.
Developing a knowledge graph is a particularly exciting area of exploration. A knowledge graph captures the relationships between pieces of information, such as legislative provisions, and provides a visual way to navigate and find legislation. This could support advanced legal research needs and enhance the utility of legislative texts. Combining knowledge graphs with large language models could also improve AI services, making them more effective in assisting with legal research and drafting.
The PCO is also exploring the release of an application programming interface (API), potentially adapting the open API standard. Providing real-time access to legislative changes through an API could encourage innovation among third-party developers and services, fostering a more vibrant ecosystem for law and justice in New Zealand.
The concept of hierarchical identifiers is another area of interest. Assigning unique identifiers to each clause and provision in legislation could improve the accuracy of citations and cross-references, and enhance integration with legal databases and research tools. This would make it easier for users to reference specific parts of legislation and facilitate more precise legal analysis.
Conclusion
The Parliamentary Council Office in New Zealand is undertaking a comprehensive digital modernisation effort to enhance its legislative drafting and publishing processes. By focusing on enhancing the delivery of better-designed legislation and reimagining the access and use of legislative texts, the PCO aims to make New Zealand's laws more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly. These efforts are grounded in a methodical approach that emphasises security, collaboration, and the thoughtful application of new technologies. As the PCO continues to explore and implement these modernisation initiatives, it is poised to set a benchmark for legislative innovation and accessibility in the digital age.