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Legislative drafting training

Legislative drafting

Legislative drafting is part of the process of implementing change through legislation — legislation cannot be made, amended or even repealed unless legislative drafting occurs.  Equally, the drafting of legislation is dependent on policy formulation: the change which legislation brings about should be policy based.  In short: legislation generally cannot be drafted without policy proposals: policy proposals often cannot be implemented without legislation. The two are interlinked.

For these reasons, legislative drafting is both a complex technical task (although, like many complex tasks, if it is done well it appears simple) and also part of a dynamic process.  This mix of technical complexity and policy reform leads to the following set of propositions:

• the objectives of the legislation should be understood by drafters, and expressly set out in the legislation;
• the legislation should be well structured, so that it can easily be understood by those who use it;
• the balance between primary legislation (an Act) and subordinate legislation (usually regulations) needs to established;
• there should be consistency with the many objectives of stakeholders — both Government and external — on a range of issues, such as human rights principles, criminal law sanctions and market intervention;
• there should be consistency with other legislation — or alternatively other legislation should be amended to achieve consistency.

We offer workshop-based training on legislative drafting, suitable for legislation officers working government departments and agencies. The seminars are intended to develop, consolidate and extend skills in the preparation of legislation in a specific legislative context.   The workshops' principal objective is to build participants skills in producing legislation which is effective in bringing about change – implementing policy-based reforms.

By agreement with Government agencies, the exercises can be contextualised so that participants can build skills working with the legislation of their sector.

For more, visit the Duncan Lawyers website or contact us on 9601 4199.

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