KEY POINTS:
New Zealand's laws are a "frightful mess" and are too often put together without thinking about their wider impact, Law Commission president Sir Geoffrey Palmer said yesterday.
The former prime minister also fired a shot at Government departments, saying they often failed to consider alternatives to regulation and
realised too late that their moves were disproportionate to the problem they were trying to deal with.
His comments came as a select committee yesterday heard submissions on Act leader Rodney Hide's Regulatory Responsibility Bill, which proposes to subject new laws and regulations to a vigorous red-tape audit before they are passed.
The Epsom MP's member's bill enjoyed overwhelming support at its first reading, but looks set to be substantially re-worked by a select committee after the Law Commission raised major concerns about its likely impact.
Yesterday, Sir Geoffrey warned that the bill risked opening up Parliament's policy-making process to court challenges - potentially leading to a "paralysis" in the law-making machinery of government.
However, he said, while the commission felt the bill should not be passed, that did not mean there was not a problem that needed to be fixed.
"There is a very serious problem," Sir Geoffrey said.
"There has got to be a discipline on the system to ensure that in the policy-making process these things are properly and rigorously considered at the beginning, not asadd-ons at the end."
Sir Geoffrey pointed to the Legislation Advisory Committee Guidelines, which have been drawn up to help improve the quality of law-making.
They are supposed to help make sure new laws meet the objective they are designed for and comply with various other principles, including consistency with other laws.
Sir Geoffrey said the guidelines had been developed over a 20-year period but people either knew nothing of them or did not follow them.
The Legislation Advisory Committee vetted bills against the guidelines but had no enforcement powers if they did not comply.
Regulatory impact statements were in many cases attached as after-thoughts.
"The problem is that departments who are thinking about a regulation arrive at a conclusion very early, don't consider the alternatives, barge ahead with getting the policy approvals, get the legislation, and then find they've chosen an instrument that is so disproportionate to the problem they're trying to deal with - and you can't retreat from it," Sir Geoffrey said.
"We've got to get a way of ensuring that doesn't happen."