As someone who spent many years in their career trawling through some really intense legislation – the National Electricity Rules, in fact, which is a really, really solid piece of legislation and many pages in volume – it was these kinds of smaller nuances that from time to time I would come across and make a note of so that the next time the federal government, in that case, was making a legislative change I could try and make a submission and whack these in. So I thank people that have picked these things up and worked hard to make sure that they are here in this bill before the house this afternoon.

This bill is yet another one of those really technical amendment bills which make small legislative tinkerings just here and there. The changes nevertheless are important. They are about process and administration. What this bill does make is changes to the way in which subordinate legislation works – in particular, regulations that impact our day-to-day lives. Things like road safety, building regulations, even food safety, are subject to subordinate legislation. Changes to these do not come through bills like this one, and we normally do not debate regulatory changes. A lot of them are here in the Parliament but they are tabled and we approve them. But the Subordinate Legislation Act 1994 – and I will call it the SL act – we are amending today is the main act that governs how these regulations and other legislative instruments are made and are scrutinised.

The changes in this bill are not too drastic, but the main purpose of them is to ensure that our departments, who interact with these pieces of legislation on a regular basis, can work as smoothly as possible. I am going to give you an example of this: the bill is going to provide some assistance to interpretation of legislative – I love this, because I spent so many years looking at things like this in my role, particularly at Energex in Queensland many years ago – and administrative characteristics, which will assist public servants whose role includes interpreting this SL act and working out if it applies to particular subordinate instruments.

This is an important distinction because what this does is it tells us whether or not those regulations are subordinate to the SL act, because under the current legislation, instruments that have a purely administrative character are exempt from the act’s requirements. This change has come about because what we know from feedback brought to us by departments which exercise this legislation is that there are significant grey areas where they could benefit from more precise guidance, which means that this act could be clearer to apply.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during those conversations, because I can only assume that those public servants would have been so passionate about getting them here before the house to finally change. If any of them are listening, I will say on behalf of this side of the house that this one is for you guys, and we are very pleased today to be debating it here in this chamber.

Getting changes through to make an act clearer to apply is not always an easy thing to do. In my experience, in the energy sector it could take many years to get changes before Parliament to change legislation that then filtered down to what I was working on, which was compliance with energy networks in relation to the National Electricity Rules. It could take a lot; a lot of work was put into it. Here before us there are longstanding guidelines that the department use to help them with this, but what this bill will do is give them a bit of extra guidance, because extra guidance is always an important thing. It will help identify instruments that are of a legislative character if they include things like offences, regulations that set out mandatory requirements to take actions or refrain from actions, importantly, that apply to the public at large or a large class of people, or regulations that include penalties or other sanctions for noncompliance. If a regulation or other legislative instrument has these features – such as road safety regs that, for example, may impose a fine – these are less likely to be legislative in character and therefore fall under the Subordinate Legislation Act.

In addition to this, the bill also aims to improve the way that consultation takes place on the making and development of subordinate legislation, and there has been just a little bit of discussion from those opposite around consultation here in Victoria undertaken by our government. I do reject the premise that consultation is not undertaken correctly or in good faith. There is so much consultation that goes into bringing legislation and reforms before this house in the lead-up to introducing bills for us to debate. The consultation that I think they probably dislike most is that we are not spending hours and hours and hours consulting with them on matters that we are trying to push forward in the interest of all Victorians in this place.

But back to the bill: we just talked about how the bill aims to improve the way that consultation takes place on the making and development of subordinate legislation. Currently, whilst the legislation states that consultation takes place between ministers, this does not actually reflect the reality that a lot of these discussions that take place – and they are really important discussions – take place between departmental offices. As such, the bill amends this requirement to now allow for consultation to take place between public sector body heads. This does not really change anything, but it is an important reflection of how these arrangements work in practice and it puts it expressly on the books, which is always a really important thing.

One of the more interesting parts of this bill, which I found surprisingly informative – I did not know it – is that there is currently a legislative requirement that physical copies of statutory rules must be printed and must be supplied by the government printer for purchase from a prescribed bookshop. The first thing I thought was, ‘Well, what bookshop is that, and where is that located, so I can bolt down there and get a copy?’ If anyone is listening is actually wondering, the prescribed bookshop is TIMG bookshop, which is located all the way at the other end of Bourke Street. If you have got nothing to do after Parliament finishes this afternoon, you could pop on down there and actually see what they have on the shelves.

Further to this, the legislation requires that the minister make available a copy of the statutory rules, a physical copy related to their portfolios for inspection by the public. The public come in and they are looking to see what this is, and they make it available for the public for free at their department office or other office specified in the Government Gazette. What this bill does is improve requirements – I think it kind of gets with the times – for there to be online access to the statutory rules. While this may seem insignificant, if the rules cannot be accessed, inspected or acquired by the public, then if someone commits an offence under those rules they will have a complete defence and will not be able to be penalised. That is something I did not realise, and I thought that was a really interesting nuance. So next time you are down the other end of Bourke Street or doing anything down that end of the city, you might see that bookshop and you will know that it has a very special place in the heart of Victorian legislation, and you can understand why.

In summing up in the next 15 seconds, this is a another really important bill before our house. They are small changes, but they are meaningful. If nothing else, we will be saving paper with people being able to access these rules online. I commend it to the house.