The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 1908. THE STATUTES.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 190, 6 May 1908, Page 6

The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 1908. THE STATUTES.

The announcement by the Attor-ney-General that the statutes of .the Dominion will before long be consolidated into "five handy volumes" will be received with gratitude by everybody whose business it has been to disentangle the law frojn 'the everdeepening chaos of new and ajnending Acts. So far as the general public, is concerned, it is probably immaterial whether the law is lost in 5000 volumes pr found 'in live. Yet it is possible that the. public, which has suffered bo i wuch in recent years from defective, inconsistent, • and slovenly draftsman* 1 ship, will profit indirectly from the boiling-down process, With the long 1 array of annual volumes before them, • full of _ amending 'Acts depending for their intelligibility on an endless series of references to other Acts,- our legislators have, got _ into very .bad habits of work. Lacking any example of orderliness and compactness, they have come to regard "the statute law" as essentially and necessarily a disorderly museum of enactments, in which,_ as in an untidy man's study, there is all that is necessary, but nothing very neat or easily discoverable. Several causes have conspired to make the chaps of the laws in New Zealand particularly glaring. It is not alone that the anxiety of Mr. Seddon, _ to "lead the van," plunged the Legislature into a whirl of rapid , innovations. There has also been a growing tendency to get all these hastily-considered ideas on to the 1 Statute Book without much care for ' the language of their embodiment. A ' political proposal may be rash, daij- : gerous, and little considered, but there is alwayp a way of giving it a i clear and precise expression. Unfor- > tunately, members have got into the i way of neglecting the virtue of precise i expression—a natural result, indeed, < of the Radical administration's, nog- > Jeot of the virtue of precise refl.eotion.Jj

We need not recall the many recent examples of faulty legislation, of Acts that proved unworkable immediately upon being put to the test of use, of other Acts which have proved fruitful in unexpected and undesired results, of "flaws" innumerable, of Ministerial acrobatics to avert not so much the undesirable consequences of their hasty work as the unpopular consequences, which matter a great deal more to the jjiodern Minister than rank injustices. Every year amending Acts have been, rendered necessary by the discoveries of the recess. The most recent of all the examples ,of crude and imperfect work is last year's Native Land Act, which, we understand, has been found to contain a disastrous flaw. With the reduction of the vast body of our statute law to a more compendious shape, Ministers and members may feel that a new leaf has been turned, and may resolve to give eloper attention to the mechanical work of draftsmanship. If the compilation is to be the beginning of the end of "legislation by reference," that will be a separate and a great, benefit. The Government may well consider whether it is not time to make amending Acts self-explanatory: The hopeless confusion of the law relating to Native land is largely due to the habit of amending Acts by reference only, instead of by substantive expressions of change. We should like to see a greater reform than a mere reforjn of the mechanical work of drafting the'clauses. We should like to see a great ; contraction of the volume of new legislation, but it is probably expecting too much to. hope that a Government bent on "leading the van" will give up its conviction that the wqy to do it is to grind out multitudes of new Acts with feverish energy. reform may come Inter on, and it will be enough for the present if the "five ha.nuy, volumes" act as an inspiration to thoughtful and precise habits in putting on paper whatever ideas tie Government may have in its mind. Those ideas may be good or bad, but tliat is no reason why they should be made worse by infectipn with the strange germs that creep in through a slovenly handling of the material. ,