Overview of this demo website
This demo website contains New Zealand legislation, including newly digitised as-enacted versions of all pre-2008 New Zealand Acts, and agency-published secondary legislation.
It is a key step in a programme of work to improve access to New Zealand legislation. Its improved features will be applied to the New Zealand legislation website. See Improving access to NZ legislation | Parliamentary Counsel Office for more on our plans.
This demo website includes agency-published secondary legislation
A key new feature of this demo website is that it includes a pilot service to provide access to agency-published secondary legislation. This is secondary legislation that is published by both government and non-government agencies to their websites, or the Gazette.
This demo website uses data collection methods to find, index, and link to the agency-published legislation, so New Zealand legislation is easier to find, use, and understand.
This website clearly identifies agency-published secondary legislation with labels and notes.
This pilot service is a work in progress. The PCO’s project team is working with publishing agencies to improve the quality and completeness of the collection of agency-published secondary legislation. This includes setting standards, and supporting agencies to comply with them, to improve the accuracy of and access to this legislation.
Read more about the project to improve access to legislation.
In this demo website, the collection of agency-published legislation is incomplete. Whether or not an instrument is collected does not affect whether legislation is validly made or in force. There are known issues for:
completeness – the pilot only includes agency-published secondary legislation that the data collection method has located so far
showing the relationship between principal, amendments, and consolidations
distinguishing current from revoked legislation
matching legislation to its current empowering provision
issues arising from how agencies arrange their websites
distinguishing legislation from other instruments published by agencies
providing real-time updates to all agency-published secondary legislation; approximately half of the agency collections are being updated daily
accurately linking to empowering schedules where these empower secondary legislation
the collection does not include local authority legislation, including bylaws made by a local authority (see
section 161A of the Local Government Act 2002).
We use an automated data collection tool to gather secondary legislation and its metadata. The recording of an instrument as “matched” or “unmatched” does not affect whether legislation is validly made or in force. An item of secondary legislation may be “unmatched” for a range of technical reasons.
Our automated tool may have:
failed to collect the secondary legislation text
failed to find an enabling Act in the text
failed to match an enabling Act against data held by the PCO
failed to find an empowering provision in the secondary legislation text
failed to match an empowering provision against data held by the PCO.
In the next phase, agencies will be required to make their legislation available in a manner that means the automated tool will be able to better match legislation to its empowering provision and the website will be able to more accurately present the legislation.
This demo website contains official versions of New Zealand legislation
This demo website is a legislation website for the purposes of section 5 of the Legislation Act 2019. It includes official electronic versions of legislation for the purposes of section 78 of the Legislation Act and regulation 11 of the Legislation (Publication) Regulations 2021. It is published to a subdomain of legislation.govt.nz.
All legislation published by the PCO under section 67 of the Legislation Act 2019 is available from this site. This includes the collection of Acts, Bills, and PCO-published secondary legislation.
When the legislation.govt.nz website is updated with legislative content, those updates are also published to demo.legislation.govt.nz.
During the testing of this demo, we noticed there are some cases where legislation is taking longer to display in the search results. We are working on improving this.
This demo website also includes historical Acts
This demo website includes a new collection of legislation: the “as enacted” version of New Zealand Acts enacted since 1840. The PCO has scanned and converted these and made them available here. Many of these Acts are presented as standalone versions of legislation, including many amendment Acts. Most are repealed. However, the “as enacted” versions of principal Acts that were in force in 2008 are integrated into the collection as the first version of that Act.
We will also add other collections as we complete their conversion. These will include reprints and other consolidations published under the Acts and Regulations Publication Act 1989 and predecessor Acts, and the statutory regulations series.
This website and its URLs are temporary
This demo website and its legislation URLs are temporary. Because of this, we recommend that you do not link to this demo website, especially to legislation here.
Instead, link to legislation at legislation.govt.nz. For agency-published legislation, please link to the secondary legislation on the agency website.
Questions? Please contact us
If you have any questions or want to discuss this demo website and related legislation access projects, contact us at demo@legislation.govt.nz.