legislatures

This page considers legislatures as a foundation of law.

It covers -

• introduction
• Australian parliaments
• overseas parliaments
• processes
• Hansard
• Parliamentary Papers

     Australian parliaments

The sites of the Australian Parliaments - essential for Bills, Hansards and committee reports that aren't covered in AustLII - are as follows

Federal
NSW
Victoria
Tasmania
South Australia
Western Australia
Northern Territory
Queensland
ACT

     overseas legislatures

New Zealand Parliament (NZP)

European Parliament (EP)

Canadian Parliament (CP)

UK Parliament (UKP)

US federal House of Representatives (Reps)

US federal Senate (Sen)

     Hansard

Hansard is the familiar name for the official publication of each Australian legislature that provides a report of what takes placein the chambers of those legislatures and in their major committees.

The reports typically comprise two elements for each chamber -

• Votes & Proceedings (V&P) - identifying documents tabled and votes taken (eg which members of parliament voted for, which voted against and which abstained in voting on a particular Bill)
• Journals - a formal record of speeches and responses in the chambers (aka parliamentary debates), questions and responses by members of the particular legislature, and oral statements by officials or others to committees of the legislature

The record is not a strict verbatim transcript, with legislatures typically indicating that the Hansard provides "a verified and accurate record" in which repetitions and redundancies (eg recurrent 'um' or 'ah') may be omitted and obvious mistakes corrected. Interjections that did receive a response from the principal speaker (eg "you galah" and "sit down") are omitted.

The intellectual property in Hansard is Crown Copyright.

Hansards for the major Australian jurisdictions over the past two decades are available online at -

• Commonwealth - here
• ACT - here
• NSW - here
• NT - here
• Qld - here
• SA - here
• Tas - here
• Vic - here
• WA - here

     Parliamentary Papers

Parliamentary Papers, published by each legislature, are official publications that that are typically grouped in sessional or annual volumes. They comprise -

• reports by parliamentary committees
• reports submitted to the particular legislature by government agencies within that jurisdiction (eg from every government department and statutory authority within the executive arm of government in NSW)

Collectively the papers offer a detailed - albeit often very formalistic - account of what has happened in within the executive arm over the past year. That picture can, in principle, be matched closely with forecasts of expenditure made in the jurisdiction's annual Budget.

Individual reports by government agencies often amount to over 100 pages and reflect specific whole-of-government reporting requirements that have a statutory basis. Key legislation for that reporting is -

• Financial Management & Accountability Act 1997 (Cth ) | here

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