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TONY ROBINSON: Well the Cabinet oversights most of the bill production and the authorisation,
but bills can originate in different ways. In most cases bills will be generated by departments
with the Minister’s approval to deal with day to day changes. So it might be that the
law is changing around the world or that penalties need to be increased or that the language
of certain things has changed and the department will make a recommendation to the Minister
that at some stage during the next 12 months a bill will be required to update the legislation.
Parliamentary Committees in their reports to Parliament might make recommendation that
the law needs to be amended and that might find its way into bills. Parties will make
election commitments some of which require legislative change and after an election they
are entitled with the mandate they’ve received to change the law accordingly. You can also
have laws being proposed or changed via ministerial councils and in the consumer affairs area
we have a thing called the Uniform Consumer Credit Code, the UCCC, and that’s a body
of Consumer Law that ministers by agreement over a number of years have sought to harmonise,
right across the country, and that can via Ministerial Council Agreement result in changes
which will be what we call “templated” so the code might be changed in Queensland
but by virtue of the agreement in place with the ministers through that Ministerial Council,
Victorian law is actually changed without a bill coming into the Victorian Parliament.
So there are a variety of ways in which bills can be initiated and in which the law can
be changed.