Legislation Design Interest Group

If the Transition Towns Movement is to succeed it needs a 'behaviour setting' of legislation that allows the goals of the movement to be achieved without  breaking the law.

Background

New Zealand has two different types of legislation. Originally legislation was written in the "Prescriptive'" style.

Late in the Twentieth Century one of the Parliamentary Counsels advocated the adoption of "Performance-based legislation to help cope with social change. The first performance-based Act was the original Building Act 1990.

The principles that underly the performance-based legislation, are to create a type of Act that does not have to be changed every time social or technical change occurs. This is done by the use of goals, objectives, and boundaries. (Added together the objectives achieve the goals.)If you act within the boundaries, the actions are legal, if act outside them it is illegal, and if you sit on the boundary there is a act designated decision-making group that decides if you are legal or not.The invention of these Acts was triggered by the Learning Revolution, but appears to not be taking much notice of later discoveries in the Learning Revolution - a problem that needs to be solved.

This new type of legislation has started a paradigm fight in the legal profession.Some law schools are reluctant to give their students courses on performance-based legislation. This is because basic assumptions underlying the design of the Acts, challengessome of the traditional legal assumptions.

and among both members of the legal professions, and those enforcing the Acts, misunderstandings of the underlying principles sometimes occurs.

Over time, there has been serious misunderstanding of the design of performance-based a

At that time the front  bench members of both the National Party and the Labour Party became well informed about the design of performance based Acts.

Being written - NOT COMPLETE

Goal of Interest Group

To Monitor legislation to see if it acts as an unnecessary constraint on the Goals of Tranistion Towns, and explore how and why it might be desireable to ammend, or otherwise change, the legislation to remove the unnecessary constraint.

('otherwise change' refers to the regulations, by-laws, logic of judicial descions, etc.)

Being written - NOT COMPLETE

Facilitator: Juanita Neale Saxby
(Currently an independent Policy Reasearcher, previously experience as a Policy Analyst.)

Anyone interested can join the interest group.

There are at least 6 professions that are, or can be, directly or indirectly involved in the design of legislation:

• Members of Parliament;
• Parliamentary Counsel;
• Members of the Legal profession offering advice;
• Judges (through judicial decisions);
• Policy Managers, & their Policy Analyst staff - (some seconded as to work in the Ministers' office;
• Policy Researchers;

  Plus:

• Retired members of all the above professions.

Other groups that may get involved are those who are stakeholders affected by particular legislation, and any interested member of the public who wishes to have input.