Law and administration ... in alignment?

Laws are words on a page - or on a computer screen. What happens in practice? Is administrative practice aligned with applicable regulatory requirements? Several factors operate to cause misalignment, including:

• the difficulty of changing laws and the legislative instruments made under them. This can be the result of limited skills within the sectoral agency or the complication caused by division of responsibilities between agencies;

• lengthy time frames. This is particularly a factor when amendment to primary legislation (an Act, Ordnance or Law made by the Parliament) is necessary. In practice many agencies prefer to devise work-arounds in which decisions are made on the basis of strained interpretation of laws, in disregard of laws, or in reliance on lower-level legislative instruments (regulations, guidelines and directives) which are themselves of doubtful legal validity;

• lack of administrative and political will to bring laws into alignment with good administration (remembering that executive government is able to initiate law reform). Examples of this are excessively harsh penalties and regulatory requirements which are unnecessary and selectively enforced. Legislative over-reach of this type produces, over time, a tangle of legal requirements which are opaque and oppressive, and which bring the legal system - and public administration - into disrepute.