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    Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel

    The Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel (OQPC) supports democracy, the strategic direction of the Queensland Government and delivers on the government’s objectives for the community by providing legislative drafting services to all Queensland public sector agencies and access to legislation on the Queensland legislation website (www.legislation.qld.gov.au)

    OQPC's objective is to draft and provide access to Queensland legislation of the highest standard. OQPC was established as a statutory authority under the Legislative Standards Act 1992 on 1 June 1992. Subject to the Minister, the Premier of Queensland, OQPC is controlled by the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel. The office publishes its own strategic plan and is included as a service area in the DPC's Service Delivery Statement each year.

    Key achievements for 2018–19

    • Supported the Queensland Government's objectives for the community by providing high-quality drafting services and timely delivery of the government's legislative program.
    • Supported democracy by providing high quality drafting services for Bills and amendments of Bills for private members.
    • Contributed to the drafting of national scheme legislation and the work of the Australasian Parliamentary Counsel's Committee.
    • Provided the authoritative source of Queensland legislation by preparing consolidations of Queensland legislation, including indicative reprints in a timely way, and publishing this material to the Queensland legislation website.
    • Enhanced access to Queensland legislation and legislative information by continuing with public website developments, including additional subscriber notification options, additional user-generated reports, electronic publishing of pre-1991 legislation and providing legislation in open data format.
    • Developed a dedicated OQPC website to promote services provided by the office for the government and the Queensland community.
    • Implemented stage three of the indicative reprints project to include tracked change functionality.

    Our performance

    The following service standards in DPC’s Service Delivery Statement were used by the department and the government to assess overall performance of the Legislative Drafting and e-Publishing service.

    Legislative Drafting and e-Publishing
    Service area: Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel    		 Notes 2018–19
    Target/Est.    		 2018–19
    Actual
    Effectiveness measures
    Client satisfaction with legislative drafting services provided by the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel    		 1 85% 95%
    Client satisfaction with the quality of access to legislation available online 1 85% 84%
    Efficiency measures
    Average cost per hour of legislative drafting and publishing output    		 2 $145/hour $132/hour

    Notes:

    1. This service standard informs on overall satisfaction of the service and is derived from an annual client survey. Clients are ministers, chiefs of staff, directors-general and their departments' cabinet legislation and liaison officers and senior policy officers.
    2. This service standard informs on the average cost per hour to draft and publish Queensland legislation. The calculation methodology applied to determine the average cost per hour is the total operational expense per annual period, plus a percentage of centralised costs, divided by the total cumulative recurrent standard hours per annual period. The 2018–19 Actual is lower than the 2018–19 Target/Estimate due to filling of temporary FTE vacancies by year end resulting in a lower per hour cost.

    Strategic Plan 2018–22

    Objectives
    Provide excellence in legislative drafting to support Government objectives Queensland legislation and information about legislation that is readily accessibly to the community Cultivate a collaborative high performing culture focused on organisational excellence.

    STRATEGIES

    • Identify and adopt best practice in drafting Bills, amendments to Bills and subordinate legislation, having regard to fundamental legislative principles.
    • Contribute to the drafting of national scheme legislation and the work of the Australasian Parliamentary Counsel's Committee.
    • Efficiently use resources to deliver drafting and publishing services at an average cost per hour at or below the service delivery standard threshold.

    STRATEGIES

    • Identify and adopt best practice in providing access to Queensland legislation.
    • Make up-to-date consolidations of Queensland legislation publicly available for each day of change.
    • Identify and implement enhancements to the Queensland legislation website to improve accessibility and end user experience.
    • Maintain open data arrangements for the release of Queensland legislation.
    • Efficiently use resources to deliver drafting and publishing services at an average cost per hour at or below the service delivery standard threshold.

    STRATEGIES

    • Cultivate a high-performing integrated and innovative workforce.
    • Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement where staff collaborate and contribute to solutions and implementation strategies from the Employee Opinion Survey.
    • Nurture strategic relationships with clients, partnering entities and other stakeholders

    MEASURES OF SUCCESS

    • Client satisfaction with drafting services.
    • Legislative program delivered on time.
    • Deliver the legislative program at an average cost per hour at or below the service delivery standard threshold.

    MEASURES OF SUCCESS

    • Client satisfaction with access to legislation.
    • Consolidations published within 3 days of the commencement date.
    • Deliver the legislative program at an average cost per hour at or below the service delivery standard threshold.

    MEASURES OF SUCCESS

    • Employee Opinion Survey results in areas of job empowerment, innovation, organisational leadership and agency engagement.
    • Employee engagement in employee opinion survey and knowledge management initiatives.

    The OQPC Strategic Plan 2018-22 is available at www.legislation.qld.gov.au/about.

    At a glance in 2018–19:

    • 34 government bills
    • 8 private members’ bills
    • 45 amendments during consideration in detail
    • 349 total legislative instruments
    • 7027 total pages drafted
    • 247 total reprints
    • 59,891 total pages reprinted
    • 7,175,919 total legislation web hits
    • 262 items of subordinate legislation

    Future directions for 2019–20

    • Support democracy and the Queensland Government's objectives for the community by providing high quality drafting services and timely delivery of the government's legislative program.
    • Support democracy by providing high quality drafting services for Bills and amendments of Bills as requested by private members.
    • Contribute to the drafting of national scheme legislation and the work of the Australasian Parliamentary Counsels' Committee.
    • Provide the authoritative source of current Queensland legislation by preparing consolidations of Queensland legislation, including indicative reprints, in a timely way and publishing this material on the Queensland legislation website.
    • Enhance access to Queensland legislation and legislative information by:
      • continuing with public website developments to provide advanced functionality for website users, including additional subscriber notification options and user-generated reports and lists
      • providing legislation in open data format.

    Organisational Structure

    • The office is located at 111 George Street, Brisbane. The current structure is summarised in the organisational chart below:
    OQPC organisational structure
    • Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel
      • Deputy Parliamentary Counsel
        • Legislative DraftingServices
      • Executive Director Legislation and Business Services
        • Legislation Editing and Publishing Services
        • Information and Technology Services
        • Corporate Services

    Case study

    Tracked changes to indicative reprints

    During the November 2017 election campaign, the Queensland Law Society, in its Call to Parties Statement, sought a commitment from the government to provide Bills with tracked changes where amendments to existing legislation are proposed in the Bill.

    The Queensland Government committed to delivering this proposal and referred the matter to OQPC.

    To meet this commitment OQPC worked with its system partners to quickly provide an interim solution involving publication of the incorporated Bill amendments as PDF renditions of indicative reprints. OQPC published the first indicative reprints for Bills introduced in the opening sitting of the 56th Parliament in February 2018 identifying Bill amendments in italic styling.

    Compilation of these indicative reprints involved significant manual work from the Legislation Editing and Publishing Services (LEaPS) team in order to make the changes as explicit and comprehensible as possible. However, time savings from the implementation of OQPC's Queensland Integrated Legislation Lifecycle System or QuILLS in 2016–17 meant the team was able to continue to edit and supply high-quality Bills and subordinate legislation, and compile and publish reprints, as well as providing the new indicative reprints.

    The final goal was to provide documents with tracked changes to clearly show Bill amendments. OQPC's ICT team worked with its system partners to research, assess and develop available options. Using the agile development process, OQPC was able to quickly develop a proof of concept prototype of the solution for approval.

    Much consideration was given to how indicative reprints should be depicted on the legislation website so they could not be confused with authorised legislation. Significant testing and system changes to the office's workflow and publishing systems were implemented.

    Extending the benefits of this developed technology, OQPC took the opportunity to add the feature to the website, enabling users to prepare their own 'on-the-fly' comparisons of 'live' in-force reprints. In an Australian first, the website now offers a variety of views, including a synchronised side-by-side view of reprint comparisons.

    The track changes functionality for indicative reprints and in-force reprint comparisons benefits website users through:

    • easier access to legislative changes, both past and future/proposed
    • simpler ways to understand the legislative changes
    • understandable mark-up of changes to Bills for parliamentary committees and government officers.

    OQPC has delivered many information sessions to Queensland government departments and agencies on indicative reprints with tracked changes and there continues to be a demand with a forward program being progressively delivered.

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    Last updated:
    1 November, 2019
    Last reviewed:
    1 November, 2019