Out of Step with Modern Life

03 Nov Out of Step with Modern Life

I am often asked about outdated laws or government decisions. Sometimes, laws or government decisions just seem so out of step with modern life, that you might wonder what is going on.

Why and how does this happen?

Well, the answer is that there are so many government decisions and laws made every year that it would be a lot of work to go back and review every single one of them. Government relies on us – individuals, businesses, associations, charities, interest groups – to tell it when something doesn’t work and work with it to change things for the better.

Government does, from time to time, review its own laws to update them. I have been involved in two major Federal government projects to review and update old laws.

The first was the Tax Law Improvement Project (TLIP), affectionately called “tulip”. The goal was to rewrite and modernise the 1936 tax law. However, part-way through the project, new government initiatives, including the GST and business tax review, took precedence and the project was never completed. As a result, Australia now has two main income tax laws – the 1936 Act and the 1997 Act.

The second was identifying inoperative provisions of the tax acts. Essentially, we looked for tax law that was no longer current. This review repealed more than 4,100 pages of Australia’s tax laws.

Poring over tax legislation might not be everyone’s idea of fun, but you may notice things that don’t work in law that impacts you.

Usually, government relies on us to tell it when something doesn’t work and help it improve those laws or decisions. That is your invitation to go to government with your ideas. When approaching government, always remember to write in easy-to-understand English and include three key things:

• what doesn’t work;
• why it doesn’t work and how that is detrimental to the community; and
• how it should be changed, to benefit the community.

There are many examples of laws and government decisions that have not been updated and were created in different times and no longer suit our modern world. For example, I worked with companies that were required to send paper letters to clients. In today’s world, most clients don’t want paper letters – they think they are getting a bill or a fine! So, we had the law changed to permit electronic communications.

Sometimes, government requirements can make environmentally friendly initiatives difficult to implement or make innovative projects unnecessarily complex. It is in everyone’s interest to update these government requirements, so let’s work with government in collaboration to help ensure that laws encourage innovative solutions to modern issues.

This article comes from my column entitled “Here to Help” in Hunter Local, November 2022. If you have an everyday problem just begging for a simple, real world solution, send it to “Here to Help” and let’s see what we can achieve.

Elaine Abery has a closet full of great ideas and empowering solutions. She’s also the Director of Unravelling Red Tape, a company dedicated to helping everyday people, not-for-profits and companies change the world through improved decision-making and legislation.