A law that makes it illegal to sell skim milk inside Wellington’s city boundaries is among 152 ageing statutes the Government wants to wipe from the books, as part of what Attorney-General Chris Bishop is calling a statutory spring clean.
Mr Bishop announced the project this week, saying more than 150 outdated and obsolete Acts have been identified for repeal after a trawl through legislation stretching back more than 150 years. The Parliamentary Counsel Office, which drafts New Zealand’s laws, has done the digging, with the Department of Internal Affairs helping to sort through old local Acts.
The headline example is the Wellington Milk-Supply Act 1919, which set up a council-run licensing regime for milk vendors and, more than a century later, still technically bans the sale of skim milk within the capital’s boundaries. Bishop noted that Wellington City Council nearly ended up in court in 2021 when a lawyer asked it to issue a milk licence under the long-forgotten rules.
“Like the milk it regulates, this law has aged badly,” Mr Bishop said.
Another target is the Dunedin City Fish-markets and Empowering Act 1918, which once let the Dunedin City Council run a fish market and even buy and sell sheep. The council does neither today, and the minister suggested it could “probably put this one out to pasture”.
The numbers behind the clean-up tell their own story about how the statute book has piled up over time. Mr Bishop said roughly half of all the Acts currently in force were passed between 1840 and the 1960s, leaving a tangle of overlapping and forgotten rules that almost nobody reads but which still sit on the books.
“We’ve got layer upon layer of legislation dating back more than 150 years, a legal lasagne, if you will,” he said.
The 152 Acts identified so far cover public, private, local and provincial legislation. Many regulate institutions that no longer exist or activities councils stopped doing decades ago. The Government is keen to stress that repealing a law does not erase the history behind it, and pointed to a few entries that carry genuine historical weight.
One is the Kaitangata Relief Fund Transfer Act 1892. It followed one of New Zealand’s earliest industrial disasters, an explosion at the Kaitangata coal mine in South Otago in 1879 that killed 34 miners. Public donations poured in to support the families left behind, and the Act dealt with what to do with the money left over, transferring the surplus into a wider mining accident relief fund. Another is the Caledonian Society of Otago Incorporation Ordinance 1874, which formally set up one of the country’s oldest Scottish societies, a group that ran Highland Games in Dunedin for generations.
Removing those Acts will not rewrite what happened, the minister argued. The events stay in the historical record, while the redundant legal machinery around them is cleared away.
The project is being run in stages rather than as one giant repeal. Public consultation on the first batch of 152 Acts is open now and runs until 31 July, with further rounds planned for later in the year. Once submissions are in, the Parliamentary Counsel Office will draft a repeal Bill and introduce it to Parliament, where it will go through a select committee and another round of public submissions before anything is actually struck out.
For most New Zealanders the changes will pass entirely unnoticed, which is rather the point. None of the laws on the list do much in practice, and few people could name a single one of them. The argument from the Government is that a cleaner statute book is easier for lawyers, businesses and ordinary people to navigate, and that clearing out the clutter is part of a wider push it describes as fixing the basics.
“Part of being a responsible Government focused on fixing the basics is making sure New Zealand’s laws are fit for purpose,” Mr Bishop said.
The spring clean sits alongside a busy programme of legislative change from the Attorney-General, who has also been driving resource management reform and other regulatory overhauls. Repealing dead laws is the gentler end of that work, unlikely to spark much of a fight given that the targets are things like milk licensing rules from the era of horse-drawn delivery carts.
Even so, the consultation gives the public a say, and anyone with a fondness for an obscure old Act, or a reason to think one still matters, has until the end of July to make the case for keeping it. Details of every law on the list are available through the Legislation Repeals Project page on the Parliamentary Counsel Office website, with more background in coverage from the New Zealand Herald.
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What do you make of the great legal clean-out? Are there old laws you would happily see gone, or quirky ones worth keeping for posterity? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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