22 Finding Secondary Legislation
Tracey Thomas and Theresa Buller
To find current New Zealand secondary legislation, the best online source is the official New Zealand Legislation website. A useful method is to locate the relevant empowering Act (this is usually the principal Act) and use the Secondary Legislation tab for a list of secondary legislation made under that Act, along with its empowering provision and administering agency.
Some secondary legislation is published on the website of the administering department, ministry or other agency responsible for the secondary legislation, in the New Zealand Gazette or not published at all. Accordingly, there is not yet a single, authoritative source for all New Zealand’s secondary legislation.
A common legal-research task is to find an Order in Council, which is a type of secondary legislation. Some Acts include a commencement section stating that the Act or specific parts of the Act will come into force on a date appointed by the Governor-General by an Order in Council. Orders in Council can be found on the New Zealand Legislation website.
Secondary legislation is also available on the subscription legal databases Westlaw New Zealand, Lexis Advance and CCH iKnowConnect. As with Acts, these subscription databases each have their own commentary (books, journal articles and online commentaries, along with additional functionality features) that may discuss the secondary legislation. It may be useful to check and compare each of the subscription databases.
Historical Secondary Legislation
A free website useful for locating historical original “as made” New Zealand secondary legislation is NZLII. There are several digitised collections of secondary legislation available through NZLII, including:
