Mr HUNT (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) (10:00 AM) —I move:

The Statute Law Revision Bill 2005 corrects minor errors in existing acts including spelling, numbering, lettering and punctuation errors. It continues the important exercise of promptly repairing the statute books and improving the accuracy of government and commercial consolidations of acts.

Schedule 1 amends 24 principal acts and schedule 2 amends misdescriptions in 24 amending acts. The kinds of errors being amended in schedule 1 are minor clerical and drafting errors in various current acts such as incorrect numbering of subsections and typographical errors. Misdescribed errors are ones that either incorrectly describe the text to be amended or specify the wrong location for the insertion of new text. Misdescribed errors are best corrected by amending the amending act, rather than the principal act, and schedule 2 sets out the amendments to the amending acts. None of the amendments proposed by either schedule will make any change to the substance of the law.

The bill also updates references to organisations. For example, reference to the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission and the Queensland Crime Commission, which no longer exist, will be replaced with a reference to the Crime and Misconduct Commission of Queensland—the successor of these two bodies.

The bill, while not making any substantive amendments to the law, does improve the quality and public accessibility of Commonwealth legislation. I commend the bill to the House, and I place on record the explanatory memorandum.