Types of Legislation

Most bills, or drafts of proposed legislation, are presented by Ministers. They are therefore referred to as government bills in some legislatures. They are more generally described as public bills in the sense that they are inevitably matters that affect all citizens directly or indirectly. However, as noted above, a private Member, that is someone who is not the Speaker or a Minister, may also present a bill in most Commonwealth parliaments: in some parliaments these are termed Private Members’ Bills (See Box 2).

There is another form of bill that seeks to confer a benefit or right on some particular individual, group or corporate body. These too are usually presented by private Members but are generally termed private bills because they are not of universal or ‘public’ applicability. The terminology can be confusing as different parliaments may use different classifications of bills.

It is not too difficult to see that a bill may contain within it an exception that gives it the characteristics of both public and private applicability. Such bills are termed ‘Hybrid’ and are essentially treated in legislatures as public or government bills.

The drafting of a bill is a matter for specialists. In most cases, the genesis of the bill would be a Cabinet Paper or a request from a government department, which would be passed to the drafting authorities, whether they are parliamentary counsel or a separate legal drafting department of the government. The responsibility of these specialists is to convert an administrative document into a legal one, paying attention to the nuances of language and the structure required of a statute while researching possible conflicts with existing laws.