Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel
Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel (OQPC) is the Queensland Government’s provider for Queensland legislation, supporting government and democracy through legislative drafting and publishing.
Subject to the Minister, the Premier of Queensland, the office is controlled by the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel. OQPC was established as a statutory authority under the Legislative Standards Act 1992 on 1 June 1992.
Key achievements for 2015–16
- Successfully delivered the government’s legislative program within required timeframes.
- Drafted national scheme legislation on behalf of the Australasian Parliamentary Counsel’s Committee.
- Implemented the full build of OQPC’s new legislative drafting and publishing system (QuILLS) to deliver enhancements to legislative drafting and publishing processes and public access to Queensland legislation.
- Continued the staged publication of Principles of good legislation: OQPC guide to Fundamental Legislative Principles.
- Supported the YMCA 2016 Queensland Youth Parliament, including providing assistance with the formatting and supply of eight Youth Bills.
- Invited a broad cross-section of Queensland institutional legislation users to participate in the OQPC Stakeholder Reference Group.
Our performance
The following service standards in DPC’s Service Delivery Statement were used to assess OQPC’s overall performance.
| Legislative Drafting and ePublishing | Notes | 2015–16 Target / Estimate |
2015–16 Actual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of client satisfaction with legislative drafting services provided by the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel | 1 | 85% | 97% |
| Percentage of client satisfaction with the quality of access to legislation available online | 1 | 85% | 100% |
Note:
- This service standard informs on overall satisfaction levels with the quality, timeliness and support provided by LDeP and is derived from an annual client survey. Clients are Ministers, Directors-General and their agencies, Cabinet Legislation and Liaison Officers and Senior Policy Officers.
Apart from the annual departmental client survey, OQPC also seeks feedback from instructing agencies on its performance in relation to individual drafting projects. Four standard questions are asked (see below):
| Questions | 2015–16 survey results |
|---|---|
| 1. How would you rate the quality of the drafting product? | 98% |
| 2. How would you rate the level of service in providing advice on alternative ways of achieving policy outcomes? | 97% |
| 3. How would you rate the level of service in providing advice on the application of Fundamental Legislative Principles (FLPs)? | 97% |
| 4. How would you rate the level of service provided by the drafter during the drafting project? | 99% |
Average of all four questions: 98%
In 2015–16 OQPC drafted 420 legislative instruments, totalling 7955 pages and reprinted 704 legislative instruments totaling 120,205 pages.
- 420 legislative instruments drafted
- 7955 total pages drafted
- 79 government Bills drafted
- 20 private members’ Bills drafted
- 46 amendments during consideration in detail for government Bills, totalling 445 pages
- 28 amendments during consideration in detail for private members’ Bills, totalling 92 pages
- 247 items of subordinate legislation drafted
- 704 reprints of legislation
- 120,205 total pages reprinted
- 117 total other legislative publications
- 4836 total pages of other legislative publications
- 4,963,934 total legislation web hits
Future directions for 2016–17
- Continue to provide high quality, accurate and timely drafting and publishing services to support delivery of the government’s legislative program.
- Launch the new Queensland legislation website.
Organisational structure
The office is located at 111 George Street, Brisbane. The current structure is summarised in the organisational chart below:
Case study
eLegislation
In February 2016, OQPC’s new legislative drafting and publishing system QuILLS (Queensland Integrated Legislation Lifecycle System) went live. Supply of Bills to Parliament House and the government printer from QuILLS commenced from the first parliamentary sitting in February 2016.
The eLegislation project was commenced to improve public access to Queensland legislation and legislative information and streamline and automate legislation production and publishing processes within OQPC.
The project involved:
- implementing specialist legislation database technology to manage drafting and reprint workflows along with web publishing activities
- development of a new legislation website with a range of enhanced features
- conversion of current reprints of Queensland legislation including approximately 980 legislation titles comprising more than 85,000 pages. Additionally, OQPC processed more than 500,000 existing files to enable transfer of content from the old legislation website to the new website.