This is interesting, but really needs to be taken a bit further. For example, the commit https://github.com/Br3nda/legislation/commit/ed9e389c5573c98... adds the Animal Welfare Treatment of Animals Amendment Bill - but the effect of this Bill is actually to amend the Animal Welfare Act 1999. In other words, this Bill is a legal patch, so it should probably be shown as a git branch that contains a commit modifying the Animal Welfare Act 1999 as well as adding the Amendment bill.

As a sidebar, it's interesting that the Statute of Marlborough (1267) is still in force in NZ.

I completely agree. I'd love for somebody to maintain a repository that follows in parallel the real life of a bill. Introducing it to Parliament is like creating a branch, then debating and process can further amend the branch/bill, then passing the bill and submitting it for royal assent is like submitting a pull request.

I'm sick of 3-page bills whose entire purpose is to remove a word or two from existing legislation. A diff is a much more powerful tool of examining the impact of a bill.

Edit: "Aaron's Law" is a good example:

> —Section 1030(e)(6) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by striking "alter;" and inserting the following: "alter, but does not include access in violation of an agreement..."

Tell me a diff doesn't say that better.

Sorry for nitpicking, but the Statue of Marlborough was repealed in 2008: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/imperial/1267/0023/latest...

Legislation has some similarities to source commits, in that many Acts amend other Acts. Something like: section 3: amend section 4(i) of the so-and-so Act 1958, replacing each occurrence of word A with word B.

It would be nice to store that as git commits, and have the functionality of diff, blame etc.

However, the dependence on the existing format, in terms of case-law, legislation, techniques for handling it, textbooks, articles, not to mention the decades of experience of solicitors, barristers, judges and legislators, make this hard to change. Back-compatibility is important. So the way to do it is to include the present format as meta-information.

While cool, note that this seems to be both incomplete and not up to date. The full list can be viewed with a search like http://www.legislation.govt.nz/all/results.aspx?search=ta_al... and the results are easily spidered - I did it a few years ago and ended up with ~5000 files totalling ~375MB.

There's so many pull requests I'd like to submit...

I keep wondering why all legislation isn't done in a git-like format. It really seems to be the best platform for being able to attribute and track changes on complex text documents with a large body of contributors.

Now this is cool. If only we could fork it in real life.

The problem is not forking and making changes (although you will have trouble using your local version), the problem is making a pull request and having it accepted.

Since we are already talking about legislation, how good/bad of a climate does New Zealand's law present for entrepreneurs? Asking because I have been fascinated with the country ever since (and also with it being almost the opposite part of earth when you're from Germany it's the farthest you can possibly get away from home for a change ;-).

So, any Kiwis around to give some insights?

I'm a kiwi but can't speak from direct experience. However, there are a few articles around like this one (I read another one the other day but can't find it now): http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2012/11/14/new-z...

There exists something similar for the German law:

https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

Fully converted to markdown and the best:

  You are encouraged to open pull request. 
  Of course only valid legislation voted on by the
  Bundestag will be merged.

First off, why is this interesting? At least, I find it pretty uninspiring.

Second, how are the dates set to 23 years ago, etc?

You can make a git commit with a date in the past (e.g. http://ao2.it/en/blog/2009/10/30/git-commit-date-past)

Now we know who to 'blame'

Can someone shed some light on the xml format being used here? Is there a standard parser, or something that would make it more human-readable? I'd love it all to be Marked-down.

The XML format is that used internally by the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and is documented here: http://www.pco.parliament.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/lenz-8-dtd-...

No tests?

This legislation is poorly written. Plus, we already have US legislation. This seems redundant. Reading it made my eyes bleed.