What is secondary legislation?
Secondary legislation is legislation that is made by someone other than Parliament. It is made under a power that Parliament has formally delegated in a particular Act. There is also a small amount of secondary legislation made under the Royal prerogative (and not under an Act).
Secondary legislation can also be made under other secondary legislation.
There are many types of secondary legislation, including regulations, rules, Orders in Council, and notices.
Secondary legislation is defined in section 5 of the Legislation Act 2019. The Legislation Act 2019 and the Secondary Legislation Act 2021 simplified terminology relating to secondary legislation. For more information see Secondary legislation reforms on the PCO website.
Secondary legislation on this website
On this website, you can search for secondary legislation by type on the Advanced search page: see Search for legislation. You can also find secondary legislation from its empowering Act, under the Act’s secondary legislation tab.
This website provides access to secondary legislation in two different ways, depending on its publisher.
PCO-published legislation is published directly on this website by the Parliamentary Counsel Office.
Agency-published legislation is secondary legislation published on the website of the legislation's administering agency, or in the Gazette.
This website provides access to agency-published legislation by:
linking to it
including its title and full content in search results
providing minimum legislative information for it where available.
See also Agency-published legislation available on this website.
This website does not currently provide access to local government bylaws or other local government secondary legislation.
Secondary legislation available on this website may have variations
The agency-published legislation available on this website is published by a variety of agencies. Some data may be missing or incorrect. View the legislation at its source to confirm its accuracy.
Note that this website does not currently have all PCO-published secondary legislation that was revoked before 2008. See Previous versions of legislation available on this website.
Other instruments published by the PCO
There are rare examples of instruments that have been published by the PCO, usually before the commencement of the Legislation Act 2019, that are not secondary legislation within the meaning of that term under that Act. Those instruments will still be listed under an Act’s secondary legislation tab.
For more about legislation status and secondary legislation, see About legislation status.
What is the difference between principal and amendment secondary legislation?
For PCO-published secondary legislation, amendment secondary legislation makes changes to existing secondary legislation (and may sometimes, if specifically empowered to do so, amend an Act): see About amendment legislation. When viewing this amendment legislation, the left-hand tab near the top of the page is labelled “Amendment secondary legislation”.
What is a consolidation or reprint of secondary legislation?
A consolidation (or, previously, a reprint) of secondary legislation is a version of secondary legislation that incorporates the amendments made to that secondary legislation so that it shows the law as at its stated date.
There may be multiple consolidations of PCO-published secondary legislation, each with different "as at" dates. These enable a user to locate a specific version of the secondary legislation with amendments incorporated "as at" a particular date.
Consolidations begin with “Version as at …”, and are identified as a consolidation in the Notes at the end of the secondary legislation.
Agency-published legislation may indicate whether it is a consolidation, and if so, provide its "as at" date in the minimum legislative information table published with the secondary legislation.
Structure of PCO-published secondary legislation
All PCO-published legislation shares a similar legislative structure. Here we note key and unique features of PCO-published secondary legislation. Understanding this helps you to better understand the secondary legislation’s contents and how it works.
PCO-published secondary legislation starts with:
New Zealand Coat of Arms (if it is official)
title
reference number (below the title or at the top of the page)
information on who made the legislation, and when
name of the administering agency
empowering provisions
contents list.
For consolidated PCO-published secondary legislation, the starting information also includes:
“Version as at” date, or “Reprint as at” date for older versions, if the legislation has been amended
note on formatting changes made (if the legislation has been amended).
Clauses
The basic unit of secondary legislation depends on the document: “regulation” for Regulations, “rule” for Rules, and “clause” in other documents. For simplicity, we often refer to the units as clauses, or sometimes “provisions”. They are numbered and have a bold heading.
A clause can include:
subclauses: numbered as (1), (2) below clause numbers
paragraphs: numbered as (a), (b) below clause numbers and often below subclause numbers; if there are more than 26 paragraphs, numbers are used instead of letters
subparagraphs: (i), (ii)
subsubparagraphs: (A), (B) below subparagraphs.
Clause 2 usually includes commencement information, setting out when the legislation comes into force. See About legislation status for more information.
There may be one or more interpretation clauses. These give a standard meaning to words or phrases that occur frequently in the secondary legislation. The word or phrase being defined is usually shown in bold.
Note also that interpretations provided in the empowering Act will usually also apply to the secondary legislation that it empowers, unless the legislation states otherwise.
Some clauses may allow further secondary legislation to be made, if the empowering Act enables it to. These clauses are called subdelegating empowering provisions. Subdelegating empowering provisions are followed by a publication note that gives information about publication, presentation, and disallowance requirements for any secondary legislation made under the clause.