Westlaw New Zealand Tip - How to find a list of Secondary Legislation

Last Published: December 09, 2022

This tip outlines a simple process for finding a list of secondary legislation.

From the home page, click on Legislation
Tick the box beside Legislative Instruments (soon to be named Secondary Legislation) – you can untick Revoked if you do not want to include revoked subordinate legislation in your results. Also untick the “current” boxes connected with Acts and Other Instruments
Into the Global Search Bar, enter the following: ("pursuant to" +s "local government act 2002") ("consent of the executive council" "after having regard to" /s "local government act 2002") or whichever Act you’re researching.
Press enter or the orange magnifying glass to run the search

This search makes use of the standard wording that is used on the title pages of subordinate legislation to return a comprehensive list of subordinate legislation titles that are either made pursuant to the named Act or a specific section of the named Act.

The order of the results is displayed by relevance. If you have included Revoked Secondary Legislation in your search, this means that the revoked titles will appear at the end of the results list.
If you have a lot of results, and want to see a list of subordinate legislation titles without search snippets etc, it can be useful to switch the detail level to “less” to provide a more concise view of the list (see circled item in screen shot below).
This type of search will return the occasional document that isn’t a legislation title.

You can also use this type of search to create an alert. This alert will tell you when new subordinate legislation made under a particular Act has been added.

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