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Commonwealth act
This Act is essentially a massive housekeeping law — it was passed to make the rest of the Australian government's legal framework line up with a major new law called the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (known as the PGPA Act), which overhauled how the Commonwealth government manages public money and resources.
Before this Act, two older laws governed how federal government agencies handled public money and accountability:
The PGPA Act replaced both of these with a single, unified framework. This Act (the Consequential and Transitional Provisions Act) does all the plumbing work to make that transition happen smoothly.
Because you can't just switch off old laws overnight, this Act keeps many old FMA Act and CAC Act rules operating for a limited time — for example, old reporting rules still apply to financial years that ended before 1 July 2014.
The Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997 gets renamed to the and is drastically cut down — most of its content is repealed because those functions are now handled by the PGPA Act.
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Direct links to the current provisions in Public Governance, Performance and Accountability (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Act 2014.
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View on official registerSourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), CC BY 4.0.
The Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act 1997 is fully repealed (scrapped), with transitional rules to handle matters already in progress under that law.
The Act amends a wide range of other Commonwealth laws (like the Auditor-General Act 1997) to update references from the old framework to the new PGPA Act terminology — for example, replacing 'Chief Executive' with 'accountable authority' and updating definitions throughout.
Different rules under the new PGPA Act kick in at different times — for instance:
Things like bank agreements, Special Accounts (dedicated government bank accounts for specific purposes), delegations of authority, and investment arrangements that existed under the old laws are automatically treated as if they were made under the new PGPA Act.
This law primarily affects:
Ordinary Australians are not directly affected in their day-to-day lives, but this law shapes how the government manages taxpayer money and holds itself accountable.
Without this transitional law, the switch to the new PGPA Act would have created legal gaps — existing contracts, delegations, and financial arrangements would have had no legal basis. This Act is the 'bridge' that ensures continuity and a smooth changeover.