What it does
The Public Sector Superannuation Reform Amendment Regulations 2022 (the Amending Regulations) are a piece of delegated legislation that alters the Public Sector Superannuation Reform Regulations 2017 (the Principal Regulations). The Amending Regulations consist of a short title, a commencement provision, and a series of regulations (regs 4 through 39) each of which states that an amendment has been incorporated into the authorised version of the Principal Regulations. The Amending Regulations do not reproduce the text of any amendment. Instead, the reader is directed to the authorised version of the Principal Regulations as the repository of the actual changes. This is a form of amendment by reference, where the legal effect is achieved without setting out the new wording within the Amending Regulations themselves. The effect is that the Principal Regulations are updated, but the specific content of each amendment must be located elsewhere (in the authorised version, presumably maintained by the relevant government authority). The Amending Regulations take effect on the day the Public Sector Superannuation Reform Amendment Act 2019 commences; that Act is not reproduced and its commencement date is not stated in this instrument. The Amending Regulations were notified in the Gazette on 30 March 2022 and are administered by the Department of Treasury and Finance. Mechanically, therefore, these regulations do not change any substantive rule directly in the text of the Amending Regulations; they operate as a series of instructions to treat the Principal Regulations as having been amended. This creates a compliance and transparency challenge, because the precise nature of each change is not disclosed in the instrument itself. For a practitioner or affected member, the only way to know what has changed is to compare the Principal Regulations before and after the date of incorporation, or to rely on a consolidated version provided by the administering department. The Amending Regulations consume 36 separate regulations (regs 4 through 39) to achieve this incorporation, which is unusual for an amending instrument of this kind. Standard drafting practice elsewhere often sets out the amended text in schedules or in individual amendments with strike-through and underline. The approach taken here reduces the immediate utility of the instrument as a standalone legal reference. The Amending Regulations also do not include a table of amendments, an explanatory statement, or any transitional provisions. The entire operative content is the single repeated sentence: “The amendment effected by this regulation has been incorporated into the authorised version of the … Principal Regulations.” That sentence appears 36 times with no variation. The Amending Regulations themselves, therefore, convey almost no substantive information beyond the fact that the Principal Regulations have been altered in some unspecified manner. The practical effect depends entirely on the content of the incorporated amendments, which are not accessible from this document.