Word Note (No. 39)
Commencement Provisions
Issued December 2001
Introduction
1	Drafting Direction 2001, No. 12 deals with commencement provisions in Bills.  
2	The table and the standard subsections (1) and (2) now appear in the templates for New Acts and Amending Bills. 
3	This Word Note outlines the changes to the IT system and explains how to use the new commencement provisions.
4	A renumbering macro for commencement provisions is described in Word Note 13.  
Changes to the IT System
Inserting provisions
5	The subsections and standard provisions for the commencement table are listed by  using the Alt-C macro.
6	From the list you can multi-select the required commencement provisions.
Standard provisions in tables
7	To insert standard commencement provisions in the commencement table, position the cursor in the second column (ie Commencement column) and press Alt-C.  
8	Always fill in the last row of the table and delete unused rows. (This ensures that you don’t need to fix the format of the lines).
Subsection provisions
9	To insert subsection provisions, position the cursor in the appropriate place in the Bill and press Alt-C.  
Renumbering
10	A macro has been written to renumber commencement provisions.  The macro also renumbers cross-references to the commencement table preceded by a tilde character (~).
11	To run the macro, press the (R)Comm button or select it from the OPC-Macro menu.
12	The macro will first check to ensure that there are no duplicate numbers in the table. If there are duplicates, you will need to correct this before re-running the macro.
13	As with the other macros, a table showing the old and new numbers will be created in a new document.
Table for parliamentary amendments
14	The Alt-C macro also has an option that can be used if rows of a table are needed for a Parliamentary Amendment or an amendment of an existing commencement provision.  
15	The option will insert 2 blank rows of a table.
Further assistance
16	If you have any problems with this macro or with any other aspect of the procedures, please contact one of the IT staff who will be able to assist you.

Peter Quiggin
Second Parliamentary Counsel
Director of Information Technology

Document History	
Release number	Release date	Document number	
1.0	20 April 2006	s05pu393.v01.doc