86 321.  On the other hand, it may be that the lack of formal constitutional arrangements and legal frameworks in New Zealand have encouraged this legislative sprawl to occur. 322.  Legislation comes from many different sources and the bulk of it has its origins in Government policy and proposals put forward by Government Departments. In recent years Departments have operated to some extent as separate “silos” so that the general shape of things is not so important as the particular agenda of the particular Department.    323.  There has been some loss in the ability to see the problems of legislation as a whole  in  the  same  way  that  there  has  been  in  public  administration  and  the problems of seeing the task of co-ordinating the Government as a whole.  And while the New Zealand Law Commission is not restricted to references referred to it by the Executive Government, it does need to be sensitive to the needs of the  Government  of  the  day  in  deciding  where  to  put  its  resources  for  the production of proposals for change.    324.  The methods that are required to produce high quality work also require a lot of consultation with groups who may be affected by reform proposals.  This can be a time-consuming matter and New Zealand Parliaments have a three-year life.   The timeliness of proposals is therefore difficult to preserve if the work is to be done as thoroughly as some of it needs to be done.    325.  There  is  always  a  tendency  when  formulating  proposals  for  change  to  fail  to consider rigorously all the options and analyse the state of the facts.  Empirical research can play an important role in law reform and in New Zealand, although it  is  a  simple  country  in  which  to  do  empirical  research,  too  often  it  is  never done.  It is therefore hardly surprising that reform proposals put forward with the best intentions often end up causing consequences that were not intended.    326.  The  New  Zealand  Law  Commission  was  a  late  arrival  in  terms  of  law commissions in other Commonwealth countries.  For a long time New Zealand                                                                                                                                             63   Michael Kirby, Reform of the Law (Oxford University Press, 1983) 7.    64   Above n61, 9.