³Justice Ronald Sackville, Som e Thoughts On  Access to Justice, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Faculty of Law, New Zealand Centre For Public Law, 28 and 29 November 2003.      ⁴W oolf Report. 2 Part 1 Introduction 1 I have always considered speakers and authors who use some Latin or other phrase to flavour their topic as complete show-offs. But the quotation at the beginning of this paper is simply too good to pass up, and quoting the original Latin reinforces the point that not much has changed. Nearly everyone shares the same frustrations with the proliferation of legislation and the strains it places on society that Tacitus expressed almost 2000 years ago. However, unlike the times of which Tacitus wrote, today’s laws re flect the values of the liberal parliamentary democracy. It is not by accident that they do. That is, in part, the theme of this paper. 2 It  is  predictable  that  a  paper  by  a  legislative  drafter  begins  with  preliminary comments about definition, although opinions differ among legislative drafters as to  whether  the  interpretation  provision  should  be  drafted  first  or  last.  In  any discussion  of  access  to  justice  issues,  it  is  important  to  be  clear  about  how  the concept is used. Six months ago in this lecture theatre, Justice Ronald Sackville, a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia, delivered an address to the First Annual Conference on the Primary Functions  of Government held by the New Zealand Centre for Public Law. The Judge’s paper, “Some Thoughts on Access to Justice”,³ discusses  at  the  outset  different  meanings  associated  with  the  term  “acc ess  to justice”.   3 At one level, it is access to the civil justice system, in the sense in which the term is used by Lord Woolf in his report Access to Justice⁴ that led to sweeping reform of the English civil justice system and to the adoption of new Civil Procedure Rules.