56 Modern  computer  technology  should  certainly  allow  greater  facility  with  the rearrangement and presentation of our laws.  This technology needs to be taken advantage of in ways that are novel, imaginative and promote efficiency.   57 New Zealand is not the only country that suffers difficulties regarding access to its statute law.  The Statute Book in the United Kingdom is much bigger and goes back much further in history than our own.  It is even more inaccessible than ours.   It does seem to me that the State has an obligation to make laws accessible if it expects  citizens  to  obey  them.    There  are  many  practical  difficulties  that  flow from a lack of accessibility.  Probably first among them is the cost of locating the relevant provisions.  Very few people in New Zealand other than lawyers can find their way around the statute book, and many of them have problems.  Our statute law is not fit for human consumption.    58 The problem causes difficulties for our public discourse on matters.  Journalists in particular have great difficulty being able to say in any clear way what the law is, and they tend to veer away from trying to do so.  In a democracy as small as New Zealand, where public debate is continuous and volatile, much of it is conducted on a daily basis in complete ignorance about what the law may be on the topic under discussion.  And often, that law is highly relevant to what is being debated. 59 There  are  civic  as  well  as  legal  virtues  in  improving  the  accessibility  of  New Zealand’s law.  The task seems even more important given the quite rapid rate in which  statute  law  is  overhauling  common  law  as  a  source  of  legal  principles.   Statute is not so much King as emperor.  As Lord Steyn remarked, quoting Guido Calabresi, we are overwhelmed by “an orgy of statute making”.²⁶   60 In Iowa, business people, bankers and even farmers can have the Iowa Code on their shelves and they can use it.   And it is all readily accessible online.  There is no need to resort to a lawyer to be able to locate and read relevant statute law.                                                     26   Guido  Calabresi  A  Common  Law  for  the  Age  of  Statutes  (Harvard  University  Press, Cambridge,  1982)  1,  quoted  in  Johan  Steyn  “Dynamic  Interpretation  Amidst  an  Orgy  of Statutes” (2004) 35 Ottawa Law Review 163, 164. 20