Amendifier

Edit the principal Act. Get the amending Act. And back.

Principal Act with your amendments

Amending Act

Make your amendments to the principal Act on the left, then choose Generate amending Act →. Or paste an amending Act here and choose ← Generate redline from amending Act.

Replace the redline?

This will overwrite the redline on the left with a new one: the principal Act as amended by the amending Act on the right. Your current changes on the left will be lost (Ctrl+Z on the left can undo it).

Drafting aid, not legal advice. A drafter must check every instruction. The tool sees only the text you give it: not the rest of the Act, other Acts that refer to it, commencement, application, transitional or saving provisions, or other amendments in the same Bill.

Tested against enacted amendments

Each worked example is a provision as it stood before and after a real amending Act, with the items Parliament enacted. Fifteen Commonwealth examples were used while writing the rules; ten more, marked “held out”, were collected afterwards from other Acts to test them. They run each time this page loads, and in Node (node tests/run.js). For every example the generated items are applied, by a separate interpreter, to the current text and must give the new text exactly. They are then compared with the enacted items word for word.

ExampleAmendmentResultEnacted items matched
Conventions and sources, by jurisdiction
How it works
  • The principal Act is split into its Chapters, Parts, Divisions and sections, and each section into subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs, definitions and notes.
  • The current and amended texts are matched provision by provision, by number and by content, so a moved or renumbered provision is recognised. Existing provisions keep their numbers; any renumbering in your edits is flagged for the drafter, not carried out.
  • Within a provision the texts are compared word by word and the instruction quotes the smallest clean phrase, always whole words. Where the words occur more than once, the instruction says which occurrence, or quotes more of the text where the jurisdiction does not number occurrences.
  • A whole provision is repealed and substituted when most of it changes, when it gains or loses paragraphs, or when a short paragraph's opening words are rewritten. New sections, Parts and Divisions are inserted in place; removed ones are repealed.
  • With the jurisdiction on (automatic), the principal Act's own wording decides it: its enacting words, the Interpretation Act it relies on, how its sections are laid out and numbered.
  • ← Generate redline from amending Act works the other way: it reads the amending Act on the right, in the chosen jurisdiction's form (or the one its wording shows), applies each amendment to the principal Act on the left, and shows the result as a redline. The same reader checks every generated amending Act.
  • The worked examples are real amending Acts, one for each jurisdiction, with the text of the provisions they amended as it stood before and after, from the official legislation sites.
  • Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you paste or type is sent anywhere.