Calderoli Makes Bonfire of Unintelligible Laws

Clear-out of bureaucratic “dross” but much garbled legislation remains. Government’s decrees fill 124 volumes

MILAN – Aspiring D’Annunzio imitator Roberto Calderoli has worked his miracle. Having announced that there were 29,100 pointless laws, he made a bonfire of 375,000 of them. That’s more than one a minute – including time to read the text – since Mr Calderoli took office, assuming that he has been working 12 hours a day. Fantastic! But there are still all the newly introduced laws to consider. According to the Chamber of Deputies’ legislation committee, the decrees of the present government average more than two million characters: 56 decrees with 112 million characters. To put it another way, that’s 124.4 volumes of 500 pages each. Firefighters’ representatives say that the minister’s bonfire was “a drama worthy of the Fascist period” and some observers point out that book-burnings and the like have always been a feature of turbulent times. There is also some doubt over the figures. The report of the parliamentary committee chaired by Alessandro Pajno, frequently quoted by Mr -Calderoli, discovered “about 21,000 legislative acts, of which 7,000 predate 31 December 1969”, so how did the minister arrive at 375,000?

Leaving quibbles aside, the key issue is: did the files burned in a fire station yard yesterday (Mr Calderoli would have preferred Palazzo Chigi but the Prime Minister’s Office secretary Gianni Letta is thought to have objected) contain only ancient exercises in bureaucratic prose or were some of them more recent? Take article 7 of the regulations for the regional equalisation fund : “The difference between borrowing required to cover expenditure under article 6, paragraph 1, letter a), number 1, calculated in accordance with the method described in letter b) of paragraph 1, article 6, and the regional tax revenue set aside for the purpose, determined with exclusion of variations in revenue produced by the implementation of tax autonomy and the emergence of the tax base...” Minister Calderoli will agree that this is sheer gobbledegook. The trouble is that this is not a law passed in the 19th century when Ferdinando Petruccelli della Gattina was writing “I moribundi del Palazzo Carignano”. It is one of the present government’s measures, taken a few months ago as an example of bureaucratic linguistic dementia by a great journalist who could in no way be described as “red”: Mario Cervi, former editor of the Berlusconi-owned Il Giornale. And there is worse to come.

In its laudable attempts to make it easier for citizens to understand and obey laws, the government passed on 18 June 2009 a measure whose article 3 was entitled “Clarity of legislative texts”. It recites: “a) every regulation intended to replace, amend or abrogate existing regulations or to define exemptions should expressly indicate the regulation replaced, amended, abrogated or derogated; b) any reference to other regulations contained in legislative provisions, or in regulations, decrees or circulars issued by the public administration, should concomitantly indicate that text, in full or in a concise, comprehensible form”. In other words, no more horrendous legislationspeak. Yet here is a paragraph from article 1 of the latest “thousand-extensions” decree by the present government: “5-c. A further extension to 31 October 2010 is granted to the time limit laid down in the first sentence of article 8-e of article 6 of decree law no. 300 dated 28 December 2006, converted and amended by law no. 17 dated 26 February 2007, as last extended to 31 December 2009 by article 47-b of decree law no. 248 dated 31 December 2007, converted and amended by law n. 31 dated 28 February 2008”. Beg your pardon? Oh well.

And this is the point. What sense is there in burning a few boxes of red tape that deals with “concessions for mechanically driven trams” or the “purchase of coal for the Royal Navy” if the freed space is filled up again by new laws that are even more confused, crazily worded and incomprehensible? The answer can be found in a fine little book by Michele Cortellazzo, dean of the faculty of letters and philosophy at the university of Padua. The title is “Operating instructions for local electoral offices translated into Italian”. It is subtitled “To the ministry of the interior with compliments”. You might think it was a leg-pull, if the subject weren’t so serious. If election regulations were comprehensible, why on earth would they need to be “translated into Italian”?

Lawmakers’ cupboards in other countries also contain legislation that is gathering dust. A web site dedicated to dumb laws has even compiled a hilarious list. For instance, in some western US states, you can’t fish on horseback. In Illinois, you can be fined for going to the theatre less than four hours after eating garlic. And you can’t walk cows along Main Street in Little Rock after 1 pm on Sunday.

Every so often, the lawmakers have a clear-out. If possible, they try to avoid the mistakes made by Mr Calderoli, whose impatient new broom was stayed by objections in the newspapers as it about to sweep away the laws that transferred the capital from Florence to Rome, established the Court of Auditors and protected citizens from being accused of insulting a public official if they react to arbitrary or illegal actions. The crucial thing is that new laws should be drafted clearly. If they aren’t, we’re back at square one.

In fact, we have a long way to go, and the people who say so are not “communist carpers”. They sit on the parliamentary legislation committee chaired by Mr Berlusconi’s party colleague, Antonino Lo Presti. Two months ago, the committee explained that the word, number and codicil-bloated decrees of the Prodi government contained an average of 1.128 million characters. But the Berlusconi government’s all-encompassing equivalents have more than two million each. And this is supposed to be simplification?

Have we shaken off Victorian absurdities like the “reproduction by means of photography of fixed objects” only to be saddled today with references “to article 1, paragraph 255 of law no. 311 dated 30 December 2004 may contemplate the application of article 11, paragraph 3 of decree law no. 35 dated 14 March 2005, converted and amended by law no. 80 dated 14 May 2005 and by article 1, paragraph 853” and so on and so forth?

Pull the other one.

English translation by Giles Watson

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