Having the entire collection of in force legislation is a good thing if you're a law student and for that matter a practicing lawyer. So a few years ago I created a Python script to download PDF versions of all NZ legislation.

Later I made use of the xml versions available and the RSS feed of new, amended or modified legislation to create the twitter bot @nzlegislation

In the past I have created a couple of visualisations of the legislation.

One was an animated sequence showing the relationships between acts develop as each act was passed. However it wasn't historically accurate since it only had access to those acts still in force and visually became a mess that didn't communicate anything of value.

The second I started for last year's Mix & Mash competition and was a more prosaic effort, using a tree map to visualise the legislation. Whilst it did communicate some useful information I didn't feel it was a tool that would be of significant utility and didn't submit it.

This year the guardians of the legislation, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, are a sponsor of the Mix & Mash competition. They are sponsoring the Open Government category and have some suggested legislative mash ups they would like to see.

So if you're interested in putting an entry together using the legislation I can offer a Python script which may help. You'll get XML and PDF copies of every version of every Act, Bill, SOP and Regulation available. Given a reasonable ADSL connection you should have the lot down in 8-12 hours. Put aside approximately 39 Gig of bandwidth and disk.