Making criminals of us all? Or perhaps not...

In Tuesday's blog post, I discussed that in recent years we have seen a large increase in the amount of laws and criminal offences in those laws. Businesses have been the targets of many new criminal offences in many areas.

However, even the cleverest boffins—a bit of tabloid-speak for you there—don't really know how many criminal laws there are.

A bit worrying really.

As you can see from the first chart below, estimates of the amounts of offences vary between about 7,000 offences to well over 10,000 offences.

That's 'only' a difference of 3,000-odd offences.

When asked how many offences are there, even the Attorney-General's office has said in the past that it has no idea. You can hardly see the same answer to the question, 'what's this quarter's GDP?':

Oh it must be lots and lots. I'm sure that it is quite big really. Gosh, there's a question.

Hardly what you would call business-friendly: most businesses I know want to comply with the law. They want certainty.