Meredith Leigh

Meredith is the First Parliamentary Counsel with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, which is responsible for drafting all principal legislation, all regulations and a range of legislative instruments for the Australian Government. OPC is also responsible for the publication of Commonwealth legislation through the Federal Register of Legislation. Meredith has 25 years of drafting experience. She has worked extensively with all Departments and many agencies, including in the areas of tax, corporations law, education, and more recently counter-terrorism legislation and electoral legislation. She is an ex officio member of the Board of Taxation which is a non-statutory advisory body charged with contributing a business and broader community perspective to improving the design of taxation laws and their operation. She is also an ex officio member of the Australasian Parliamentary Counsel’s Committee, s a committee representing the drafting offices in Australia and New Zealand and provides a forum for the preparation of national uniform legislation, a forum for discussion about the development of legislation and the management of those drafting offices, and an IT Forum for those drafting offices. She was also an inaugural Board of the Australian Government Legal Service which supports a whole-of-government, high quality, consistent and coordinated approach to the delivery of legal services and the management of legal risk across the Commonwealth. Before joining OPC, Meredith worked for a short period as a corporate lawyer at Allen, Allen and Hemsley.