I think poverty reduction legislation is fine. It certainly needs to be forward-looking into the future and not just static in time, if a particular initiative is put in place. I think, however, for legislation to be effective you have to know what your policy framework is in advance in order to be able to legislate that. So you need to know what your vision is. You need to know what your guiding principles are. You need to know what your activities are, what your performance measures are going to be, what type of consultation you're going to be looking towards, what type of annual reporting on progress there might be, and then be able to enshrine that in legislation, not only now, but into the future as well and allow it to be adaptable into the future and forward-looking that way.
On May 7th, 2009. See this statement in context.