In recent decades, successive Parliaments in Australia and elsewhere have proliferated an extraordinary amount of legislation. Notable features of this phenomenon are the complexity of these statutes and the breadth of discretionary powers bestowed on the executive government with a concomitant deleterious impact on fundamental rights. This panel explores various problems that arise from this phenomenon of “hyper-legislation“, including: – the ways in which statutes are used to direct, constrain and empower government – accountability for delegated legislation under national security statutes – judicial deference to the executive in relation to government action – judicial methods for dealing with broad statutory conferrals of executive power – specific problems caused by hyper-legislating in the national security context