Legislation will require government communications to be clear and concise, but opposition says monitoring will add more bureaucracy
Bill will require government communications to the public be “clear, concise, well-organised, and audience-appropriate”. For the country’s anti-gibberish brigade, it’s a victory: they say clear language is a matter of social justice and a democratic right.
“People living in New Zealand have a right to understand what the government is asking them to do, and what their rights are, what they’re entitled to from government,” says MP Rachel Boyack, who presented the bill.Advocates say there’s vast room for improvement in New Zealand government communications. By way of example, the country has an annual plain language award which includes a “best sentence transformation” trophy. This offering, from the government’s statistics department, recently took the prize: Over the year we tested the innovation readiness and change-adaptability of the organisation, made significant changes to our prioritisation and investment approaches, moved to activity based working and seen teams across Stats respond by making time to focus on tackling customer and internal pain points.”We tested how ready our organisation was to innovate and make changes. We also changed our approach to setting priorities and to investing, and moved to a flexible working style for our staff. In response, staff focused on solving their own, and customers’, irritations.”Where it has been identified and is possible to update this it has been undertaken ensuring future band allocation is correct.”Where possible, we’ve identified and updated affected sub-models to make sure they’re assigned the correct levy band going forward. Bad sentences are more than an aesthetic concern, says Lynda Harris, who launched the awards and directs plain language consultancy Write Ltd. Government communications decide the most intimate and important parts of people’s lives: their immigration status, divorce papers, entitlements to welfare payments or ability to build a home. When people send in letters of that nature, they “describe their frustration tears, anger, because they’ve just tried to get a thing done,” she says. When governments communicate in ways that people don’t understand, it can lead to people not engaging with services that are available to them, losing trust in government and not being able to participate fully in society, says Boyack. Those most affected are people who speak English as a second language, have not attended university, have disabilities, or are elderly. The bill is not universally supported. Advocates say some parts lack clear-enough definitions. New Zealand’s opposition argue it will add further layers of bureaucracy and cost, in the form of plain-language-monitoring officials, without actually improving communication with the public. “Let me speak with extremely plain language,” said National MP Chris Bishop. “This bill is the stupidest bill to come before parliament in this term. National will repeal it.” Labour’s lawmakers argue that ultimately, it will pay off – via higher tax compliance, less time spent by call centres and staff dealing with a bewildered public, and increased trust in government.Can clearer sentences really achieve all that? Possibly not. But advocates say plain language is a boon for accountability as well as comprehension. “The language is a vehicle. It’s just a means to an end,” says Harris: it should tell people what happened, who was responsible, and what can be done. In an ideal world, that would mean an end to artefacts such as “mistakes were made”: a sentence structure where errors float unencumbered by responsible parties,
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