Plain Language Bill

I move, That the Plain Language Bill be now read a third time.

It is a pleasure to take a call, today, on the third reading of my bill, the Plain Language Bill. I want to begin my contribution by acknowledging my colleague and Minister for the Public Service, the Hon Chris Hipkins, who was the original drafter of the bill. Minister Hipkins drafted the bill, back in 2012, based on similar legislation implemented in the United States. The US Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires the Federal Government to write all new publications, forms, and publicly distributed documents in a clear, concise, well-organised manner that follows the best practices of plain language writing.

The purpose of the Plain Language Bill is to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Public Service agencies and Crown agents, and to improve the accessibility of certain documents that they make available to the public by providing for those documents to use language that is appropriate to the intended audience, and clear, concise, and well organised.

New Zealand is at its best when we can all understand and easily participate in our democracy. Every day, Government agencies are engaged in communication with the public. When Government agencies are explaining services, benefits, or how to comply with requirements, they should use plain language and avoid jargon.

As MPs, it is common to provide support to constituents who have had difficulty interpreting letters or Government documents. This is particularly the case for constituents who are migrants or who have English as a second language. When people are seeking information, it’s important that the information is accessible and easy to understand. This bill will help make that happen.

Using plain language and simple words makes sentences easier to scan and makes content more accessible to a wider range of people, including people whose first language is not English. I want to thank everyone who participated in the select committee process, where we made a number of changes to the bill, including defining “document” as anything that sets out text in a visible and tangible form and medium, like print, or in a visible form by electronic means, like a web page on an internet site; replacing the definition of “relevant document” to make clear what documents must use plain language; clarifying that only documents in English must use plain language; making it clear that the Act would not restrict a reporting agency from including te reo Māori in any relevant document; making it clear that a relevant document is one that is intended for public consumption; clarifying who “the public” is, for the purpose of the bill; clarifying that just because a document is made available to the public under the Official Information Act, this does not mean it should be a relevant document for the purposes of the bill; stating that agencies must take reasonable steps to ensure that relevant documents use plain language; clarifying that a Public Service agency’s legal duty is owed to the Public Service Commissioner; making it clear that the bill does not create any legal rights or obligations that are enforceable in a court of law; requiring the commissioner to issue guidance, including accessibility guidance, on how reporting agencies may comply with all requirements under the bill; providing that the commissioner must have regard to international best practice on plain language writing when developing the guidance; making it the responsibility of plain language officers to deal with feedback from the public, rather than complaints or requests; and removing from clause 10(1) the reference to the commissioner making recommendations to the Minister on guidelines and best practice.

Throughout the debate on this bill, both in select committee and the public domain, we’ve had submissions and supportive comments from many in the media, and I want to make note of some of those in particular. There are two particular agencies that I’ve had a lot of contact with, one being Write Ltd. The brand manager for Write Ltd, Penny de Borst, said to the media, about the Plain Language Bill and the use of plain language, “It increases trust and transparency … it supports equity … it works for people with English as an additional language, it works for people who use screen readers … it’s easier to translate. And it also improves efficiency: if every email that came into your in-box was short, crystal clear, how much time would you save every day?” And Shelly Davies, who’s an excellent plain language coach in New Zealand, said this: “Academia, historically, teaches us to use a language to speak to other academics, and that’s the only way most of learn how to write so we come into our jobs and use this overly-formal language … It doesn’t work when we’re communicating to a wider audience.”

We had a number of submissions through the select committee process from submitters in support of the bill. Write Ltd, again, said, “Our work with almost every government agency over many years has given us an in-depth understanding of the colossal waste of money and time that results from un-plain website information, government forms, and explanatory leaflets. Government agencies spend millions of dollars annually on responding to questions, clarifying information, following up on poorly completed forms—and on calming upset members of the public who cannot find what they need or understand the information once they find it.” And they went on to say, “One project we completed several years ago saved an average [of] $1.5 million annually by revising a form that had close to a 100 percent error rate.” They’ve gone on to say, again, that “Appointing a plain language officer creates a formal mechanism to expect and promote plain language, rather than relying on the goodwill and enthusiasm of a few who have no mandate or resources to create change.”

I want to particularly note some comments from Blind Low Vision NZ, who clarified the need to include accessibility guidelines in the bill. They said, “The most obvious reason to use Plain Language writing is to make important information and ideas more accessible to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and others with disabilities affecting reading, comprehension, and other cognitive functions. We know how to replace steps with ramps. We know how to widen doorways and make restrooms larger for wheelchair users. We can accommodate Deaf people with Sign Language and captions on videos. Blind people, deafblind people and those with low vision can use large print, Braille, or audiobooks. We must strive to make information, instructions, and ideas more cognitively accessible, particularly for people with intellectual, developmental, and learning disabilities. Information and communication to the public must be accessible to people with print disabilities at the same time as everyone else.”

Another agency, the National Building Financial Capability Charitable Trust—FinCap—commented about the impact on financial documents. They said, in their submission to the select committee, “A recent survey of financial mentors showed that their client cases have become more complex. This reflects the multiple and compounding challenges that whānau can face. Through ensuring that plain and clear language is used by public services, time can be saved for financial mentors and the whānau they walk alongside.”

I’d like to finish with some positive submissions that we received from members of the public and individuals who were supportive of the bill. Amanda Nally noted that “For the past 18 years [she has run a communications business—focused on writing for clarity for business, science and medical clients.” Before that, she worked as a journalist. Before that, she was a public servant working with Housing New Zealand and the Post Office for seven years. And she said, “It was while working in public service roles I was made keenly aware of the number of clients with low or no literacy—which sadly—in the post office extended to some staff. I quickly learned, to avoid embarrassing the clients who were seeking our help, to always offer to fill out any paper work for them.” She goes on to say, “On a more personal level, for the past seven years I have supported my elderly mother in her interactions with the health service, and WINZ, and as such have assisted her in filling out many, many forms.”

This quote from Richard Self really spoke to me. He said, and I agree, “Everyone who lives and works in Aotearoa gets essential information from the government. We have a democratic right to be able to understand this information. Plain language in government communications means information is easier to understand and act on—it’s written with the reader in mind.”

It has been a privilege overseeing the passage of the Plain Language Bill through Parliament. I thank everyone who has supported the passing of this bill and helped make the improvements to it, especially officials, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, submitters, and my colleagues on the Governance and Administration Committee. This bill will make a positive difference to the lives of New Zealanders, and I commend it to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

But I do say to the member: this is not the type of achievement which she will be remembered for. This is the type of achievement which is simply, I think, a bunch of Labour Party backbenchers looking for work when they lose their seats at the next election. Because when they leave and are kicked out of this Parliament at the next election, they’ll be looking for work and plain language officers will be their new job titles.

They’ll be lining up for all the new plain language officer jobs. I can see Glen Bennett, he’s keen—he’s as keen as beans to be a plain language officer after he loses the New Plymouth seat at the next election. He can’t wait to get a new job working for the Ministry of Social Development or somewhere as a plain language officer. And I know that Steph Lewis, who was speaking in the general debate, she’ll be looking forward to that; the seat of Whanganui will be coming back to the National Party and she’ll be looking for work—and plain language officer, I can see her.

But the sad news for them is National will be repealing this piece of legislation because this is a stupid piece of legislation, it doesn’t actually fix anything, and it’s got no actual requirements on the Public Service departments to actually comply with it. So all it is is—let me count—1,923 words, and that’s not including the explanatory note, by the way; that’s just the legislation. It is 1,923 words, which could be done by just simply the Public Service Commission writing a letter to the Public Service agency saying “Please use plain language in your documents”. Now, that’s not many words. But they’ve used 1,923 words to use what could be made in seven words. Absolute failure. And so it really beggars belief, actually, why we’re here debating this.

And there’s absolutely no evidence that there’s actually a problem. And you hear the member on the other side stand up and say, “Well, you know, we had people say that they couldn’t read documents and it’s costing millions of dollars”. Well, this bill will cost millions of dollars. She’s got no evidence to prove that the current state is costing that money; it’s just some anecdotal “someone said something”. But there’s no costings as to what this will cost, because we know that this bill will have a cost. Because what it does is it requires every single reporting agency—hundreds of agencies—to put in place plain language officers in their agencies.

Plain language police! That’s what they’ll become. The plain language police, who will be having their clipboards and their little white coats, running around, looking over the shoulders of all the public servants, checking to see that they’re using plain language—are they keeping to the guidelines, are they writing with words of less than one syllable? Well, that’s what they’ll be trying to do under the new guidelines, if this bill passes. Because the Public Service Commission will have to hire a whole lot of people to issue guidelines to the Public Service, and the Public Service agencies will need to employ plain language officers who will then read the guidelines. Hopefully, those guidelines are less complicated than the piece of legislation.

Let me read this clause to the House and to those listening; I know there’s lots of people listening. “If a document contains a part that meets the requirements in subsection (1) and a part that does not, section 6 applies only to the part that meets the requirements.” Now, that’s pretty plain, isn’t it? Very plain language! Or what about this one: “The transitional savings, and related provisions set out in Schedule 1 have effect according to their terms”. I have no idea what that means. The Plain Language Bill is not even in plain language itself. How ironic is that? There are 1,923 words to tell us absolutely nothing and to do absolutely nothing.

But this is this Government. All they know what to do is spend, tax, and grow the bureaucracy. They’ve already hired how many thousand? Fourteen thousand new public servants in the core Public Service—14,000—

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Nurses and teachers.

SIMEON BROWNAnd they say, “Oh, those are nurses and teachers.” Well, I’m sorry, those numbers don’t include the nurses. They are employed outside. The teachers are employed separately as well. So the members on the other side are completely factually incorrect. These are core public servants working for—

💬 Hon Poto Williams: 1,500 police.

SIMEON BROWNEven the police are outside those numbers and that’s from a former Minister of Police. I’m not sure whether the members on the other side—they’re clearly not fit for governing this country and clearly not fit for passing this piece of legislation. Numbers are clearly not their strong suit and words are not their strong suit either.

But what I say is 14,000 more core public servants and bureaucrats under this Government, and they don’t even know how many more. It will be hundreds more jobs that will need to be found; millions and millions of dollars in paying the salaries. And we’re already paying $2 billion more in salaries for core public servant bureaucrats than we were when National left office. That’s $2 billion every single year—$2 billion of backroom bureaucrats, not front-line services. That’s the legacy of this Government. That’s the legacy of this Government who are failing to actually deliver on outcomes and delivering on the services New Zealanders expect. All they’re delivering is more bureaucracy, more taxes, more spending, and New Zealanders are sick and tired of it.

So I’d just like to talk about some of the—

Order! ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa)The time has come for me to leave this chair for the dinner break. Our session will resume at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you. When the House adjourned, we were in the third reading of the Plain Language Bill. Simeon Brown has three minutes and 18 seconds remaining to speak.

💬 SIMEON BROWN: Thank you, Mr Speaker. As I was saying, the National Party not only opposes this bill but will repeal this piece of legislation, because all it will do is increase the amount of bureaucracy in New Zealand, it will cost taxpayers millions and millions of dollars more, and it will not do anything to actually help New Zealanders understand the bureaucratese of the bureaucrats which this Government has hired—14,000 more bureaucrats across the Public Service under their watch, costing taxpayers $2 billion.

As I said, it’s not even necessary. All that’s required, if the Government feels so passionate about this, is for the Minister for the Public Service to write a letter to the Public Service agency saying “Please write your documents in plain language.” And in fact, the submissions said exactly that. The legislation guidelines say legislation should only be made when it is necessary and the most appropriate means of achieving the policy objective. The Office of the Clerk considered the requirements in this bill to be uncertain and without consequence. It suggested that the committee explore whether officials could use non-legislative means. The reality is, this is a bill looking for a problem. It is wasting Parliament’s time, it is going to waste the bureaucracy’s time and the Public Service’s time, it is going to cost New Zealanders millions and millions of dollars, and no one is going to be better off.

But this is where this Government is at. They are the “tax, spend, and grow the bureaucracy” party, and New Zealanders are sick and tired of it. What they want the Public Service to be focused on is making sure our children are at school; making sure the ram raids, which are up 500 percent, stop; making sure that people who need hip operations can get them in a timely fashion; making sure that the Public Service is actually delivering the outcomes that they need. But all this Government puts up is a bill which says, “Let’s have plain language police in the Public Service to try and make sure that things are written in plain English.”, as I said earlier, using a bill with 1,923 words to say what could be said in a letter of seven words. This is a particularly ridiculous piece of legislation, the National Party opposes it, and I say in plain language: “We will repeal it”.

In plain language, I support this legislation. This is a members’ day, and this is the third reading. Rachel Boyack, congratulations on getting to this point on the third reading of a members’ day of a member’s bill to support the Plain Language Bill, that will come into law, I hope, this evening.

Now, the previous speaker, Simeon Brown, threw out the good old rhetoric around this bill is a bill looking for a problem. Well, I don’t quite see that to be the case. For myself, as someone who appreciates plain language and knows the importance and effectiveness of plain language, I support this piece of legislation. Whether it’s the people who are dealing with ACC or whether it be benefit entitlements, taxation, immigration requirements, compliance issues, or rights in terms of coming to the Family Court and other court situations, I think plain language is plain and simple, that it is important for us as a society.

Now, I’ve spoken in previous speeches about this, and I’ve spoken around how our language evolves and changes, and I just want to let people know tonight: do not be afraid—or be not afraid, as we used to say.

💬 Hon Andrew Little: That’s Shakespeare; that’s Shakespearian.

That’s very Shakespearean. I don’t want to bring up Shakespeare, but, hey, you’ve gone there. Be not afraid of plain language, because it doesn’t mean that for all of you beautifully educated people, with eloquent spoons in your mouths, under your tongues, you can still speak with that spoon in your mouth, under your tongue. You can still speak your big, wonderful, wonderful, huge words that I don’t have, and I’m OK with that, because this is around accessibility. This is around having language that everyone and anyone can understand. So be not afraid. Be not afraid because you can still continue with your large and big words.

But when it comes to our public sector, when it comes to us in terms of Government agencies, surely we want to make sure that every single person in our society has access—everyone in our society has access. And as I was looking through the submissions, I came to the Citizens Advice Bureau. They made it very clear in terms of the work that they do. They spend a lot of time meeting with clients, meeting with members of the public, explaining complex documents, unpacking what a letter from Work and Income or a letter from Births, Deaths and Marriages actually means when it comes to potentially filling out a form or understanding what their requirement is at the bottom of the document when they sign it. So I agree with the Citizens Advice Bureau in their support for making our language easier and more accessible for all members of our society.

And I come back to what the Plain Language Bill is about. It aims to improve the effectiveness and accountability of the Public Service by requiring communications to be clear and accessible to the public—to make it clear and accessible to the public. Now, why would you not want that? Why would you be resistant to making sure that everyone—the public—has clear access to democracy, clear access to our agencies and our services, clear access to what rightful entitlements they may have through Government policy?

So that’s why I support this piece of legislation. And I don’t want to bang on about my history and my work, but I’ve experienced this time and time again. Now, I have to confess that I do not have a university degree. In fact—

💬 Hon Andrew Little: Confess nothing.

Confession time: I may have confessed it before because I’m pretty open about it, but I did make it through sixth form certificate. I did pass.

💬 Hon Andrew Little: The second time?

The second time—it was actually the first time; I made it the first time. I was successful, and then I made it through about a quarter of the way through seventh form. And just because life’s opportunities came along, I was able to move on to a different space and place.

Now, I was nervous, actually, when I was asked to run for Parliament. I was very nervous because I thought, “Well, I ain’t no lawyer. I don’t know all the big words that all the big people use.” I thought, actually, “I’m no accountant, I’m no business studies graduate, and I’m no professor or doctor.” In fact, the only letters I have after my name are—

💬 Marja Lubeck: What are they?

I have none, actually. As I was thinking, I was trying to think of something funny or something—MP! And I have a friend—he’s an elderly friend—and he has a really bad dad joke every time he sees me. He says, “Oh, listen. Glen, he’s the local MP; he’s a missing person.” Hilarious, eh?

Anyway, it was a dad joke, so I digress. But for me coming into this place, I was very nervous and apprehensive, and, in fact, I said no several times because I didn’t feel I had the words, and I didn’t feel like I had the education and the training to be in this place. But then I realised that this is the House of Representatives—this isn’t the House of lawyers or professors or doctors; it is the House of Representatives. It’s the House of all people in Aotearoa New Zealand. And so that’s why I stand here as the MP for New Plymouth, as someone who uses plain language on the daily, which does not stop people from using educated language, the language of those who know far bigger and more powerful words than I do. Like I say, be not afraid because you can still use those words, but it means that everyone has access to important pieces of information.

It’s been interesting paying attention and following this legislation through the House and how vermently and how—I don’t think that’s the right word. Vermently or vehemently?

💬 Hon Members: Vehement.

Vehement, see. There we go. Exercise complete—tick. Basically, what I mean, is—I don’t know because I just forgot, but I’ll come back to the bill and mention the submissions as I paid attention as it went through the Governance and Administration Committee.

Thank you to the committee for spending your time on this. But it was a submission from Amanda Nally, who spent the past 18 years running her own communications business. Her focus has been on writing for clarity for business, science, and medical clients. But before that, she worked as a journalist, and before that she had been a public servant—in fact, working for what was Housing New Zealand and the post office back in the day for a number of years. And she stated, “It was while working in public service roles I was made keenly aware of the number of clients with low or no literacy, which sadly in the post office extended to a small staff, and I quickly learnt to avoid embarrassing the clients who are seeking our help to always offer to fill out the paperwork for them.”

And I know this too well as well, because in my work and the community sector, that was always the case. You never assumed to know that someone understood or could read the documents. You never imagined or assumed that a client or a community person you were working with knew how to spell correctly or even know how to write. This bill doesn’t fix that, but this bill makes it more accessible for people. Let us never assume that the person next to you has had the privilege or the opportunity you’ve had. Never assume that the person next to you has been able to have the experiences or the opportunities that your family or whānau gave you in terms of being able to read, write, and speak.

And, sadly, we look at what’s going on in a number of families around our nation, and I’m glad that we have services available to help when it comes to reading and writing and when it comes to speech therapy, because we need to make sure that people have language. We need to make sure that people have language that they can communicate with one another, because language is power. Words are power. And I think maybe that comes to the reason there’s been so much pushback on this legislation, because the second we allow plain language within our places and spaces in our society, those who have and own the language suddenly may lose, or feel like they lose, some of their power. But I can say tonight that you do not lose your power. You just allow others to have power and to step up and to have access to all aspects of our society. And I know, as a society and as a nation, surely that’s what we want. We want those who are educated and those who struggle in education—we want all people—to have access to our services, to our bureaucracies, to our Government, and to contribute in a meaningful way to our society. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Firstly—because I’m sure it’s the first time I’ve had the opportunity to speak in this House since you’ve been elevated to the Throne—I wanted to congratulate you on that. And I will say I want to hope you’re getting on well with your blue pen; I have a red one and I hope you’ll be completely neutral when it comes to the speech I’m about to make.

I wanted to start tonight with a few comments about Glen Bennett’s speech, because I didn’t think there was a word he said that I can’t agree with, interestingly. Because what he talked about—and what he meant to talk about—really related to the fact that we need, in this Parliament, to create stuff that people can understand. And there’s two challenges with that and Glen raised both of them.

One is the fact that in our education system—or somewhere in our system—we are letting people down. So consequently, through our electorate offices, we’ve all seen a large number of the very people that Glen Bennett was talking about who come into our office, who you don’t know whether they can read or write or not, and who often can’t. So when you get them to fill out a consent form to get you to go and see Minister Little and ask him a couple of questions, you don’t know whether you need to fill it out for them or they can fill it out themselves. And that’s a serious challenge for us.

That, though, I don’t think really relates to this bill. I think the issue that I have with this bill is not that it’s not a good principle; I think everybody needs to be able to understand what we’re trying to tell them, and one of the challenges we have in politics, of course, is that we don’t get our message out there very clearly. So from that perspective, I think Glen Bennett was absolutely right. A lot of what we need to get people to understand, we need to put it in language that they can understand.

I think our argument with this bill is that there probably was a different way of doing that. But having said that, I want to get on and talk about what I thought was an extraordinary job that Rachel Boyack did of shepherding this bill through the select committee. She didn’t have a lot of help from the other side of the House, but none the less she did an awful lot of work—a lot of work. I’ve never seen, I don’t think, in my time—other than perhaps with the euthanasia bill or one or two of those big ones—a member who has done as much work as she did to get this bill into some sort of order to come back to the House, and I’ll talk about some of those issues later.

So I think that Rachel Boyack did a very good job, and irrespective of whether you agree with the bill or not—as I think Glen Bennett again said—this is a members’ day and members can do what they like in this place within reason, provided the Speaker lets them, and if they can get those bills through the House, that’s their prerogative and good luck to them.

So I think from that perspective, we’ve got to respect the fact that members bring things to the House in good faith. I think, ironically, this bill was in the name of Michael Wood at one stage before. And it’s quite interesting that he’s putting the Fair Pay Agreements Bill through the House at the moment. This bill, of course, will create quite a few more people that might be eligible for a fair pay agreement. But none the less, that’s how it will work. You know, you could end up with 40 or 50 of them in this thing that would qualify, of course, for a fair pay agreement.

But, you know, I think it is interesting that some of these bills sit on the ballot for years—for a long, long time—they come out, and they might not be relevant when they come out of the ballot. But Rachel did do a lot of work to make sure that she got this bill into some sort of, I guess, order that will no doubt pass tonight.

The other interesting factor about this bill is that there’s a number of definitions in it that I think are really quite interesting. We had to almost go to the point of defining “plain language”. Now, that is extraordinarily complicated.

Again, if I go back to Glen Bennett’s speech, plain language to you and plain language to me—being Irish and Scottish—will be different. Those sort of things are different for different people. So to get a standard for the commissioner—whose job it is to actively set the standard in this bill—is going to be very, very difficult and very complicated. So I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do.

I go back to Glen Bennett again because he spent quite a bit of time talking about lawyers. Well, I’ve had a great deal of difficulty in my life understanding what lawyers are talking about. And, of course, they write almost every piece of legislation that comes and goes from this House. So, really, that’s the profession we should be getting at with respect to trying to create what this bill terms as “plain language”, which I’d term perhaps as more something that everyone can understand. Because, in fact, we need to create that environment.

The other interesting thing about this bill is it doesn’t deal with any other languages. Of course, in New Zealand we have two other official languages and numerous—as we’ve shown in the Parliament this week with the number of different prayers we’ve had—other languages used frequently in New Zealand. All of this bill relates, effectively, to the English language and the way it’s written. Because, of course, most of the other languages that evolve and are used in New Zealand come from the written English language. That’s just how you translate them that’ll be the interesting piece.

So the bill had the job of, first of all, defining “plain language”. But then it had to define a “relevant document”. Because, effectively, this bill applies to what’s termed “relevant documents”, which are documents from reporting agencies, public entities, and Crown agencies, basically. So those are the only people affected by this bill.

This bill doesn’t spread its wings right across New Zealand; it spreads its wings primarily through the Government agencies and the Crown agencies associated with them. But none the less, that does create quite a lot of extra jobs. And depending on how they interpret the bill—and, of course, that’s the challenge we have in New Zealand if you go right back to the Resource Management Act when it was first implemented, it’s the interpretation of the Act that’s caused the problem, not the Act itself at the time.

So a lot of this happens through this House where we put a bill—in good faith, I guess—in place. The interpretation of it then hugely complicates it and we end up with something quite different than we anticipated might happen in the course of that bill going through the House. I think, from that perspective, the commentary that goes with the bill is hugely important to getting a result at the other end.

One of the other things we do—and it’s come up in the course of a select committee discussion today—is we set a bill in place and we leave it to the ministries or the people behind the wall to set the regulations. And then we’ve got no idea when we’ve passed the bill what those regulations are going to look like. In my view, that’s something that really needs to change in our lawmaking processes. Because people submit in good faith, but they submit in good faith not knowing what’s going to come out the other end.

This bill itself had quite a number of submissions in favour of it; it had a few submissions equally as strongly opposed to it. But the submissions that were in favour of it were really in favour of, I guess, writing things in a sense, as Glen Bennett said, that people could understand—didn’t necessarily need a police force to, I don’t think, enforce that. I think it just needed an acceptance amongst our agencies that they should write things and put things in a manner that—again to quote Glen Bennett; he’s not a lawyer, he’s just an average person—an average person could understand, and we don’t always achieve that.

The other things we defined in this bill were, effectively, the job of the commissioner. And that, again, is quite a complicated one because we tried to define what the commissioner needed to do as he set what he interpreted—or she interpreted—as “plain language”. Quite a complicated issue. So it’s really quite interesting just defining the issues in this bill.

Then the reporting process is also quite interesting because the reporting agency must report annually to the commissioner on how the agency is complying with the bill. The commissioner must then report to the Minister, who in turn reports to the House. So it’s actually not as simple a process as people might believe it is.

So the bill has created a whole lot of reporting requirements for ministries and Crown agencies that will inevitably cost money, and I think that’s the issue that we take with the bill primarily: not the fact that we don’t want things to be written in plain language that everyone can understand, not the fact that we don’t want to have a system that makes life easier for all of those people, but the fact this is quite a complicated way of going about what probably could have been achieved in another way.

The other irony of this bill is that the Act does not comply a legal right or impose legal obligation on any person that’s enforceable in a court of law. So if one of our ministries, for example, decide they’re not going to do it, I don’t really think there’s any way of enforcing it. So it, effectively, becomes a goodwill issue, and I think I’ve never seen that before in legislation—it might well be there but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. It’s a bit of irony in the fact that it’s virtually unenforceable, certainly unenforceable from a court of law perspective.

So that pretty much covers our position on it. We did submit a different view on the bill, for most of the reasons I outlined in my speech. But I have to reiterate the fact that we’re not all opposed to plain language in our written documents that we use. I’d encourage it, in fact.

Also, as I’ll say again, thank you to the select committee that put this through, but also thank you to Rachel Boyack—whether we agree with the bill or not—for the work she did to get to where she got to, because she did do a lot of work on it. So thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for letting my red pen go. See you later.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise in support of the Plain Language Bill. I would like to start my contribution by echoing the words of Mr Ian McKelvie, in congratulating Rachel Boyack on shepherding this bill through the House and for her work on the select committee, which has obviously earned her respect from across the select committee table, which is really good to hear. I would like to reaffirm my support for this bill, and I will endeavour to do that in the next few minutes in plain language.

The Plain Language Bill obviously promotes the use of plain language in official documents and websites, and what it does is actually require the Government to lead by example and to start making that happen. Mr McKelvie outlined that there are several Government organisations that are already having this requirement, but we need to lead by example to make sure that, in practice, this is also taking place. It has been said before, but I would like to repeat it because I think it’s a really important statement, that New Zealand is at its best when we all can understand and easily participate in our democracy. Every day, Government agencies are engaged in communication with the public, and when Government agencies are explaining services and benefits, or how to comply with requirements, if they don’t use plain language and if they go back into using more convoluted language and jargon, you disempower people from participating in that process.

Mr McKelvie spoke about constituents approaching him. And likewise, when people come to our office in Warkworth, they sometimes bring documentation with them that they may have received from Government agencies and ask us—sometimes in quite frank wording—what the “something” this letter actually means. So we have to go through it with them line by line and explain what it actually says, and sometimes that takes quite a bit of reading ourselves. There was one recently that I was in the office for. Someone had a letter from the Ministry of Justice on outstanding fines, but the next action that needed to be taken was kind of hidden in between all the other sentences, and it wasn’t that easy to get to it. So, again, using plain language and simple words to make those sentences easier to understand makes it easier to scan, makes the information more accessible to people.

I wasn’t part of the select committee that dealt with this particular bill, but I had the pleasure of reading through quite a few of the submissions, and there were some really valid submissions made that dealt specifically with accessibility. For example, Margaret Stefanitsis mentioned that “Clear and straightforward writing will make it easier for those who do business with the government to have faith in government agencies and build a reputation for reliability and trustworthiness.” And, on accessibility, she said that “Plain language supports accessibility because it works well with assistive devices and is easier to translate.” So here is actually a really practical issue: that using plain language makes it much easier for translation devices and assistive devices to support people.

Parents of Vision Impaired (NZ) Inc said, “We have noticed that many communications require a very high level of English language comprehension, and this language is a barrier for families. Families who are dealing with a disabled child, and particularly during the process of diagnosis and grappling with what that means, are under pressure, in distress, and/or feeling anxious and worried.” What the organisation said was that “Using clear, plain language would assist families and alleviate some of the stressors that they are under.” I haven’t heard much about this aspect of accessibility, but I think it is a really valid one, and thank you to those who came to the select committee and made that particular point. I thought it was really helpful.

On some of the bill’s history, the Plain Language Bill has, in fact, been long awaited, rather than its being an answer looking for a problem, as Mr Simeon Brown called it. I like to think of it more in line with the balanced contribution from Mr McKelvie, in that there is a need for this bill. The bill was originally drafted by the Hon Chris Hipkins in 2012, and he did that after similar legislation was passed in the United States in 2010. The US Congress passed the Plain Writing Act of 2010 on 13 October that year. It required the US Federal Government to write all new publications, forms, and publicly distributed documents in a clear, concise, well organised manner that follows the best practices of plain language writing. The purpose of the Plain Writing Act of 2010 is “to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies … by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.”

I’d like also to reiterate again the stellar job that the select committee did in general, but in particular the role of Rachel Boyack in that process, because, looking through the commentary to the bill, there were a lot of changes and improvements and practical recommendations made to make this a better bill that is being brought back to the House. Now, I won’t be able to run through all of those changes. Other colleagues may want to pick that up, because there are some really interesting aspects to it, but I fear I may run out of time, since I’m only allocated 10 minutes and I see I’m already quite far into that time line. So I will give that part a miss.

Just a little bit back on the history, then: the bill was first introduced on 23 September 2021—a very special date in fact, because it was the day that my son had his 20th birthday, and three years prior, I think, I got into this job, on 23 September. It was referred to the Governance and Administration Committee on 15 February 2022, and on 6 April evidence was heard from the member in charge of the bill, Rachel Boyack. Submissions were called and closed on 31 March 2022 and, from what I understand, there were 68 submissions received and considered from various groups and individuals. And, again, I think it’s not an insignificant number. So that would indicate to me that there was quite a bit of interest in this particular topic. The select committee heard oral evidence from 20 submitters on this particular bill.

Now, just on the second language aspect of this bill, I think, being an immigrant myself, I have quite often been in situations where—and I won’t even go into slang, because I could tell you a whole lot of other stories, but they’re probably not very suitable for here in the House. But I have plenty of stories of where the difficulty of words made it much harder to participate in certain processes in the country. In fact, I started a law degree when I was in my mid-forties and the amount of words that you have to use in that kind of study would blow you away. It shouldn’t be impossible for other people to be able to do it, but in fact it clearly is. So I feel that plain language clearly is a matter of social justice and a democratic right, and a healthy democracy rests upon clear speaking and writing—ideas that are expressed in a way that everybody can understand.

There was a submission, in fact, from Andreea Calude, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Waikato, and she expressed the following about the bill, talking about that linguistic equality: “Minority, migrant, and marginalised communities have more difficulty understanding complex and jargon-laden documents, which tips the scales even further against them.” I think this was the point that my colleague Glen Bennett, in his excellent contribution, made previously: there already is inequality in society and having non - plain language that people have to use just basically tips those scales of inequality further against people. Not everybody has the privilege to grow up in New Zealand, so speaking a second language, and not everybody has the privilege to attend university or participate in further education to learn to use the type of complicated, bureaucratic language.

So I think this bill, as opposed to what has been said before, is a really important bill. It’ll make Government and democracy more accessible to everyone. I thank Rachel Boyack for her work on it, the select committee for their work on it, and I commend it to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Holy thesaurus, it’s the Plain Language Bill. I’m not usually the person that speaks on behalf of the Plain Language Bill, but I’m what you’ve got tonight. I also wanted to acknowledge that people started talking about Shakespeare earlier in the debate, but I was disappointed in the delivery, because no one came up with any of the quotes. The thing about a debate is that the world is a stage, and we all must play our parts. There are entrances and there are exits, and that’s what makes the debate so fruitful.

I feel that this bill will pass tonight. To be or not to be, that is the big question, but on the “be” side they have got 65 votes, and so that’s probably going to happen.

💬 Simon Court: 64.

64—oh, sorry. Plain language; I need plain maths. Thank you very much, the guy in the corner here.

We will be supporting this bill, because what I see in this bill is that it creates transparency around guidelines around plain language. There will be reporting to the Minister and reporting to Parliament around progress that makes it far more transparent and inclusive as well, so that’s a good thing. We think that’s a good thing, and as much as I love a good word salad, it is not the vernacular diet which will actually get what we need to communicate over the line.

That’s the job of the House, of members in the House, as well. I don’t know how many meetings I’ve been to where people have waffled on with big, long words—“jargony” words that just don’t land at all. It’s actually, in my view, very easy to be long-winded and complicated, and to drag it out with all the big words, and so on and so forth, but it’s a lot more complex, actually, to get things down concisely and for them to land with people, and that’s really important. So the principle of that is very important.

I wanted to acknowledge comments from Mr Ian McKelvie. He spoke to the hard work of the member that brought this bill to the House, Rachel Boyack—that she has engaged in a good way to actually make this bill fit for purpose, to get it in such a way for it to do the things that we need it to do.

So, plainly and not so plainly, the Greens will be supporting this bill. Thank you very much.

First, let me congratulate Rachel Boyack. It’s quite a thing as a backbencher to have a bill that you have been shepherding and nannying through the process come to fruition, as we all hope on this side of the House that it will do tonight. I also want to acknowledge, as she did, her predecessors, because it is relevant when you have a bill that has been a project worked upon by many members to acknowledge those, and so I acknowledge them for their work and their previous championing of this very worthy little bill. Finally, I also thank the Governance and Administration Committee, who put in a lot of work to making a bill about simplifying language much more simple, and the submitters, who helped them in their work to identify the issues and to craft this piece of legislation.

Briefly—if you’ve just tuned in, audience members—this bill promotes plain language in official documents by Government departments. It does two things: it requires the Public Service Commissioner to give some guidance around how to speak plainly in official documents to Government agencies; and then it gets the Government agencies to take some responsibility for how they’re going to make sure language is simple and straightforward to understand for the members of the public who are its intended audience, by appointing a person in each agency who will be a plain language officer, and it’s that person’s responsibility to marshal the training and see that standards are actually met.

Now, why is it necessary? A couple of speakers across the aisle in this debate but also in previous debates have disputed the necessity, and some of them quite ungraciously, if I may say so, and some of them quite repetitively. I was quite amused to have just read Mr Simeon Brown’s speech from across the aisle in the second reading debate and to then hear phrases and paragraphs and then pages roll off his lips that I had read only moments before—but we can’t all be original, Mr Speaker.

Now, it is interesting also to hear that derision rolling across the aisle, derision that suggests that this is a pointless exercise and that plain language and simple speaking can be enforced as simply as Ministers just vaguely telling their staff, “I need you to calm it down, people. I need you to simplify it.”—no need for a bill, no need for ongoing monitoring, apparently, and no need for training. The problem with that proposition is that I come from a career of working with people, aka lawyers—who are still people—who also believed that they could speak plainly and that speaking plainly was a simple matter. Like the late—not the late; like the previous President of the United States Mr Trump, lawyers believe that we have all the words, we have the best words, and we know best how to use them.

I have spent, in fact, an adult lifetime interviewing judges and senior barristers in the criminal courts about how they understand and how they go about simplifying language in courtroom contexts when they need to deal with people who are not cognitively developmentally normal adult witnesses and defendants, when they’re dealing with child witnesses, when they’re dealing with people with communication impairments—as, in fact, they very often are, because, as we know, often defendants and witnesses in criminal cases are people with communication or with intellectual disabilities. Now, I have spent this lifetime interviewing these judges and these senior barristers, and I have spent a lifetime, as a result, being told, just as Mr Brown across the aisle told us, just how simple—just how simple—that exercise is.

When it came to simplifying your language for children, for example, I have been told so many times over the years that my judges and my lawyers knew how to communicate with children; they had no problem simplifying their language; many of them had children of their own, and many of them, even those who did not have children of their own, knew of children; and, in some rare and very special cases, some of them had actually been children in the past themselves. The problem with their comments was that what they didn’t know, but I did, was that there’s 30 or more years of hard, solid, empirical research from linguists, from developmental experts, and from people who are experts in the language of people with intellectual disability to show that lawyers are, in fact—to use the technical term—completely crap when it comes to simplifying our language. We are notoriously incapable of speaking plainly and we have an appalling tendency to reach for the $10 words and the difficult syntax.

💬 Hon Member: I don’t.

There is, in fact, a tendency—there are, of course, in this House some notable, notable exceptions to that rule. But they are exceptions, and we all know what exceptions do: they prove the rule. In fact, there is even a really rather lovely study that shows that the better you are at using language and the more highly educated you are as a speaker, the worse you are at simplifying your language or, for that matter, at noticing whether or not you have simplified your language. We are not only people who are highly educated people—lawyers, if they can be called highly educated—and we are not only bad at simplifying our language, but we are also bad at recognising when we’re not simplifying our language. It’s a terrible catch-22.

So when we look at this bill, we instantly see the point, I would hope, of having a system where we monitor, we train, we go back, we check, we research, and we look at whether we are achieving the standard. Just telling people to do it ain’t never going to work, because we’ve been telling lawyers and judges to simplify their language around children and people with intellectual disabilities for the last 40 years, and it doesn’t work unless you have training and accountability.

That’s what we’ve been doing, and these are very much the people that we are talking to here, aren’t they? As has been commented upon several times during the course of this debate, many of the people who write the laws are high-end language users—lawyers—many of the people who staff the Government departments that are writing the communications are high-end language users and lawyers, and many, many of the people who are going to need to be able to decipher their documents are, in fact, those with far lesser language competence.

So this is from my perspective, as someone who has worked in the courts for many, many years, a really important process, and it’s not just the communication-impaired that it goes for, because there is a considerable body of research on what happens to a cognitively normal adult’s language comprehension when they are under stress. The technical term for what happens to a person whose language is under stress—let’s say they are being arrested, being pulled over by the police for their driving, or being interviewed by a police officer and trying to find their way through a courtroom. These people, who are relying on summonses, on charging documents, on bail conditions—their language, typically, goes to pot.

There are remarkable studies that show that when a cognitively normal, competent adult is under cross-examination from a lawyer, they go back to childhood levels of language comprehension and usage. Stress takes away your ability to understand language and it takes away your ability to use language. These are the situations where we are hoping that agencies are going to be designing documents for the people in these stressful situations.

This bill is a really necessary piece, and I say that because recently, a friend came to me—a very, very competent woman. Her son, a young man in his early 20s, who is also a perfectly normal, competent boy, had been pulled over for bad driving and was off to court, and she said to me, “I just want you to check out this summons to court. I’m pretty sure it says that he doesn’t have to turn up.” I looked at this document, which was in about six-point type on some sort of paper that you could see through if you held it up and was full of $10, $20 words, and it absolutely was necessary for this young man to turn up in court. Had he not turned up in court, we would have had a warrant to arrest.

It’s a simple example, but I think it does point to a problem that I think does exist: without plain language, we have courts full of people who don’t understand where they’re going. We need this bill. I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, that was an interesting speech about lawyers, and I think Emily Henderson might get a letter from the Law Society and perhaps they’ll disbar her for bringing the profession into disrepute, but in any case.

There’s always an opportunity cost with Parliament’s time, so it could be worse. Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re doing this and spending time on this instead of watching the Labour Party create laws that New Zealanders don’t like and will very likely punish them for in the next general election. This bill has no teeth, no particular enforcement—which is a good thing—but it is going to be enormously costly up to the point at which we get rid of it next year. This bill epitomises the Government’s insatiable appetite for creating bureaucrats that the public sector simply just does not need and in fact, I think, they’d have a very hard time actually hiring for. I think the recruitment people are probably quite worried about this.

Again, the experiences of migrants dealing with, presumably, the immigration system, but perhaps other aspects of our law, has been talked about; those with English as a second language. For sure, there are some difficulties there, though I think I’ll just repeat what I said in a previous reading of this bill—can’t remember if it was the first or the second—look, if the Government particularly wants to help migrants in that space, in that context, just remove English language requirements from the immigration system. I’d totally support that. I know they won’t, but, you know, actions speak louder than words.

There was some seriously dubious commentary about cost savings in the first speech of this reading, and it just sounds like a—something to do with printing material or revisiting material, I think; a dollar amount in the millions was mentioned as one example. This just sounds like a hilariously bad attempt to justify the cost that will be imposed on the taxpayer for this bill.

This bill is totally unnecessary. It is probably going to create a myriad of problems rather than solve problems. It is a total waste of time, and I’m not going to spend any more time on it. We’re going to get rid of it, we’re going to repeal it, and if the plain language officers want to put a jihad on us, then so be it. We’re opposed. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this Plain Language Bill, brought by my friend and colleague Rachel Boyack. I’d like to join others around the House in commending Rachel Boyack for being successful in getting a member’s bill drawn from the ballot and seeing this bill through to its third reading today where it will undoubtedly, I think, pass, and be a great credit to our legislative scheme.

So there are a few things I wanted to mention about the Plain Language Bill, some of which have been touched on by other members of the House and some of which are observations that I’ve made looking at this bill. I haven’t had an opportunity to speak on this bill yet and I wasn’t part of the Governance and Administration Committee that examined it. But I did read their commentary, and I can agree with other members around the House who have praised the work of the Governance and Administration Committee and their extensive examination of this bill, and in the myriad of sensible changes that they have put forward to make this a functioning and useful piece of legislation which will, I believe, improve equity and accessibility for people using documents produced by Crown agencies and other Public Service agencies.

So what else do we want to say about this Plain Language Bill? Well, the thing that I most wanted to emphasise is how I think that this is important and a good thing and a thing that we should be very proud of introducing in this House today. And that is because we know—as MPs who have to deal with a lot of paperwork, we know as people who have to read a lot of emails coming in from constituents around the country, we know as people who work with legislation on a daily basis, we know as people who read annual reports—that there is a very, very clear difference between something that is clearly written in plain language and something which is written in a complicated manner.

Yes, there are issues to do with literacy in this country. We do have goals to improve our literacy rates. But I don’t think we need to delve that deep into the reasons for this particular bill to say that the need for it is literacy. I think if we looked at, for example, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in English, and some of the documentation clearly written during the COVID response in order to make sure that people could receive and understand information very clearly, we will see that we have two languages that look very different despite the fact that they are both English. Those are extreme examples, but there are so many other examples within our Public Service, within our legislation, that could be improved upon if there’s a real focus. And that is why I think that this is really important. Just to go back to the goal of this bill, it’s really simple, and I find it difficult to understand why someone would disagree with this: improve the effectiveness and accountability of the Public Service by requiring communications to be clear and accessible to the public. Surely this is something we can all agree is vitally important and will help people understand the very important information that our Public Service organisations want to convey to them.

Another point that I wanted to raise is the issue of enforcement. Some other members of the House have criticised this bill by saying it lacks teeth or it lacks strength because there isn’t legal enforcement. I want to reflect on how we work as a society, and look at some other things that perhaps we don’t necessarily do because we think that we’re going to get caught and we’re going to face a penalty or there’s going to be legal repercussions; we do them because they’re the right thing to do. For example, most of us would try and keep to the speed limit. That’s not necessarily because we think that we’re going to get pulled over or we’re going to get a fine or we’re going to get taken to court because of it; it’s because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the safe thing to do. It’s a sensible thing to do as a member of—

💬 Simon Court: No, it’s not.

It’s not? I hear members on the other side saying keeping to the speed limit is not a sensible thing to do. I beg to differ. On this side of the House we like to keep to the speed limit.

Another example: we don’t defame people just because there is legal repercussion for that. We do it because, generally, we don’t like to make up untrue things about other people and say them publicly, because that’s not the right thing to do. So there are lots of things within our society that we do that are outlined in law that won’t necessarily always, in every situation—in fact, the vast majority of situations—result in legal repercussions. However, we follow them. This bill clearly states—I think it’s clause 10A—that there isn’t the ability to take legal action. I actually think, if we tease that out, that most members of the House would agree with that, because we don’t necessarily want cases going to court about failure to write in plain English. We don’t necessarily want that. It would be preferable for people to write in plain English; however, we don’t necessarily want legal action taken about it. So it’s a sensible measure, and I understand from talking to Rachel Boyack, the member in charge of this bill, that the reason that was determined was on the basis of advice that there could be, for example, legal cases taken if that particular section was not inserted in the bill. So it’s a sensible, pragmatic change that actually means that there’s clear guidance and a responsibility to follow the law, because we must follow the law even when there isn’t adverse outcomes for us if we don’t.

So we follow the law and we don’t necessarily have the legal repercussions if we don’t. I think that this is the right balance for this type of legislation. I think it’s a really good balance; I commend the member and the committee for reaching that conclusion.

Another thing I just wanted to add, finally, was the inclusion of te reo Māori. This bill specifically applies to English; however, I think the committee has recommended a very good balance with saying that whilst it applies to English, there is still no direction, or there should be no indication for anyone looking at this Hansard in the future, to say that you should not use te reo Māori if you wish when you are creating documents that should be read by the public. I think that is also correct. I think it’s admirable that we’ve had an increased use of te reo Māori within a lot of the publications that we’ve seen produced by our Public Service agencies. So I think this is something we all want to see continue, and I think this is the right balance met by this bill.

So in conclusion, this is a very sensible bill which will result in actual pragmatic changes to increase accessibility and equity for New Zealanders, and I commend it to the House.

The Hon Todd McClay—this is a split call, five minutes each.

Mr Speaker, thank you very much. Listening to the last intervention from the Labour Party, it reminds me of their approach to crime: penalties are not important; people will just do what is best.

The problem is for the last speaker, every example she gave as to why there was no need for consequence in this legislation—actually, driving your car too fast has a consequence; whether you choose to do it or not, it has a consequence. Each of those examples has a consequence.

Very few members in this House have the privilege of having a bill drawn out of the member’s ballot. It’s a great, great shame that this member for Nelson, in the only short three years she’ll be a member of this Parliament, has chosen this piece of legislation which is well-meaning at best—well-meaning at best—but actually achieves nothing at all. When she jumps on the plane tomorrow to fly back to Nelson and says to those people, “Ah ha! In the last two years as your representative, I have achieved the following for you: all plain language has arrived—well no, it really hasn’t and I could have done that with a press release.” What an absolute waste of time of this House and hundreds of thousands of dollars. That member had an opportunity to actually make a difference, to do something important, and she’s chosen not to; she’s come up with something that could just have been a press release that says, “Don’t use complicated language if you don’t want to, but if you do, it’s OK.”—a complete and utter waste of time.

In an essence, we don’t have an issue in this country of people not understanding the law—at least not for the majority of members of Parliament or the majority of our constituents. When it comes to plain language, this member has it partly right: this is a very plain bill—that will achieve absolutely zero, nothing at all. It won’t be remembered. It won’t have to be repealed because it’s going to sit on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. The so-called plain language officers that will be appointed are not likely to take much notice of it because, hopefully, sitting in their ministries, they have much, much more important things to do.

I feel for this member. She’s going to be known for this piece of legislation. It does nothing for a single one of her constituents. It would never have been raised by a constituent with her. She won’t be getting letters about it. It’s not going to help her, come the election next year. We’ve already seen one change in her city: a move away from silly ideas to sensible ideas in her council. I fear this will be one of the last things she does and she will be known for it for ever.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a short call on the Plain Language Bill. I, too, want to start by thanking Rachel Boyack for her hard work in bringing this important bill into the House.

Plain language is easy for everyone to understand. Obviously, as someone who comes from a migrant and refugee background, I understand how it feels to struggle with complicated language in legislation and documents. As a member of a couple of select committees, I see, every day, people who very passionately feel about specific issues. They want to submit, they want to understand the issue, they want to discuss it, but there is a barrier, and that’s because all the documents and legislation are written in a language that they can’t understand or they find difficult to understand.

Obviously, the bill went through the select committee. It’s been scrutinised, and the select committee couldn’t find the middle ground, and we thank them for their diligent work. Quite a few people submitted in support of this bill and they expressed very strong support for this bill. It’s very surprising that none of the Opposition MPs who actually spoke on this bill recognised those who submitted on this bill.

I’ve just come back from the Inter-Parliamentary Union conference, which was a global conference, where about 1,500 members of Parliaments from all over the world, with their supporting staff, gathered with different levels of English, obviously. Some came from English speaking countries and some came with very limited English. Because of the level of English, because of the plain language that was used to facilitate the conference, everyone could understand each other and the conference was at the end a full success.

It’s no different in New Zealand as well, because about 20 percent of the New Zealand population are from migrant backgrounds. We are increasingly getting diverse; we’re a multicultural nation and we have to be accommodating. We have to be inclusive and we cannot stop people from participating in democracy on things that affect their lives. Obviously, this bill is a very good bill. It’s going to change a lot of lives. It’s going to give people clear access and participation.

Once again I want to thank Rachel Boyack for her hard work. She’s someone who works hard for her community. She comes from a very diverse community. I’ve been in Nelson quite a few times and in her community there are a lot of newly arrived refugees and immigrants who struggle with the English language, and this is going to help a lot of them. I thank you, Rachel, on behalf of those people for the good work that you have done. This is a good bill. I commend it to the House.

I’m as excited as a thaumaturgist in an apoth—I’m going to start again. I’m actually tongue-tied already; this is bad. I’m as excited as a thaumaturgist in an apothecary. I am eudemonic—in fact, I am ebullient, although I will admit, I am also just a little bit esurient. Just for the sake of the Labour Party, I want to repeat what I said at the start: I’m as excited as a thaumaturgist in an apothecary.

Now, those who know me know that that’s me speaking quite plainly, actually. People who know me as someone who likes to use the English language to its full extent—that’s rather plain for me. I use that because, of course, the first thing is the Labour Party have no idea what I’ve just said, because they really don’t understand the English language. Part of that, of course, is that the Labour Party’s been very happy up to recent days to see the end of Shakespeare. So in that vein, and to offer them a little, I’ll buy Stuart Nash or the likes a beer if they can quote where this came from in Shakespeare: “Prithee, nuncle, be contented; ‘tis a naughty night to [be swimming].” So you have about eight minutes and 47 seconds to quickly google that and tell me which of the wonderful Shakespearean plays.

But long and short, the thing about language is it’s varied and it’s subjective—it’s varied and it’s subjective. This is one of the most problematic elements we have here coming through this bill. I don’t take away from the intentions of Rachel Boyack, who is putting it forward, but there’s a fatal misconception that there is something called plain language, that there’s just this amazing, singular amount of language which somehow everyone from all distinctive cultures and ages is going to understand, and that’s a false premise. Thaumaturgist, apothecary—it’s perfectly plain to me; it’s probably not to others. It’s not complex. “Apothecary” is just as simple to me as the word “chemist”, OK?

The problem that you may have, or someone else may have, is just illustrating the point: it’s very subjective. That’s the nature of language. There are degrees of understanding. Language is contextual. We’ve heard some from the other side complain about jargon. Well, actually, if you’re in any profession—let’s take the medical profession. I much prefer they use complicated jargon to get the message across quickly than trying to explain in plain English that someone I love is having a major heart issue, OK? I’d much prefer they just get straight to it and say, “It’s a pulmonary aneurysm.”, rather than, “Well, actually, in plain English, the heart which is pumping is having just a slight problem moving in and out.”, while my friend is now dead on the floor.

Same with military things—when you’re coming under heavy fire, I’d much prefer you got to the point quickly in jargon than in plain English, other than “Duck!”, and “Shit, I’m about to die.” Granted, it’s not English, but to enable the House, we should say it in Latin: “Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum.” Granted, not English. All right. Look, it’s important, though. Language is contextual.

The other thing is I’ve worked to try and develop plain English documents, believe it or not—believe it or not. It was a great project at the start. It was in the insurance and legal space. But what we realised really swiftly is it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. All the best intentions, in fact, are illustrated again through Shakespeare, through what Creative New Zealand was doing, or trying to do in recent days—actually, there comes a moment where there are distinctions and the need for precise language. Creative New Zealand was saying that—you know, they were arguing that there is a difference between funding and investment. As they were being challenged in recent days around investment applications, they were really keen to tell people in plain English, “No, it’s not about investment; it’s about funding.” Actually, they are right; there is a subtle distinction, and that’s the nature, again, of language.

I want to just illustrate it even further. Emily Henderson and other lawyers will know we often use—and, actually, in insurance too—the term “force majeure”. Now, granted, not all English. “Force” is; “majeure” not so much. But it talks about these events which are beyond our control. It’s just a standard—

💬 Simon Court: C’est français, Monsieur O’Connor.

Très bien. C’est vrai. It’s true; “force majeure”. But it’s a term now very common in English, and it gets just straight to the point. It means, in two words, “That which is bringing something outside of our control.” Now, in plain English, we could simply have said—of course, it would take a long time—you know, catastrophic events which are beyond your control; things like war, strikes, riots, epidemics, an asteroid strike, Australia winning the Rugby World Cup, or, of course, Labour winning the 2023 election would be catastrophic. I’m just parodying this, because actually the whole idea of what is and is not plain is not clear.

I do want to put it to the other side too: New Zealand is becoming a blended language in some ways. We are integrating te reo into English. I actually can see some benefits in that, but others would suggest we’re developing a pidgin language or over time that’s what will develop. I have to say, having been overseas recently, and as someone who has studied Māori at university, they don’t understand—the Germans, the French, the Africans, the Nigerians—“Oh yeah, there’s a smart-arse over there who, of course, has done”—excuse me; smart-arse is actually sort of a plain colloquialism isn’t it?

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr O’Connor, for a man who is standing, sort of showing off his command of the English language, you have reverted to some very bad potty language twice now, so can I just keep your language above the waist, please.

Thank you very much. Of course, I would like to make the argument that it is plain language and colloquial language that people use. But what we are seeing is, as I say, a development of language in New Zealand which is not plain to other English speakers in the world. So I can talk about pūtea to my French colleagues; they’ve got no idea that I’m talking about money. I can talk happily about rangatahi and tamariki and they know I’m talking about young people—well, a New Zealander might know I’m talking about young adults and children, but of course my Nigerian colleagues have no idea. Is that a good or a bad thing? I don’t know; that’s subjective. But where is plain language going to go, and where’s that bill going to fit in with this, as we develop this, as I say, blended, if not sometimes pidgin language?

Look, the other elements we need to consider, just on the practical side: who gets to decide what is plain English? OK, we’re going to have these, what, 14,000 or so plain English officers in each Government department—costs about $1.8 billion—telling people how to write. Are they expert grammarians? Can they sense solipsism at pace? I mean, who’s defining this? It’s one of Lenin’s great desires from way back, to control language, to control what it means. I’m a great free speech advocate. I am very nervous about who gets to control what is defined as free speech.

💬 Joseph Mooney: The kid that can’t read and write properly.

Well, you’ve even got that. I mean, there actually was one thing—I think it was Glen Bennett who raised it earlier in terms of this debate, was actually the notion of education. So instead of passing a law in Parliament to define that we have to have some plain language officers, what about trying to actually get the young people to learn better English, to actually understand grammar, structure, linguistics? Get them to learn a second language. I think the Minister who tried to interrupt earlier around Māori could probably have done a few lessons or two in that language. It’s a good thing. This is where we should be putting our investment. In fact, I would have really liked to see and be very supportive of a second language bill. I personally think a compulsory second language in New Zealand is a good idea. I don’t particularly care what that language is, because actually all the research tells you that it’s good for cognitive development, and it’s actually good for understanding, certainly, the primary language of this country, which is English.

Look, fundamentally, I do have that, as I say, philosophical problem with who gets to define what is plain English. You know, to slightly illustrate the point again, are you an Oxford—sorry, I can’t use the “you” term. Does the member supporting this bill—is she a supporter of the Oxford comma or not? It’s a small question—

💬 Hon Member: Oh!

—and someone sighs. “Oh no; it’s just too hard to think about.” Actually, for those of us who enjoy English, who revel in grammar, we know that actually the placement of something so simple and plain as a comma can change the entire meaning—the entire meaning—of a sentence. So are we going to have Oxford comma sort of, I don’t know, dictates or not? Again, some at home might think that sounds silly, but this is about plain English. Do you want to understand what’s actually been said or not? I can’t think of the particular laws, but we in this House, and while I’ve been in this Parliament, have literally passed laws where the wrong placement of a comma or an “and”, or—I believe, actually, it was to do with police oaths; we had to come back under urgency because the simplest mistake in legislation meant that we had to change the whole meaning.

So this is just well intentioned, but as with all intentions, it comes with a major set of problems, and I just think we should not be doing this. If there was any way we wanted to do this, educate the children better, perhaps by ministerial dictate, encourage people to produce better English, but fundamentally, understand that English, as with any language, is deeply subjective, and what might be plain to some can be more difficult to others, and what may be difficult to others may be plain to some. It’s highly subjective and I do not support this bill.

It’s a little bit sad to hear such a—

💬 Marja Lubeck: Diatribe.

—diatribe. Because this is actually a really good and serious bill, and yet some members around the House have taken it as an opportunity to show how much they know about Shakespeare or Oxford commas. I’d much rather have a discussion about the merits of the bill, because it is a really good bill. I guess it’s all very nice for the members on the other side to say “Oh, well, what we should do is make people speak and understand better English.”, but the fact of the matter is that we have a really diverse population, and if we want to include others, we need to communicate at an appropriate level. It’s not good enough to look out at the masses, as Simon O’Connor would, and say “Well, if you’re not good enough to lift yourself up to my level of education, then you don’t deserve to understand.” This is a bill that says the law and Government is for everyone, and it’s the job of Government to come to the people, not for the people to expect to understand complex language. So this is actually about real democracy.

We’ve got people throughout our Public Service now who work hard to make sure that they are accessible and understandable to members of the public. This is a further and welcome step down that road because we absolutely need a legislative solution to this problem, because it is a problem. And whilst it’s fair to say that a Government of the day or a department or a ministry could direct by executive action better English and plain English, the fact of the matter is that that remains optional. We as a Parliament want to say “Plain English isn’t optional.” Plain English isn’t a decision for the executive, plain English is a dictate of this House. We require our public servants in our Public Service to take into account who is expected—and the example of the warrant of arrest is a really good example, because we know that the people who are subject to a summons are often people with poor education and poor literacy. And so it’s entirely appropriate that if we are going to put out a summons, that it should say in clear letters at the outset: “You must turn up to court on this day.”—that’s pretty plain, that’s an example—not: “You are hereby summoned to attend.” That’s not plain English.

We want plain English in all of our documents. The more important the documents are, the plainer it should be; the more widely circulated the documents are, the plainer it should be. So that’s what this is about; it’s about saying, “These documents take into account who they’re aimed at. Write these documents so that those people will understand.” It’s said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, and it’s true. But it should certainly not be the case that we use that in some perverse way so that people don’t understand and, by accident or by some perverse trickery, find themselves on the wrong side of the law. This is about enabling people to be on the right side of the law. It’s a great bill. It’s been far too long in coming, and I cannot believe that there’s any members on the other side of the House who seem to think in some way it’s a good idea not to aim for the highest—because that’s what we do on this side of the House. That’s what this member has done, and today we’re improving the law, we’re making it better, and it’s just as plain as that.