Collins JudithHon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura): Thank you Mr Chair. I've got a few further questions on Part 1. Some of them have been raised by some of the contributions from this side and also from the member who is in charge of the bill.I looked at this bill and wondered whether or not this bill itself was written in plain English. Well is it that plain when we have a word like Minister" in clause 4—in the Interpretation clause—where that takes 29 words to explain what a Minister is? And that I've kept out the "means" bit because I think that's unfair to use that.So a "Minister" under this is "the Minister of the Crown who under the authority of any warrant or with the authority of the Prime Minister is responsible for the administration of this Act." A lot of people will take a while to work that one through.Simeon Brown: We still don't know which Minister it is.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Or any Minister really. It's a Minister of the Crown—"the" Minister whichever.I think one of the problems we have—one of the glories of English as a language is that it is a very precise language. There are opportunities to use a multitude of different words for things that in some other languages have only one word. If we think of some of the Inuit people I think they have you know hundreds of words for "ice". In our case we have different words for different things.I'll just take us to an example and I'm going to ask a question of the member. If we look at a word like "legislation"—which we've been talking about this afternoon—well what is legislation? Some people might say "Well that means the law." So why don't we just say "law" instead of "legislation"? Well because "law" also includes the common law it also includes the interpretation of legislation and it can include statutes. Then people would say "Well what's that?" Well that's Acts of Parliament; we have to explain that one. Well what about Orders in Council? So the simplistic word "law" is the general word but then there are all the subsections under it. And that is just one of the issues that we have when we look for the plain language meanings.Let's even look at the word "commissioner". Well why doesn't this bill just say what the commissioner is? Public Service Commissioner? Why not just say "public service boss"? Isn't that what it means? Is there some other meaning? What is the meaning that's meant here? Surely it should just be "public service boss" so we all know because "commissioner" of course—as I've explained already—is one of those sorts of words that comes from the Norman French that came over to England and that means four meanings when I had a quick look up for the benefit of the member. That was a member of a commission; someone commissioned to perform certain duties; an official in charge of a Government department especially a police force; or someone who commissions something—in other words commissions a painting. So there's four quite distinct meanings for the term "commissioner" and where the word "boss" might not be such a good alternative. So my question to the member in the chair—who I have to say has at least been making some attempt to answer the questions unlike most of the Ministers in this Government—is: how many more pages are going to have to be written to explain what is meant using the precise word that's already available in English? How many more; has she taken that into account?Because we already know that there has been over the last 30 years a real move towards more easily understood language being used in documentation. Partly I think because a lot of it's now on websites. But has she looked at how much more is going to have to be written? How many more people will have to be employed? And who is going to police it other than this "boss" of the Public Service Commission? And couldn't the Minister in charge of the Public Service Commission just tell the "boss" of the Public Service Commission to try and have more plain language?"