Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): 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. Dr EMILY HENDERSON: 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."