Are you an outward-looking, achievement-oriented professional with excellent representational skills? Can you provide strategic advice on complex issues? Have you a proven track record in management and leadership?
This is a direct quote from a job advertisement from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations for a Senior Executive Band 1. It appeared in The Canberra Times last Saturday. The advertisement told us that the department “is recognised world leader in the field of innovative employment policy and service delivery using advanced technology to support a major national network of contract service providers”.
The person who gets this job “will manage a Branch within one of the Groups focussed on increasing labour market participation, maximising employment outcomes, or reducing frictional unemployment, through strong policy development and managing a wide range of employment services . . . ”.
And so the sludge goes on.
It is almost impossible to tell what the job is. We are told it pays an astonishing $160,000 a year.
Next to this advertisement, the Health Insurance Commission advertises for “team leaders”. The advertisement says: “Focus: Lead a small team responsible for undertaking HIC’s financial management functions with strategic focus on internal management reporting or business pricing and modelling in accordance with the Branch Business Plan.”
Another advertisement talks of “the ability to cultivate productive working relationships with high-level communications skills”
The whole government-appointments section is full of this turgid crud. “Client focus”, “performance management”, “priority setting”, “people oriented”, “dynamic teams” are piled into the advertisements with other meaningless clap-trap.
The private sector is little better.
Cargill Australia is seeking “a proactive and results-driven team player [who] will thrive in a fast-paced environment where strong communication and interdepartmental collaboration is encouraged”.
The higher the pay the more opaque the language of the job advertisement. Down the backend of the jobs section where the salaries are around $40,000 a year or stated in per-hour part-time rates, the advertisements tell what the job is.
“Panel beater required for busy smash repairer,” one says.
“Letterbox deliverers required in the following suburbs,” says another.
Bus drivers, hairdressers, painters, pharmacy assistants, signwriters, chefs and so on are sought in plain language. You can close your eyes and picture someone doing the job.
Can you picture someone being a “strategic adviser maximising employment outcomes”?
If elected, here is a test for Mark Latham. If a public-sector job cannot be described in plain language, he should abolish it.
This is not some right-wing shock jockery. To the contrary. We talk of struggling families. Governments madly take money from people in tax, churn it through an expensive bureaucracy and hand it back in family allowance and other welfare. Richly undeserving lingocrats thrive on it. If we are to relieve the tax burden on those with low incomes and provide education and health, surely we must not waste $160,000 on “a strategic adviser maximising employment outcomes”.
Ironically, unemployment has remained above 5 per cent (often much more) and youth unemployment at 20 per cent ever since we started employing strategic advisers maximising employment outcomes and the like.
The advertisements for the highly paid, opaquely described jobs use language derived from Latin and French, rather than the plain English of the common folk. It is no accident.
Neil James, the executive director of the Plain English Foundation, argues that, from the Norman Conquest to the 14th century, the ruling classes in England used Latin and French. English absorbed much of the vocabulary. English resumed its universal role, but the governing classes to this day still prefer this Latin and French vocabulary – excessively formal, imprecise, and unnecessarily hard to read. It is also inefficient and costly – in Britain $15.3 billion a year. That would be about $5 billion a year in Australia.
The governing classes hate plain English because they feel it does not have enough gravitas. Professionals hate plain English because they can charge for jargon – though good professionals use plain language. In fact, plain language is the sign of a good professional; they know what they are talking about and so can explain it to others. Sorry, let me rephrase that: they have high-level strategic communications skills in a customer-focused environment.
The Plain English Foundation is to be launched at the Sydney Writers Festival tomorrow (Sunday May 22). It grew out of a partnership that contracted to corporations and government to teach plain English and explain its benefits. After the launch it will go public. It will accept public nominations of examples of good and poor English for competitions and publish a newsletter.
It can be contacted on mail@plainenglishfoundation.com.
The plain-English movement is obviously sound, but I have a couple of reservations. If the campaign succeeds the job advertisements will shrink and along with it the revenue that pays for this column. Also, I get occasional jobs from organisations that want documents translated into plain English. If everyone uses plain English, I will lose those jobs.
If you like, plain English is my jargon.