By Laura Frykberg
The top nominations for the worst jargon offenders are out.
A competition to highlight unnecessary bureaucratic babble in documents and websites has narrowed down its eight finalists.
Overcoming stiff competition, Immigration New Zealand and Statistics New Zealand have made their way to the top of the jargon heap. But can ordinary punters understand what they mean?
"This would not apply where the cumulative cost to the product provider or purchaser of remedying the homeowner's non-payments would significantly affect the product provider's or purchaser's margin of security in the property, and the process of addressing breaches has failed to resolve the matter..."
Does anyone know what this means?
The judge who nominated it for a Brainstrain Award didn't get it either.
"If you can't understand what is being presented to you in a public document, what is the point of the public document?" asks David Russell.
Yet that public document we asked members of the public to read was from a government office, and Mr Russell says that's unacceptable
"If you're communicating with the public, it should be clear, it should be crisp, and it should be to the point. There is no room for obscuration."
We asked one of the finalists, Statistics NZ, to clarify one passage which some members of the public found particularly confusing: "We apply a spatially aware method from the computational geography literature to design new reporting geographies, using 2006 census data as the main input."
Their response was that it's written for a specialist technical audience. So we created a simpler version: "This paper creates new regions - similar to a suburb - for use in research."
Nominee Immigration NZ - whose website was described as "sprawling and labyrinthine" - wouldn't talk to us, but said in a statement they are revamping their website to make it clearer.
It's these sorts of changes the contest organisers want more of when the winner is announced in September.
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