BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 52 of 144

Correct — C, New Zealand. The statute is the Plain Language Act 2022, New Zealand Public Act 2022 No 54, which received the Royal assent on 21 October 2022 and, under section 2, came into force six months later on 21 April 2023 — five months before this paper was set, which is what makes the stem's word 'recently' accurate. Section 3 states the purpose: to improve the effectiveness and accountability of public service agencies and Crown agents, and the accessibility of certain documents they make available to the public, by providing that those documents use language that is appropriate to the intended audience and clear, concise and well organised. Section 5 defines plain language in exactly those two limbs. Section 4 fixes who is bound — a 'reporting agency' is either a public service agency listed in section 10(a) of the Public Service Act 2020 or a Crown agent named in Part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Crown Entities Act 2004 — and section 8 binds the Crown. Section 6 then defines the 'relevant document' the duty attaches to: a document in English, whose intended audience the agency considers to be the public generally rather than one named person, and which is about the agency's services, about filing or registering information, about how to comply with a requirement the agency administers or enforces, about rights or interests that requirement may affect, or issued as part of a public education initiative. Section 6(2) expressly counts 'a page on an Internet site' as such a document, which is precisely the 'official documents and websites' the stem describes. The enforcement design is unusually instructive. Section 9 imposes only a duty to take reasonable steps, and that duty is owed to the Public Service Commissioner in the case of a public service agency and to the responsible Minister in the case of a Crown agent — not to the reader. Section 10 requires the Commissioner to issue compliance guidance after consultation and having regard to international best practice, and to make it cover accessibility for people with disabilities. Section 11 requires every reporting agency to appoint one or more plain language officers, section 12 makes each agency report annually to the Commissioner, and section 13 makes the Commissioner report annually to the Minister, who must present that report to the House of Representatives within 20 working days. Section 14 then says plainly that the Act confers no legal right and imposes no obligation enforceable in a court of law. It began life as a member's bill from the Labour MP Rachel Boyack, introduced on 23 September 2021 as Bill 70–1, reported back by the Governance and Administration Committee on 12 August 2022, read a second time on 31 August 2022 and read a third time on 19 October 2022; the Act is administered by the Public Service Commission.

• (a)Australia — The natural first guess — an English-speaking Commonwealth country with a long record of public-service reform — but Australia has enacted no plain-language statute. What it has is administrative rather than legislative: whole-of-government drafting and style guidance, which carries no statutory duty-holder, no designated officer inside each agency and no reporting chain to Parliament, and so fails every structural test the stem describes. Australia is in fact the standing decoy in this whole family of questions: it appeared as an option, and was wrong, in UPSC's 2006 item on the first country to propose a carbon tax and again in UPSC's 2009 item on the first Parliament to enact a climate Act.
• (b)Ireland — Plausible for the same reason as Australia — an English-speaking common-law country with an active plain-English movement — but no Irish Act of the Oireachtas imposes a plain-language duty of this kind on public bodies. Ireland's statutory work on language runs the other way entirely. The Official Languages Act 2003 and the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 2021 (No 49 of 2021) regulate which language a public body uses: the 2021 Act inserts a new section 10A requiring that at least 20 per cent of a public body's advertising in any year be in Irish, and sets the target that at least 20 per cent of staff recruited to public bodies be competent in Irish no later than 31 December 2030. That is a question of language choice and Irish-language rights, not of how readable a body's English is.
• (d)Germany — Eliminable from the stem alone, and this is the option that should go first. The question says the Act requires officials to use simple and easily understandable English; German is Germany's official language, so a statute regulating the readability of officials' English would have nothing to operate on. The deeper point is that Germany is not innocent of plain-language law — section 11 of the Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz (the federal Disability Equality Act), headed 'Verständlichkeit und Leichte Sprache', requires public authorities to communicate with people with intellectual and psychological disabilities in simple, comprehensible language and, on request, to explain notices, general orders, public-law contracts and official forms in Leichte Sprache, at the authority's own cost. But that is a disability-access duty operating in German, not a general readability duty operating in English, so it cannot be what the stem describes. Whenever a stem hands you a language clue like this, spend it before reaching for recall.

Plain-language legislation is a strand of administrative-law reform that treats the readability of government writing as a governance problem rather than a matter of style. Its premise is that a citizen who cannot understand a form, a notice or a website cannot exercise the right the document describes, so obscure drafting quietly withdraws entitlements. The instruments differ in how hard they bite. Most countries handle it through drafting manuals and style guides with no legal force. A smaller group has legislated. The United States went first with the Plain Writing Act of 2010 — Public Law 111-274, originally H.R. 946, approved on 13 October 2010 — which makes every executive agency use plain writing in 'covered documents', defined as anything needed to obtain a federal benefit or service or to file taxes, anything giving information about such a benefit or service, or anything explaining how to comply with a federal requirement, while expressly excluding regulations; each agency head must designate one or more senior officials, train staff and publish annual compliance reports on the agency website. New Zealand followed in 2022 with a fuller model that puts the definition of plain language in the statute itself, names two classes of duty-holder, creates a designated officer inside every agency and builds an annual reporting chain that ends on the floor of Parliament. Both stop short of letting anyone sue: the American Act bars judicial review outright in its section 6, and the New Zealand Act declares in section 14 that it creates no court-enforceable right. That shared choice is the design's core compromise — political accountability instead of judicial enforcement.

Two moves settle this question and neither needs deep recall. First, spend the stem: it says the Act governs officials' use of English, which rules Germany out at once and reduces the field to three English-speaking countries. Second, separate having a plain-English tradition from having a plain-language Act — the single fact that discriminates here is the existence of an Act of Parliament rather than a style manual. Australia and Ireland both belong to the plain-English movement in practice; only New Zealand converted the practice into a statute, and it did so in 2022. The calendar is the second tell. BPSC set this paper in September 2023, the New Zealand Act commenced on 21 April 2023, and 'recently' in a current-affairs stem almost always means the preceding twelve to eighteen months — which fits New Zealand and fits nothing else on the list. A candidate is most likely to be led astray by half-remembering the United States' Plain Writing Act of 2010, the genuinely famous instance, and then, finding no USA among the options, picking whichever remaining country feels most Anglophone. Notice finally what the stem does not say: it does not say 'first country', so you are not being asked to rank the American and New Zealand statutes against each other, only to identify which of these four has one at all.

• New Zealand's Plain Language Act 2022 is Public Act 2022 No 54; it received the Royal assent on 21 October 2022, commenced six months later on 21 April 2023 under section 2, and is administered by the Public Service Commission
• Section 5 defines plain language in two limbs — appropriate to the intended audience, and clear, concise and well organised — the same wording used in the purpose clause in section 3
• Section 4 binds two classes of body: public service agencies listed in section 10(a) of the Public Service Act 2020, and Crown agents named in Part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Crown Entities Act 2004; section 8 binds the Crown
• Section 11 requires every reporting agency to appoint one or more plain language officers; section 12 makes agencies report annually to the Public Service Commissioner, section 13 makes the Commissioner report annually to the Minister, and the Minister must present that report to the House of Representatives within 20 working days
• Section 9 requires only that agencies take reasonable steps, and section 14 states that the Act confers no legal right and imposes no obligation enforceable in a court of law
• Section 6 limits the Act's 'relevant documents' to those written in English and expressly counts a page on an Internet site as a document; section 15 leaves Te Ture mō Te Reo Māori 2016 and the New Zealand Sign Language Act 2006 untouched — which is why the stem specifies English
• Schedule 1, clause 1 phases the duty in: section 9 bites on documents issued on or after 21 April 2023 and on earlier documents only once they are substantially revised, meaning changed by more than a minor amount — the same 'issues or substantially revises' trigger the United States Plain Writing Act of 2010 uses in its section 4(b)
• The Act began as a member's bill introduced by the Labour MP Rachel Boyack on 23 September 2021 as Bill 70–1, was reported back by the Governance and Administration Committee on 12 August 2022, and was read a third time on 19 October 2022

• Answering 'USA' from memory of the Plain Writing Act of 2010 and then, on finding no USA in the options, guessing between the other Anglophone countries
• Assuming that a country with a strong plain-English drafting tradition must have a plain-language Act — practice and statute are different things, and only New Zealand has the statute
• Overlooking the word 'English' in the stem, which by itself removes Germany before any recall is needed

BPSC asks this as a single-line current-affairs identification — a named foreign statute, four countries, no statements — and rewards the candidate who has fixed the country to the law. UPSC handles the same material through the 'which country was first' frame it has used for decades, as with the first Parliament to enact a climate Act in 2009 and the first country to propose a carbon tax in 2006, and it more often wants the mechanism or the scope of the instrument than the bare name of the state that passed it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under New Zealand's Plain Language Act 2022, every reporting agency is required to appoint which of the following?

  • (a)An Ombudsman for public documents
  • (b)One or more plain language officers
  • (c)A Parliamentary Counsel for drafting
  • (d)A Public Service Commissioner

  Answer(b) One or more plain language officers — required by section 11; the Public Service Commissioner already exists independently and receives the agencies' annual reports rather than being appointed by them.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following statements about New Zealand's Plain Language Act 2022 is correct?

  • (a)It creates a right that a member of the public can enforce in a court of law
  • (b)It applies to public documents written in any of New Zealand's official languages
  • (c)It requires public service agencies to take reasonable steps to use plain language in specified documents meant for the public
  • (d)It applies only to Bills and Acts of Parliament, not to agency documents

  Answer(c) It requires public service agencies to take reasonable steps to use plain language in specified documents meant for the public — the section 9 duty. Section 14 rules out (a); section 6 confines the duty to documents in English, ruling out (b); and the Act governs agency documents, not legislative drafting, ruling out (d).