‘Get out of the bunker and talk to people’ civil servants told

Australia’s government agencies must abandon “risk-averse” public service jargon and use plain English to communicate policy complexities, one of the country’s top bureaucrats has said.

Mike Mrdak, secretary of the federal Department of Communications and the Arts, told a meeting in Canberra that successful policy depends on “clarity of language”.

“One of the things that I’ve constantly found in my career [is] that often it’s the language that kills us,” he told an Institute of Public Administration Australia conference.