Plain language on government websites is a legal obligation. Most agencies don't treat it that way.

Plain language on government websites is not a style preference. It is a legal obligation — and most government agencies are managing the risk as though it were the former.

I spent years working on digital content reform across ACT Government directorates. The pattern was consistent. Content got written by policy teams, cleared by legal, signed off by executives. Nobody at the table had a brief to ask: can the people this is written for actually understand it?

That is not a culture problem. It is a governance gap.

The compliance argument most teams are missing

The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 requires Australian government agencies to provide information that people with disability can access and understand. Plain language sits squarely inside that obligation — not alongside it.

A page written at a reading level that excludes people with cognitive disability, low literacy, or English as a second language is not just poor content. Under the DDA, it is potentially discriminatory content.

WCAG 2.2, now the expected minimum for Australian Government websites and applications, reinforces this. Success Criterion 3.1.5 requires a simpler version when content exceeds lower secondary education level. That is an accessibility requirement, not aspirational guidance.

Accessibility complaints in Australia are handled through the Australian Human Rights Commission. Agencies that cannot demonstrate reasonable steps toward accessible content are exposed to formal complaints.

Why this keeps happening

The practical failure is rarely about not knowing the rules. It is structural.

Content in government is almost always written by subject matter experts: policy officers, program managers, legal teams. They know their domain well. They are not trained communicators, and they do not have a brief to revisit the reading level when a ministerial submission is due.

The clearance process makes it worse. Pages get reviewed for accuracy. Content can pass legal sign-off and executive clearance and still be completely unnavigable by its intended audience.

Asking writers to try harder does not fix this. That is treating a governance failure as an individual problem.

What the fix actually looks like

The agencies I have seen handle this well have a few things in common.

They treat plain language as a publishing standard — alongside accuracy, currency, and accessibility — not as a stylistic aspiration to address when there is capacity.

They build plain language review into the workflow before final clearance, not after. Content is not considered complete until it has passed a plain language check by someone other than its author.

And they measure outcomes. When I led content reform across ACT Government, we redesigned digital content with plain language as a core standard. Average call centre time dropped from seven minutes to four minutes. A 43 per cent reduction — measurable, repeatable, and worth documenting in a business case.

Those results are not exceptional. They are what happens when plain language is treated as infrastructure, not decoration.

The practical question

The most useful question for a government digital team is not "does our content comply with the Style Manual?"

It is: can our users actually understand this content, and do we have a process that would catch it if they couldn't?

If the answer to the second part is no, that is the governance gap to close.