If we’re serious about communicating, we first have to question our assumptions.

We always assume, for instance, that people will clearly understand what we’ve written or said.

Government departments and agencies churn out advertisements, brochures and reports every week and every single one of them ought to be designed to let us know what’s happening.

But the language of government, like any endeavour, has its own codes: people in the business – the politicians, bureaucrats and policy-makers – usually speak and write in a highly prescribed way and they can decode the text without thinking about it.

It’s dense gibberish to the rest of us, however; Kevin Rudd’s ‘Sorry’ speech and Paul Keating’s Redfern speech being rare and honourable examples.

Unless you’re in the know, it’s almost impossible to mine clear meaning out of polysyllabic words and buzzwords (capacity-building, pathways, facilitating, stakeholder buy-in and so on).

The regular practice of nominalisation (turning verbs into nouns, as ‘…the management of…’ instead of just ‘managing‘; ‘…the implementation of…’  instead of ‘doing‘ or ‘putting into practice’ confuses the issue, to say the least.

 And it’s really hard not to add catch phrases to your own conversational repertoire: ‘roll-out’ and ‘ramping up’ I find particularly irritating.

 What’s all the more galling is that they’re thrown around to suggest the department or agency is completely in control of what’s going on.

As if!

And for most of us, the way politicians and bureaucrats overuse the passive voice means it’s hard to work out who is to be the agent – the doer – of any particular action; which assumes that you can work out that there’s supposed to be an action.

So the words often defy definition and the messages are hidden.

We struggle to make sense of what Don Watson has described as ‘verbal porridge’.

While inclusion may be the new buzzword, the language of governments excludes most of from the discourse.

We don’t even get to Square One.

And have you noticed the way departments and agencies try to slip a bit of marketing into their ads and brochures?

Sometimes it’s a bit of harmless self-congratulation, but increasingly it’s a blatant attempt to convince us that what they’re doing is actually good for us.

And this brings us to another untested assumption: that your audience shares your culture and your values.

But do they?

What I’m talking about is a failure to communicate with people whose first language is English, who may have been right through their schooling in Australia and who we might regard as participating members of our society.

If we fail to recognise how culturally specific (even class-specific!) our language is, and if we also fail to see that the values we promote in our language are equally culturally specific, then we’ve got Buckley’s chance of communicating effectively.

So if we’re in the business of trying to communicate with Aboriginal people – which we all should be in the Territory – then we need to rethink what we say, how we say it and the media we use to say it in.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

But I’m going to use some of these blogs to tease out the issues.

Perhaps you can help.