Press releases are meant to explain government decisions to the public. The average one scores at 14.0 years of schooling on the Flesch-Kincaid test, roughly university level. Plain-language guidance aims closer to Year 10, where most adults can read comfortably. New Zealand put that principle into the Plain Language Act 2022. Set a reading level below. Anything above it goes blurry.
Each government's average sits four to five and a half school years above the Year 10 benchmark. Releases under the current government score about one grade harder than those of the late 1990s. The harder the writing, the smaller the name appears, as it would on an eye chart.
Each bar is one year. Difficulty rose through the 2010s, was highest from 2020 to 2022, then fell for three years before rising slightly in 2026. It has not returned to the levels recorded in the 1990s. The scale runs from 13.4 to 15.0 so the movement is visible.
The green marker is the Plain Language Act taking effect. The red one is the bill to repeal it.
The score had already started falling before the Act took effect on 21 April 2023. It barely changed across commencement: 14.66 before and 14.63 after. The score fell further while Parliament considered repeal, before rising again in 2026.
There is no obvious break in the series when the Act took effect.
Ministers ranked by the average reading grade of their own press releases, greenest at the plain end and reddest at the hardest. Current cabinet covers this government only, counting ministers with 40 or more releases since November 2023. The all-time lists need 150. A blurry name is a minister writing above your reading level.
Average sentence length has moved only slightly since 2000, from about 23 words to 24. Most of the increase comes from the words themselves. The chart shows long words, at least 11 letters and four syllables, that are much more common now than in the early 2000s. Grey is then and red is now.
These are the highest scores in the corpus. A grade above 20 means the formula expects more than 20 years of education. The slider stops at 18, so these releases never fully come into focus. Each result links to the original.
Press releases are public information. When the average one sits at university-level reading difficulty, many people will struggle with it. The language often gets harder in review: qualifications pile up, nouns replace verbs and nobody is quite responsible for taking them back out. Scores changed with governments, but there is no obvious break when the Plain Language Act took effect. Whatever effect the law had elsewhere, it does not show up in this series.