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PM Told To Speak English

PM Told To Speak English

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Andrew Gunn - The Satiriser
Oct 16, 2024
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PM Told To Speak English
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Or te reo, or sign language, or anything really apart from that corporate lingo.

A compromise appears to have been reached after a memo from just about everyone expressed a strong preference for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to speak English instead of that weird business dialect he keeps lapsing into.

The Cabinet Manual requires all government ministers to be ‘proficient’ speakers of plain common sense in all political settings.

But the last twelve months have seen a rise in the PM and senior ministers making pronouncements in jargonese, to the chagrin of voters wondering what the hell they’re going on about.

‘Look, I can just about get the drift of ‘KPIs’ and that sort of stuff,’ said an anonymous voter, ‘but when they start with the ‘globally-frontiered deliverables’ they totally lose me.’

‘And don’t get me started with ‘agile’. In my day that was something gymnasts did.’

Under the just-reached compromise, the Prime Minister and other business-facing colleagues who speak buzzwords as a first language will be allowed to do so when speaking to each other, or when speaking to a member of the public who understands ‘results-driven value chains’, whatever that means.

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