When Government Speaks to Itself
Once upon a time, a doctor sat with a family explaining the CT scan results. She spoke of lesions appearing in the bone and in the liver, and the possibility that the original source was the lung. She carefully described how these lesions could spread throughout the body. The family listened intently and politely, nodding as she spoke.
Eventually, one relative hesitantly interrupted: ‘what’s a lesion?’ The question seemed to stop the consultation in its tracks. The doctor suddenly realised that although she had been medically precise, almost none of what she had said had truly connected. ‘A lesion,’ she explained, ‘is a cancer spot.’ Elsewhere, a patient is asked about their ‘skin integrity’. Another is informed that the blood test was ‘negative’. Outside medicine, of course, ‘negative’ rarely sounds encouraging.
Meanwhile, in another corner of society, a customer is being informed by his mechanic that his vehicle has ‘a misfire’ or ‘a faulty ignition coil’. The bewildered driver nods politely while silently wondering whether the car is about to explode. Perhaps ‘the suspension bushes have deteriorated’ or ‘there may be an issue with the variable valve timing solenoid intermittently sticking’.
To be fair, the language is coherent and accurate. It is simply not designed for ordinary human consumption or digestion. More savagely, the speaker suffers from adamantine aloofness or lacks situational awareness. But it’s between private individuals. Live and let live.
Then there is the omnipresent and omnipotent government, you know, the one that is ‘here to help’. The Bureau of Meteorology—a government agency—calmly advises Australians that there is a “cold front moving out towards the east and a low pressure system developing over the southern Tasman Sea.” Meteorologically speaking, of course, this is entirely factual. Meteorologically speaking. Not humanly speaking.
And this is where the problem begins to move intolerably beyond the aloof language of private professionals and towards something more serious. The very public institutions that are supposed to guide, inform and assist the public communicate in languages pregnant with purple prose and intelligible primarily to themselves and the intellectual aristocracy.
The doctor- and mechanic- speak is disconcertingly bad enough. Harmful too! Studies suggest that up to 70 per cent of medical errors involve communication breakdowns. Nearly six in ten Australian adults possess low levels of health literacy. But none of them exercise the full coercive machinery of the state.
Replete with finance-speak, government finances are the most unintelligible: ‘automatic stabilisers’; ‘forward estimates’; ‘conservative bias allowance’; ‘underlying cash balance’; ‘headline cash balance’; and ‘public debt interest’ are a small sample from a skein of concepts.
Stripping away advanced concepts, the most familiar rhetoric appears, for example, in the Australian Financial Review (6 May 2026): Victoria ‘is forecasting a razor-thin $727 million operating surplus this financial year’, while net debt is projected to rise ‘to a record $199.3 billion by 2029-30.’ Yet the budget also records ‘more than $30 billion in cash deficits over the next four years ($30.48 billion), when this year’s $21.4 billion in the state’s current capital works are included.’
To a lay person, attempting to understand and reconcile these apparently inconsistent positions—a surplus on one side and rising debt on the other—is like trying to grasp a column of smoke with bare hands.
To those unaccustomed to the terms of art, a ‘budget deficit’ exists if expenses are larger than revenue in a given year. Conversely, if revenue is larger than expenses, the government has a net operating surplus. But to fixate on deficits and disregard ‘debt’ risks missing the more important structural reality.
A ‘debt’ is a distinct term and refers to the total amount of money that the government owes its lenders at a particular point in time. It measures how much successive governments have spent over the receipts they have collected. Think of it, broadly speaking, as the sum of all deficits. But even this convenient equation can mislead because we need to account for government borrowing money even if it is not ‘losing money’ in its normal yearly operations. For example, imagine a household that earns enough to meet its ordinary bills each year, but still takes out a large loan to build a house extension.
The household may be managing its day-to-day finances properly, yet its overall debt still rises because it has borrowed to fund construction. Governments operate in much the same way. They borrow to pay for rail projects, roads, tunnels, hospitals, schools and other major infrastructure. As a result, a government can say it has an operating surplus in its day-to-day budget, while at the same time saying debt is rising, because it is borrowing billions to fund long-term capital works.
In this way, a deficit is inherently temporary and cyclical but affects the debt trajectory. It is debt that ultimately shapes fiscal capacity, constrains future choices and determines how exposed an economy is to rising interest rates or shocks.
Economist Saul Eslake castigated the Victorian surplus as a ‘con job’ because it excludes the blowout of capital expenditure on major projects.
The concern, in simple terms, is not that governments borrow to build infrastructure—that is normal and often necessary. It is that the cost of that building program has expanded far beyond what was originally expected. As capital spending on major projects blows out, the government must borrow more to fund it, and that borrowing pushes debt higher than forecast. In that sense, the debate is less about the legitimacy of investment and more about its sheer size and its consequences for public debt.
Finance was the chosen example in this column because no function of government is more fundamental than the management of public money. Governments may debate policy, ideology and social priorities, but ultimately every promise, project and program is financed by taxpayers. The executive branch is therefore not merely exercising political power; it is exercising financial trusteeship over resources it does not personally own.
For that reason, financial literacy should form the first bastion of civic understanding. If citizens cannot interpret budgets, deficits, debt, operating results or capital expenditure, they are effectively excluded from understanding the most consequential dimension of governmental performance.
Understanding governmental language (or what we might coin as ‘governmentalistics’) and the language through which power explains itself is therefore a democratic imperative. In constitutional terms, voters are the principals and elected representatives are their agents. The principals are expected to continually assess, monitor, question and ultimately render judgement at election time on the executive’s use, non-use, abuse or misuse of its power. Yet meaningful assessment is impossible if citizens cannot understand the language through which governments explain their conduct and performance.
Without that understanding, scrutiny reduces to hunches and impressions, and the executive escapes penetrating examination. Power must be confronted with knowledge.
—Nilay B. Patel is a lawyer based in Melbourne
