PIPE is a hobby project. It's just one person, Alison, and an AI assistant called Claude. Not a company. Not a newsroom. Just the two of us, reading bills and trying to explain them properly.
This week we rewrote a sentence. A Queensland bill said "authorised persons" can remove abandoned boats. That's true, but it's a legal term most people have never heard. We changed it to "police, fisheries inspectors, or transport officers." Same fact. Now it actually makes sense.
That small fix says a lot about the job. We have three main aims:
- One — say what a bill actually does, in real terms. More fines or fewer fines, not "makes changes to penalties."
- Two — use English you don't need a law degree to understand.
- Three — explain it in neutral terms.
Here's what each of those actually means.
One: say what it actually does
Laws often hide the real action inside vague or fancy phrases. "Passenger seatbelt declaration" sounds official. What it means: a driver fined because a passenger wasn't wearing a seatbelt can name that passenger instead. Then the passenger gets in trouble, not the driver.
We could write "amends liability for passenger seatbelt offences." That's technically true and tells you nothing. So we don't.
Two: no law degree required
Saying "this is clear" isn't good enough — we already understand it, we wrote it. So every title gets checked with a formula called Flesch-Kincaid. It scores how hard a sentence is to read.
That score is a maximum, not a target. Most titles come in well under it. But sometimes you can't go lower without breaking something — try simplifying "IBAC" (Victoria's anti-corruption watchdog) into something a ten-year-old invented on the spot, and you've just made it wrong. The ceiling exists to stop lazy, wordy writing. It's not a rule we torture every sentence to hit no matter what.
Three: neutral, not spun
Politicians give speeches about their own bills. Those speeches are not neutral — they're trying to convince you. A speech about a tougher law might say it "keeps communities safe." A speech against it might call it "knee-jerk" and useless. Both are opinions, not facts.
Here's the real test we use: could someone who loves the bill, and someone who hates it, both read our title and agree it's accurate? A title like "cracks down on crime" sounds tough — but it's picking a side. So does "modernises the justice system." We skip both, and describe what actually changes, for who, and when.
We're not perfect at this
We get things wrong sometimes. The "authorised persons" fix above is one small example — there will be more. Plain English isn't something you switch on and forget. It's a constant balancing act between being accurate and being easy to read.
If something on PIPE reads like it's taking a side, or like you needed a law degree to understand it, tell us. Seriously. That's exactly how the "authorised persons" fix happened — someone just asked.