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Let’s not waste money on words – opinion

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August 19, 2025

I think we should start incorporating sign language onto our passports and signs.

BY GORDON T

I was thinking about a news report the other day which caused me to wonder about how much of our money politicians squander. The particular report was about a politician’s desire to change the front cover of the New Zealand Passport to feature the English wording before the Maori wording. Currently a new passport apparently has the Maori words of Uruwhenua Aotearoa ahead of the English words New Zealand Passport. I was curious so grabbed my old passport to check and notice that on mine the English words appeared first. “Yippee!” I thought, “If you move slowly enough eventually you get up to date”.

Curiosity got to me so I had to check the changes made and found the change to feature the Maori wording first was made in May 2021 by the Labour Government of the day and now the current government was to reverse this. Money will be spent by two governments on passports and during that time my passport hasn’t changed, the machines that read the passports when going through customs haven’t changed and ignore the cover, the customs staff in Australia still haven’t learned how to smile and ignore the front cover. So the effect of both changes seems to be zilch yet both of our last two governments have wanted to waste our money on this matter. No surprises there.

The whole point of a sign is to inform people clearly and the trouble with the passport cover is that it doesn’t do that, no matter the order of the languages used. Where they let you down is that you don’t know if the passport you are looking at is yours or the wife’s. You are forced to constantly look inside them to see which one is which. I asked the cleaner about this when she was last in; asking “How do you get on with your passport, do you think the cover identifies things well enough?” She looked up from her position scrubbing the floor and replied “it’s pretty good really, mine is the one with YOURS written on the cover”. That confused me “Shouldn’t it have MINE or maybe your initials?” I asked. “No silly” she responded, “Hubby’s one has MINE on it so mine had to have YOURS, else it could get confusing”.

Obviously the passport cover is a problem which has resulted in individual solutions for individual families however a better, more universal solution is required and I think I have one.

My solution is to start incorporating our third official language, that of sign language, onto the cover of the passport. The simplest way to do this is to incorporate the universally recognised signs for males and females that are used to identify all public toilets. Therefore in my situation I could order a passport with a male figure whereas my wife could order a female figure. A brilliant scheme really as the sign gives information to us as users yet doesn’t affect the official use of the passport; it doesn’t matter to the unsmiling gentlemen at Australian Customs what identifying sign I use, the data they are after is inside and the cover doesn’t change this.

To help make this clearer you could extend the signs available. Smaller male and female figures could be used to denote children for example and for toddlers maybe the sign used to identify baby changing facilities at public loos. And of course this system is very inclusive, for example transgender people can chose whatever sign they want to identify with, it doesn’t matter to anyone else. What a great idea, simple but effective; all we need is a government budget to implement it.

There has been a lot of discussion about signs, the languages used, the order they are displayed in and so on. The main problem with a number of signs is they are unclear, especially so to tourists, but possibly the authorities could consider the use of more pictures to make things more obvious. This is already done in a number of areas such as road maintenance signs but we could extend this. For example the signs for school could be changed from the two words of Kura and School to also include a stylised picture of three kids having a smoke behind a shed.

The Medical Centre could have a sign that features dollar bills flying away and the road sign to Hot Water Beach could feature a kettle. Simple pictures could be used to inform the public quite easily, now the only thing we have to do is work out what order the three languages are displayed. My suggestion is that the image goes on top, it is after all more universal, but I am sure there will be one or two that disagree.