Royal Commissions and Public Inquiries Editing and Proofreading Services

A public inquiry is established when the ordinary machinery has failed and something must be established authoritatively. Its report is the only product, and it has to do several incompatible things at once: establish what happened to a standard that survives legal challenge, be readable by the public whose confidence prompted it, treat the people who gave evidence with care, and produce recommendations that outlast the news cycle. Most inquiries succeed at the first and fail at the rest, which is why so many well-documented findings change nothing.

We edit what commissions and inquiries produce — terms of reference and their interpretation, procedural rulings and practice directions, opening and closing statements of counsel, interim and final reports, findings of fact and analysis chapters, recommendations and implementation frameworks, executive summaries and plain-language versions, survivor and witness-facing information and support material, procedural fairness notices to individuals and institutions likely to be criticised, submissions and responses from participants, evidence summaries and chronologies, public communications and media material, and post-report implementation monitoring documentation. Our editors work with material about serious harm and are conscious of what it means to handle it.

The hardest editorial judgement in an inquiry report concerns testimony from people who were harmed. Their accounts are usually the reason the inquiry exists, and there is a persistent pull in two wrong directions: towards summarising them into neutral institutional prose that strips out what happened, or towards a level of detail that serves the reader's appetite rather than the finding. We work on these so accounts are quoted where the person's own words carry the finding and paraphrased where they do not, so nothing appears that is not necessary to what the report must establish, so the language describing institutions is as concrete as the language describing individuals — because the passive voice arrives reliably at the moment an organisation's conduct is being described — and so anyone who gave evidence can find themselves treated as a witness to something rather than as an illustration of it. Where the report must decline to make a finding, saying so plainly is better than a formulation that lets both sides claim it.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including evidence, draft findings and material subject to publication restrictions or procedural fairness process. We are editors rather than lawyers or investigators and offer no view on any finding, criticism or recommendation. What we can do is make the report readable, its reasoning visible, and its handling of testimony careful.