politics | Tim Moore

NO ‘MAYBES’, ONLY ‘BUTS’
THE RHETORICAL ART OF THE PRIME MINISTER

Between the idea
And the reality

Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long
                  T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

POLITICIANS THROUGHOUT history have always understood the power of words. Cicero, for example, perhaps history’s best-known speechmaker, was convinced of the almost limitless possibilities of the rhetorical craft. “Nothing is so unbelievable”, he declared, “that oratory cannot make acceptable.” Churchill, whose verbal talents are often mentioned alongside Cicero’s, knew the same. At the age of 21, long before he contemplated a career in politics – and a generation before his wartime speeches would do as much as anything to halt the advance of the Germans – Churchill wrote: “He who enjoys the gift of oratory, wields a power more durable than that of a great king”.
    Talk of Churchill and of ‘the durability of power’ suggests the career of a man who has Churchill’s first name as his middle, and who has often looked to the former British leader for inspiration – our own Prime Minister. As John Howard moves beyond the tenth year of his reign, and his hold on power seems as unshakeable now as ever, a major issue that has occupied the pundits is what lies at the heart of his overwhelming personal success as a leader. There are many explanations, some more suggestive of good fortune than honest accomplishment: an uncommonly healthy economy, kick-started arguably by the government’s predecessors; a forbidding security environment bound to favour an incumbent government; an Opposition in almost permanent disarray. But increasingly commentators are looking to the qualities of the man himself – and in particular the special nature of the language he has used to express his leadership.
    This is the focus of Judith Brett’s recent Quarterly Essay: Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia. Brett’s thesis – an interesting one – is that the key to Howard’s oratorical achievement is, paradoxically, that he is actually nothing like his hero Churchill. “Howard is no great rhetorician”, she says, “and his statements of the nation’s virtues are not particularly memorable.” Rather the Prime Minister’s strength lies, Brett suggests, in his ability to articulate “in the banal idiom of everyday life” certain simple ideas about what it is to be Australian – ones that in an age of uncertainty and almost constant change have resonated with so many of the populace.
    Brett goes on to give a number of examples of Howard’s modest but reassuring depictions of his fellow citizens, drawn from the many speeches he has made over the years to community organisations and at state occasions. Thus, to the Australian Council of Social Services, Howard opines:

Being Australian embodies real notions of decency and pragmatism in a classless society which lives up to its creed of practical mateship . . .

and in a New Year’s message:

The openness and unpretentious character of Australians has given us a well-deserved reputation for tolerance and hospitality.

    Brett sees unremarkable rhetoric like this as part of a “calming operation”, one designed to make Australians feel good about themselves, and in turn to mute the partisan passions and struggles that have been a part of the nation’s political history. It is a language, she suggests, that in the face of much turmoil beyond our borders has helped to create that special state of mind so desired by the PM, a nation ‘relaxed and comfortable’ with itself.
    There is certainly some validity to this view. If, as some suggest, Howard has fashioned his leadership on being precisely what his nemesis Keating wasn’t, we can see that language has been a defining area of difference. Where the Keating rhetoric was very much concerned with painting the big picture, or “spinning the great tale of Australian economic change” as Keating once put it, Howard has worked on a much smaller canvas, choosing to sketch a narrative not of grand transformations but of an unthreatening continuity.
    But to suggest that the Howard rhetoric has mainly been about reassurance and the reinforcing of past certainties is to ignore the fundamentally radical nature of the program his government has pursued. Indeed in the Howard ‘reform’ agenda over the past ten years, we have seen a fairly relentless challenge to so many of the bipartisan certainties that once characterised Australian political life – including a winding back of the nation’s welfare system, in place for half a century; a redrawing of the industrial relations landscape; the administering of an especially punitive refugee policy; the committing of the country to an unpopular war.
    Such measures of course do not get through parliaments by themselves – they require words to help them along – to explain, to persuade, to cajole, to bully where necessary. It is in this particular verbal activity – the pushing of the radical agenda – that we can identify another type of Howard rhetoric, one quite different from that observed by Brett, but one that is combined very artfully with it.
    To understand the radical part of the Howard repertoire, we need to turn to the 2001 election – the Tampa election – where the Prime Minister embarked on the ‘radical’ strategy of using refugee issues as the main plank of his campaign. It was at the Liberal campaign launch two weeks out from the election – when the fate of the Tampa refugees was still being decided – that Howard uttered those famous words, now etched indelibly in the national psyche, and thought by some to be sufficiently powerful in their impact to win him the election:

We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
(Liberal Party campaign launch, Sydney, 8 October 2001)

On the face of it, these are bald and harsh words – more befitting of a populist firebrand than an incumbent prime minister. But to understand the effectiveness of this utterance more completely we need to hear the words that preceded it. Significantly, these are of the ‘reassuring’ type that Brett makes so much of in her essay:

It’s about this nation saying to the world ‘we are a generous open-hearted people taking more refugees on a per capita basis than any nation except Canada. We have a proud record of welcoming people from 140 different nations.’

and then:

But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

    In the crafting of this message, we can see there is an attempt to assuage and mollify here as a way of preparing the ground for the hard words to follow. And clearly the message went down very well. David Marr and Marian Wilkinson in their book of the 2001 election – Dark Victory – record the triumph of this oratorical moment: “Great breakers of applause broke over the Prime Minister’s head . . . most of the Cabinet, a squad of sitting members and senators, Liberal contenders for hopeless seats that had suddenly become winnable, and the Howard family superbly turned out in the front row all clapped and clapped and clapped”. And to show that this was no improvised one-off technique, we find the Prime Minister articulating the government’s refugee stance in almost identical fashion a week later in his final pre-election address to the National Press Club (8 November 2001):

This country is proud of its tradition in giving asylum to those fleeing tyranny. We will always do so, but we have a duty to protect the system from abuse.

    A cursory survey of John Howard’s speechmaking suggests that this two-part sequence – the assuaging followed by the sting – has become one of the keys to his rhetorical style. Thus, in a speech about the sensitive area of welfare reform – intended to prepare the way for a serious limiting of welfare entitlements – the Prime Minister begins by noting the fundamental generosity of Australians, but then goes on to point out the ‘understandable’ limits that this generosity must take:

The thing that drives me most in public life is the spirit of the Australian people. Their great capacity to reach out to each other . . . their willingness to look after those in the community who are genuinely in need of help, but equally to require of everyone that they do their bit for the common good.
(Liberal Party campaign launch, Sydney, 8 October 2001)

    Linguistically, the decisive element in the Howard ‘couplet’ is the conjunction ‘but’. Indeed when one is tuned in to the technique, it’s hard not to notice it coming. The nation is first told of its virtues and then with the ‘but’, is informed that certain things, certain unpleasant things, must regrettably be done, essentially because it would be folly to do otherwise. We see this technique used to optimal effect in what has been arguably the PM’s greatest rhetorical challenge: justifying the sending of troops to Iraq. Thus, to the National Press Club in the lead-up to the war, the PM was at pains to remind everyone of the nation’s fundamentally pacifist instincts:

I do think that it’s necessary . . . for the Australian public to be reminded of the balance of the humanitarian argument because inevitably when the possibility of war looms people talk about the costs of it, and that is naturally human. I mean we all hate it.
(National Press Club, Canberra, 14 March 2003)

The speech continues with the PM insistent that the war option is as distasteful to him as it is to anyone else, and that he would much prefer to be engaged in other matters:

Anybody who thinks I’m enjoying having to argue this position in the sense that, you know, I like the idea that at some stage this country might be involved in a military conflict, I mean nothing could be further from the truth. I’d much rather be talking to you today even about things like . . . health policy, having a debate about good water policy with the States, things like that.

And then the sting:

BUT I can’t do that.

And so what the PM was then forced to talk about – so very much against his wishes – was the “incontrovertible intelligence” on WMDs and the threat they posed to the nation.
    A similar formula was used several weeks later on the sombre occasion of the farewelling of troops at Fremantle after war had been declared. Again the PM sought to dispel any suggestions of belligerence, insisting that he and the nation were most reluctant warriors, embarking on war only after every possibility of peace had been exhausted:

No person in their own mind embraces military conflict without trying to the maximum extent possible to avoid it and to seek another alternative. We would all like to live in a world in which there were no challenges and no problems and that [sic] you could simply by turning your back on a challenge of a rogue state possessing weapons of mass destruction hope it would go away. BUT the world has never been quite as simple as that and it’s not as simple as that now. (Farewelling the Kanimbla, Fremantle, 23 January 2003)

    The period since mid-2005 has signified a distinctly different period for the Howard Government. With a majority won in the upper house – and with the main political task now being just to win over a few occasionally recalcitrant senators – there has not been the same pressure on the government to persuade the electorate of the wisdom of its decisions and actions. Interestingly though, the Prime Minister has shown no signs in his speechmaking of departing from the strategy noted above. In fact it has been used to very good effect to soften up the public for the radical legislative program that has been pursued over the past year, taking in the full sale of Telstra, welfare reform, voluntary student unionism, and the IR legislation. Thus, in several speeches – on the eve of the accession of the new parliament – the PM sought to reassure everyone of the government’s fundamentally “sober” and “moderate” outlook, while at the same time insisting there was a compelling need for it to be otherwise:

We govern in trust for the Australian people and we govern for all of them and they expect us to use our new found authority wisely and soberly and sensibly . . . BUT they nonetheless expect us to use it decisively.
(Liberal Party Council, 25 June 2005)

And:

This is a nation that rejects extremism, this is a nation that has no truck for [sic] excessive zealotry in politics, this is a nation that believes in a fair balance . . . BUT this is also a confident nation that recognises that we must change to continue to achieve and succeed.
(Liberal Party Council, 26 June 2005)

    Of the various changes ushered in during the legislative whirlwind of late 2005, it is the government’s IR reform package that has been most open to accusations of ‘zealotry’ and a ‘lack of a fair balance’. And the Prime Minister’s method for making the new industrial rules appear utterly fair and reasonable? Yet again that familiar ‘balancing’ of clauses – some reassuring words about the need to preserve the right to collectively bargain, followed by an insistence on the need for changes, ones designed, as it happens, to curtail those rights:

One of the opportunities that the unexpected numbers in the Senate presents us with is a capacity to go somewhat further in the area of industrial relations reform, not in a way that needlessly creates antagonism in the community, not in a way that denies people the right to belong to a trade union if they wish, or denies them the right to have their interests represented industrially by a trade union. That is their right, and it will never be the policy of this Government to deny people a choice.

But we do need still more flexibility, and I think we need a more nationally consistent industrial relations system.
(Queensland Liberal Party, Brisbane, 18 May 2005)

    Judith Brett suggests the key to Howard’s success is the way he has embraced and articulated a range of values once thought to be very much the ideological preserve of the Left: egalitarianism, mateship, generosity, a fair-go-for-all. Brett sees this embrace as a genuine one – as arising naturally from the young Howard’s life experiences growing up in a struggling middle-class family. The many examples of Prime Ministerial language cited above suggest however that we are entitled to be just a little sceptical. Indeed, as I have sought to show, the language of decency and fairness has been drawn on most artfully to push through an ambitious political agenda that by any commonsense understanding has to be seen as radically incommensurate with these values.
    John Howard has now signalled his intention to remain in office and with his approval still holding up well in the electorate, talk of him outdoing the record of his hero Menzies is no longer completely fanciful. Clearly if the PM’s hold on power is to be challenged at all in the near future, much work would need to be done. For the Labor Party, much of this would need to happen on the policy front. But there is also work to be done on the rhetorical front. At a minimum, the Opposition parties would need to get better at exposing the fundamental contradictions that lie at the heart of so many of the PM’s messages to the nation. To paraphrase Eliot’s Hollow Men, a ‘shadow’ often falls between the ‘idea and reality’ of government policy; indeed the ‘hollowness’ of some of these messages suggests that the Howard style may not be as unassailable as many have imagined. Around the issue of industrial relations, for example, the gap between the rhetoric of ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ on the one hand, and the reality of summary dismissal on the other, is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile.
    But it would not be enough for the Labor Party just to expose contradictions. A more important task would be for it to reclaim those values which were integral to its identity but are now little more than commodities floating in the free marketplace of political communications. One way it can do this is to start insisting on an alternative to the PM’s rhetorical mode, one based on a consequent logic of ‘so’, rather than an adversative logic of ‘but’. So when the PM asserts that ‘we are a generous open-hearted people and have a proud record of welcoming people’, or when he speaks of ‘the spirit of the Australian people, and their willingness to look after those in the community in need of help’ his opponents’ response would then not be ‘how do we negate these values?’, but rather ‘how do we give effect to these values in public policy?’ Until Labor develops an effective counter-rhetoric it will continue to find itself outwitted at every turn by this consummately clever communicator. And the rest of us? We might as well prepare ourselves for that glorious and gloating moment that will occur some time in 2014, sure to be more of a bang than a whimper!

Tim Moore works in the area of language and literacy at Monash University.

© Tim Moore

Overland 184–spring 2006, pp.14–17

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politics | TIM MOORE