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March 15 2003

Many say the art of oratory is dead, killed off by the sound bite. But we still yearn for those great speeches, writes Margaret Simons - if only someone would deliver them.

Certainly it was very hot. Perhaps that is why the earnest thousands who rallied for peace in Sydney's Hyde Park last month were more than fidgety while listening to all the speeches. Before the speakers had finished, the chant went up from the crowd: "March. March. March."

People didn't want words. They wanted to act.

I have asked others who were at the peace rallies in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra about the speeches they heard. Nobody remembers them. They remember clapping at some points, or thinking "right on", the way one does when surrounded by the like-minded.

But, just 48 hours later, the words had disappeared. The media reported not the speeches but the fact that people were there - not their words, but their numbers.

Perhaps the marchers were so clear about what they were doing that they didn't need speeches. Perhaps they were sick of rhetoric. Or perhaps it was just the heat.

Whatever the reason, there was no form of words, no tone poem of meaning, that penetrated the public consciousness. And the meaning gaps were soon exploited by those who regarded the marchers as naive, or even immoral.

Some say we live in the age of the sound bite, that rhetoric and oratory are dead. Certainly we face a daily barrage of short, banal media grabs. But our appetite for genuine communication has been sharpened. Though actions spoke louder on that day in Hyde Park, the peace movement is poorer for it. We hunger for speeches and fine words. It is doubtful if there has ever been more speechifying. Never have there been so many professional speech-writers, and never have there been so many different ways of speaking in public.

John Uhr, a political scientist at the Australian National University, says a new concept is abroad in political science - the rhetorical leadership. This posits that power relies just as much on a leader's use of public speech as on structure or law.

"Leaders exercise power ... in many ways, ranging from the secret and bluntly instrumental to the public and highly symbolic. Included in this range of powers is the power of language to shape organisational life ... Leadership works in large measure by managing the meaning of collective effort," he says.

We hunger for speeches in the same way as we hunger for music - because, at their best, speeches have the same ability as music to lift us out of the pedestrian and give meaning to everyday actions. Like good music, good speeches engage the mind and the emotions.

In these troubled times, most of all in the past few months, it has sometimes seemed as though the future of the world and the nature of our nation has hung on speeches. Addresses to the United Nations, State of the Union speeches and, locally, farewells to troops. Abstract nouns - such as liberty and peace and democracy and honesty - have filled the word spaces of public life.

But are these speeches good? What has become of oratory and rhetoric now the professional wordsmiths have entered the halls of power?

In January last year, the wife of George Bush's junior speech-writer, David Frum, sent an email to friends and family. The President had just made the State of the Union address in which he spoke about rogue nations in league with terrorists. He named Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

The email read: "I realise this is very 'Washington' of me to mention, but my husband is responsible for the 'axis of evil' segment of Tuesday's State of the Union address. It's not often a phrase one writes gains national notice - unless you're in advertising, of course, so I'll hope you'll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere."

Frum has written a book in which he describes how he arrived at the phrase. His brief was to write a speech to persuade people that the potential for weapons to be given to terrorist groups made it essential to "go after" Iraq.

He pondered Iraq's wickedness and how it compared with the World War II axis powers of Japan, Germany and Italy. But Iraq on its own was not an axis. Frum added two other would-be nuclear "rogue states". He wanted to call them an "axis of hatred".

Bush's chief speech-writer, Michael Gerson, introduced the word "evil". It fitted with the theological language Bush had been using since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Iraq, Iran and North Korea were not allied. North Korea was one of the most isolated countries in the world, and Iran and Iraq were sworn enemies. Nevertheless, it seemed to Frum that they had a lot in common - "resentment of the power of the West and contempt for democracy".

The White House doesn't use "axis of evil" any more. There seems to be tacit agreement that it was a mistake. Some have said the rhetoric might even have brought about the thing it described. Senior analysts have argued that the speech undermined Iran's moderate leaders, and might have provoked North Korea into its present confrontation.

Some speech-writers believe the growth in speechifying is partly due to the very thing we might think would destroy it: the era of the sound bite, thanks to the all-pervasive power of the media.

Peggy Noonan, who was Ronald Reagan's speech-writer, has written about a speech being an opportunity "to speak unfiltered, uncut and uninterrupted".

Lucinda Holdforth was principal speech-writer for Kim Beazley when he was deputy prime minister, and now writes speeches for Australian and international business leaders. She says: "A speech gives you unmediated access to your listeners. You control the time, the space and the moment. You have an unobstructed opportunity to tell your story in a way that is best suited to your needs."

She talks about the recent speech by the Opposition Leader, Simon Crean, to departing troops, in which he told them he disagreed with the decision to send them. "He finally and dramatically crystallised the issue at hand. A press release would not have had the same startling impact. The speech event was important - the fact that he showed up, that he said it to their faces." This made it the most striking moment in Crean's leadership, she says.

One of the finest speech-writers of recent times is surely Don Watson, who wrote speeches for a former prime minister, Paul Keating. His work is studied in schools. He argues that speeches are no longer necessary, and that the Prime Minister, John Howard, has proved this. Howard can get away without them.

"After the Bali bombing, there were no memorable words from our leaders. What we remember is a gesture. The image of Howard embracing a grieving father." Yet the period after the bombings was the natural occasion for a speech, says Watson.

The set-piece speech, however well delivered, is up against a lot of countervailing information that everyone can see. Watson says people can find on the internet the background to what George Bush is saying, and they can say: "I don't believe you, George."

But while he believes the prevailing political culture has no room for speeches, he still thinks they are necessary for a healthy political life. He holds out for good speeches - plain-speaking statements that "tell people what to make of this welter of information, that try to say something about the direction of the country".

Watson, like other writers before him, believes writing, including speech-writing, is more about discovery than invention. When you are writing well, you find out what needs to be said by writing it, by struggling towards the meaning. "Then, sometimes before you know it, you have written something that brings tears to your eyes."

Holdforth says: "A speech is a narrative. It's a story told by the leader to his or her followers. The leader takes them on a journey of words so that they will follow the leader in deed. We want our leaders to provide the big picture within which our individual small pictures make sense.

"When people talk about a vacuum of leadership in Australia, I often think they are saying: 'Where are the stories of us, and what we are about? How will we know where we are going as a country unless our leaders tell us?"'

We live not so much in the era of the sound bite as in the era of the wordsmith - the era of self-consciously, professionally and artificially stitched-together rhetoric. And yet the last decade tells us that words alone, even very powerful and well-written words, are not enough for political success.

In his famous "Placido Domingo" speech to the Canberra Press Gallery, Keating defined the art of leadership as being about both performance and music - singing a song. Later, Keating described his leadership as being about "spinning the tale, the great tale of Australian economic change".

Keating employed Watson to write his speeches and help spin that tale. The Redfern speech about Aboriginal reconciliation is one of the best known examples. In his book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Watson recounts how he wrote the speech and gave it to Keating to read over breakfast, and how not a word was changed.

The speech contained those memorable cadences: "It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us." Keating lost power not at the election after making this speech, but afterwards, and despite many other good speeches.

John Uhr says: "While Keating may be right that in the end it's the big picture which changes nations, it is also true that big pictures hang heavy in the popular mind and risk failing when that mind grows weary or suspicious of the merits of what it is being asked to support."

Four years after the Redfern speech came the voice of that reaction, when Pauline Hanson made her maiden speech to Federal Parliament. "I am fed up with being told: 'This is our land.' Well, where the hell do I go? I was born here, and so were my parents and children. I draw the line when told I must pay, and continue paying, for something that happened over 200 years ago. Like most Australians, I worked for my land. No one gave it to me." This, too, was a narrative. This, too, was a powerful speech. For many Australians, this was the "thing" that was aching to be said.

I rang John Howard's office to ask who wrote his speeches. I was told that nobody wrote for him: "He talks to his advisers to gather facts, but he either speaks without a script or writes his speeches himself."

Howard's speech to Parliament last month on the need for action against Iraq was clearly scripted. It contained some traces of argument: "I pose the simple question: what hope does the world have of dealing peacefully and effectively with North Korea if the Security Council is seen to deal weakly with Iraq?" There were bits of vernacular: "Iraq has form." There were arid metaphors: "Iraq has all the hallmarks of a nation which is hiding something." There were no rhetorical flourishes.

But this kind of scripted speech is not Howard's most effective leadership tool. Uhr points to Howard's use of talkback radio as a successful kind of "public speech" - a different kind of rhetoric - succeeding precisely because it doesn't sound rhetorical. Howard, he says, can be "skilfully muted" in his rhetoric, and perhaps these techniques are stronger for getting under our modern, cynical guard.

So is this the new direction of political rhetoric? Are the talkback radio segment and the doorstop interview to replace oratory? Is the set-piece speech on the way out and, with it, the assumption that somewhere in the words of our leaders will be an argument, a grand theme, an engagement of mind as well as emotion?

The grand old man of Australian speech-writing is Graham Freudenberg, who has written for a string of Labor leaders, including Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran, Bob Hawke and now Bob Carr. He is quite immodest about it. "Of course, I am undoubtedly the greatest speech-writer in Australian history. Nobody disputes that." And he is right. They don't.

But he insists his success had less to do with his words than with his commitment to a cause. He says the modern idea that wordsmiths will "prostitute" their talents to provide "glossy words" for a cause they don't necessarily understand, or follow, is grotesque.

"When words are used without great cause and principle, it becomes evil. When the rhetoric is divorced from the logic of the case, it becomes evil. We have this terrible disjoint between the use of power and the capacity for remorse," he says.

When Winston Churchill made the famous speech in which he proclaimed that the Germans would be fought on the beaches, he could talk of abstract nouns such as "liberty" in a very direct way. His nation was facing imminent invasion. Everyone knew what freedom meant because its opposite was looming.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural address during the Depression included: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Yet, reading the speech, this phrase does not stick out as an obvious sound bite. It emerges naturally out of the logic of his argument.

Going back to the great speeches, the thing that strikes me is their extraordinary plainness. They were hard-working orations. They were full of sinew and muscle, detail and argument. There was a stripped-down rawness of communication and, at the same time, a grand theme that arose.

In preparation for our interview, Freudenberg had taken care to write down a particular phrase he specifically wanted me to quote. He prefaced it by saying he was appalled by the consequences of the speech-writing industry he had helped to create: "If all the

bloody speech-writers and speech-makers would shut up, we might get a sensible solution. It's all this posturing and all these imitation Churchills that are leading us to disaster."

The phrase he had noted down was: "Nothing would contribute to the wellbeing of the world more than a holiday on rhetoric."

Watson links the lack of good speeches in our political culture to a broader issue - the era of the political professional.

"Words and ideas are inseparable and you will never get good speeches if you demand that writers deal only with words. Wordsmiths they call them - which has an honourable ring to it - but it's a misreading of the task," he says.

"Outrageous as it may seem to modern political geniuses, writing a speech is not the equivalent of cake decoration. You actually have to be in on the cake itself."

That is why politicians will often write better speeches for themselves than their staff will be able to come up with, he says.

In researching this article, I came across an American website called, which offers made-to-measure speeches for weddings, funeral orations and even "persuasive speeches", within minutes of an order being placed. Its sample speeches include a eulogy for a fisherman that begins: "John won't sit on the river bank any more. He won't tell any more fisherman's tales. He won't cast his fly again and, though his creel may be empty, our eyes today are filled with tears." There is also a sample speech for a retiring politician.

This website is a poignant testimony both to our hunger for significant forms of words and to the average person's lack of confidence in finding them for themselves.

I suspect that doorstop interviews and talkback radio will never entirely satisfy this hunger for meaning. So long as that hunger exists, there will be word spaces out there, waiting to be filled by those with the wit and vision to do so.




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