From the archive: ‘Political language can illuminate the darkness’

In 2008, I delivered several versions of this speech at various universities. Over the years, I’ve cannibalised parts of the speech for other means, but thought I should revisit the original for archival purposes.

One of the first questions people ask me when they find out I’m a political speechwriter is:

How did you become a speechwriter?

I’d be lying if I said I knew. Because, scout’s honour, I have no idea how you become a speechwriter. I barely know how I became a speechwriter.

Let me explain. 

Speechwriting is a strange, nebulous way to make a living. Speechwriters spend most of their time in their office of the Parliamentary library, devouring books like caterpillars – after which they stay back, cocooned behind closed doors, surrounded by piles of papers and books, and tap away on computer keyboards.  

And, maybe, if everything goes right and the person they’re working for likes what they’ve written, the slug of a speech they’re laboured over will enjoy the abbreviated lifespan of a butterfly. This nebulous, solitary way of life can do strange things to the human spirit.  If you don’t believe me, consider two former political speechwriters.

Exhibit A.  Tony Abbott.

Exhibit B.  Alan Jones.

That said, I do love what I do. The reason I do is because speechwriting combines two of my passions – politics and poetry.

The career path that’s led me to speechwriting – if you can call the goat track I’ve taken such a thing – has been as opportunistic as it has been tangled, and reaches back into my childhood. When I was growing up in the Goulburn Valley – a boy not much older than my five year old son, Noah – I held two fervent beliefs.

One.  It never rains on Sundays, because it’s God’s day and God won’t let the sky pee on His day.

Two. Gough Whitlam is the anti-Christ. 

Both beliefs stemmed from my Dad’s family’s brand of Irish Catholicism.

An Irish Catholicism that was chock-a-block full of the mysteries of the church on the one hand – and the troubles of the Labor Party on the other. We were ex-ALP.  Part of the tribe of right-wing Catholics that split from the ALP in the 1950s, supported the Democratic Labor Party, then, gradually, gravitated to the Liberal Party. I even – I’m embarrassed to admit – attended a few Young Liberal meetings in Hawthorn when I was 15.  If you were at that meeting, I was the kid from North Fitzroy with the stretch jeans and his Dad’s sports jacket. 

But what saved me from becoming, God forbid, Tony Abbott’s mini-me – was poetry. I decided I was a poet and quit politics at the ripe old age of 16. At the time, I was at the beginning of Year 12. Having decided I was going to be a poet, I took the next logical step. I quit studying. 

Instead of educating myself, young moron that I was, I filled up exercise book after exercise book with doggerel.  Needless to say, by the time of the October exams, I was failing half of my subjects. I’d gone from Dux to dunce of history. At one stage I was confronted by a teacher demanding to know what drugs I was taking. I – and this is no lie – told her my drug of choice was … Emily Dickinson.  

In the end, I pulled myself together long enough to weasel through high school and land a job at The Sun as a copy boy. By the time I was 18, I was working as a crime reporter. By the time I was 21, I was covering the 1990 Federal Election. By the time I was 23, I was departmental speechwriting for the Health Minister in the run up to the 1992 State Election. By the time I was 26, I was press secretary to the then-Leader of the State Opposition, John Brumby. By the time I was 27, I was living in San Francisco and working as a TV and Internet producer – and covering the 2000 U.S. Presidential election. By the time I was 31, I was back in Melbourne – and press sec to the Attorney General, Rob Hulls.

And finally – four years ago – politics and poetry intersected when Steve Bracks asked me to be his chief speechwriter. It was an accidental intersection. I wasn’t even looking for a job.  But Steve needed a new senior speechwriter, and my name was suggested because I was a poet. I had an interview, wrote a speech as a try out, and was duly hired.

So, it’s no exaggeration to say I became a speechwriter because of my poetry. Nor is it an exaggeration to say I remain a speechwriter because of my poetry. What drew me to politics, though, was my belief in participatory democracy – the conviction that, unless I got involved, I was in no position to complain. And the realisation that, as Cicero once wrote, you can’t choose your time and place to get involved. To quote the great Roman orator:

‘The opportunity of rescuing the country, whatever the dangers that threaten it, does not come suddenly or when you wish it, but only when you are in a position which allows you to do so.’

It’s as Camus said: time does not belong to man – man belongs to time. In other words, circumstances do just define us – they choose us. Consequently, I remain as a speechwriter because I believe I should make a contribution – and I believe this is the best way in which I can make that contribution meaningful.

But what about the work itself? At its best, Speechwriting is writing for performance. It is spoken – not written – word. You are writing to be heard. Not read. You must therefore use language that has punch and verve. You must therefore use rhythm. You must therefore be awake to the sounds different words make when you bang them together. And you must therefore tell a story – because, ultimately, that’s what people remember.

I’m not saying speeches are poetry. I don’t buy what Shelley once wrote in his essay, A Defence of Poetry – that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Shelley should’ve read the Crimes Act. It’s more like Leviticus than Philip Larkin. I think the Australia’s great expatriate poet, Peter Porter, was closer to the mark when he called poets ‘politicians of the printed page’. So, let me repeat: Legislation is not poetry.  And neither is a speech. But the best speeches can approach poetry. To do so, they have to do more than parrot junk phrases or bureaucratic babble or the latest sound-bites – to my ear speeches that fall into those traps come off sounding like bad rap songs.  

To illustrate, let me read you a poem called ‘Hansard’ – taken from my second collection of poetry, Magisterium – which Australian Scholarly Publishing has just published. ‘Hansard’ is a cut and paste poem – recycled from the maiden speeches of three now-former Federal Ministers.

What am I trying to tell you by reading this poem – other than ‘buy my book’? What I am trying to tell you is this: to paraphrase the poet William Carlos Williams, speeches are, like poems, machines made of words, of language; language is essential to our democracy, because words define public affairs and public affairs define the nation; and those words can be recalibrated to say just about anything. Remember: language is not concrete; it is not black and white. It is an identikit of words stuck together to try to represent a position that is – at its primal cognitive level – organic, rather than linguistic. That is why language is, as writer Eva Hoffman has said, the ‘hobgoblin of abstraction’.

 Or why ‘language is’, as the poet George Szirtes has said, ‘the thin skin of ice over a fathomless pond with its black bed. With dark above and dark below.’ Language, in other words, is not solid. It is not the raw material from which the three little pigs would choose to build a house. At best, it is an avatar that offers the barest inkling of the dark, speechless matter that shimmies around inside us. It may be a thin skin of ice over darkness, as Szirtes says. A poem – or a speech – should ‘like a piece of ice on a hot stove … ride on its own melting’, as the poet Robert Frost said. But without that ice there is only darkness.  

All of which is why language – as flawed as it is – remains the best means by which we can approach consensus – if not truth.  And is why speeches — as arcane as they are — remain the best means through which political language can illuminate the darkness. As Ben Johnson wrote ‘speak that I may see thee’.

All of which goes to the heart of what makes speechwriting difficult. Because speechwriters are not writing for themselves — they are writing for someone else. And that requires imaginative projection. You have to be able to put yourself into the shoes of the person delivering the speech – picture the audience they will be speaking to — and speak that audience in your speechmakers’ words. Not your words. Their words.

Ideally, the person writing and the person talking are breathing the same air, thinking the same thoughts and speaking the same language. That simpatico is hard to attain and hard to hold onto – and I can’t tell you how to get there. But I can tell you how it feels when you do.

Achieving sympatico feels like when you’re trying to solve one of those 3-D wooden puzzles in the dark, and there’s only one right way, and you fumble and feel around until it clicks into place. And when it does click into place, it feels to me a lot like poetry.

In conclusion, let me round off with a two general remarks about speechwriting, one rule of writing, and a closing thought.

Number 1 general remark on speechwriting.

Speechwriting is a job for a writer. If you’re not someone who can sit down and research, write up to 10,000 words a week, and get such a buzz out of the process that you want to turn around and do it all over again next week – if you’re not that kind person this is not your kind of job.

General remark Number 2.

There’s more to speechwriting than sitting your bum down in front of a computer terminal. A speechwriter has to be engaged in the world. That includes holding a running conversation with the person they’re writing for — talking about everything from policies to poetry — so that they get on, and remain on, the same wavelength as their speechmaker.

To put it in the sporting vernacular, if you’re not engaged with the person you’re writing for you lose your form — and the ball just doesn’t come off the bat sweetly.

My one rule of writing is simply this: Read. If you are serious about writing you have to be even more serious about reading.

Let me make a lateral connection to that point: If we want a better standard of democracy, we all need to read more. 

Without reading, then thinking about we are reading about, then talking about what we are thinking about what we are reading about, then talking about what other people are talking about what they are reading about, ad nauseam — reading, thinking, debating — without genuflecting before that literary trinity informed public debate is Mission: Impossible.

Which brings me to my concluding thought, courtesy of George Orwell:

‘A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.’

Thank you.