Oh, for some oratory not mired in mantras

Supplied Editorial Fwd: FW: mugshot

When you mate a donkey with a zebra you get a dear little useless thing with stripes and big ears called a zedonk. Sometime in the 1980s, when tourism was held out as the nation’s saviour and governments were inventing their first mission statements and learning to put “value-adding” and “leverage our competitive advantages” into every speech and press release, a chap in the Otway Ranges value-added his donkey into a zedonk and leveraged it into a “tourist attraction”.

To help him along with his start-up he got hold of several thousand dollars from the Victorian Economic Development Corporation, which had been created by the Cain Labor government to provide venture capital to entrepreneurs with this sort of ­vision and get up and go.

Labor scraped home in the 1988 election campaign, but had the story of the zedonk got out it might have lost.

For the handful of people on the Labor side who knew the ­secret, every day of the campaign was overhung with dread that the media would hear of it, and there would be sneering headlines and humiliating pictures — of the zedonk eating bundles of taxpayer dollars, for instance.

Well, the headlines never appeared and the zedonk seems to have gone down the gurgler with the VEDC; and, for the time being, along with them went the old Keynesian belief that free markets are better for a little government intervention here and there.

What sport the zedonk would have made for the economic rationalists, what an emblem for their gospel.

I’d forgotten the zedonk until Malcolm Turnbull’s innovation statement last week brought him clip-clopping back.

Curious though it is to hear neoliberals speaking with no apparent shame of picking winners and admitting the mighty market’s need of coaxing and manipulating, I am a patriot and will not hear a word against innovation. Or optimism. I’m on the team.

And as much as I enjoyed the late 1960s, and a lot of the 80s and 90s, and 2009 for some reason, I will not cavil when the PM insists that these are the best times ever to be an Australian, even “the best times in human history”.

Since he became Prime Minister, the tone and coherence of Turnbull’s sentences — the mere interest of them — has palpably lifted the national mood.

For a while Barack Obama had a similar effect on the world at large. The quality of speech does make a difference: who would have thought?

After years of atavistic messages and sub-managerial drivel delivered in hard-hats with backdrops of babies and flags, this should surprise only the political geniuses who think that politics is essentially a question of management and language is a subset of marketing. And why wouldn’t they think this in a neoliberal age when every sovereign citizen has become a sovereign consumer, and to win their favour politicians must ape the speech of every other customer-focused enterprise?

Should the media space be too great to fill with “resonant phrases”, as Tony Abbott called his favourite slogans, for years now our politicians have repaired to the well of wearisome management-speak and question-begging, declaring themselves focused on solutions for the country that will work, committed to delivering the outcomes that the Australian people deserve, and being “about driving jobs and growth”.

As with advertising and marketing, there can be no arguing with this stuff because it makes no argument, proceeds from no first principles, contains no thought and provokes none. The only difference is that advertising and marketing is more entertaining and more believable.

Now, in view of his undoubted gift and care for language, we should expect the PM to describe the new and exciting reality of our times with compelling verve. At the very least we would expect him to show us how this age is so different from, say, 1988. And yet — and this was when the zedonk returned — the language of his innovation statement was mind-numbingly stale.

We are entreated to “embrace change”, “embrace risk” and “embrace innovation”; “identify opportunities”; to be “adaptable, flexible and innovative”. More than once we are told of the need to “incentivise” people. It is “about jobs, it’s about growth, it’s about the future of the Australian economy”, we are told. It is about entrepreneurs because they “drive jobs”. Above all it is about “agility”, even a “culture of agility”. It is “all about Australia becoming an innovation nation”.

And it’s all out of the Harvard Business School, Silicon Valley and management textbooks.

“What we are seeking to do,” the Prime Minister said, “is to talk about policy in the same way practical men and women in the business world have been doing forever.”

In fact, politicians have been talking like this since Tom Peters’s Total Quality Management was the hottest thing around. John Cain was saying these things. So were Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. (Though not “incentivise”, which was a much-mocked Liberal Party slogan of the day. Or was it “incentivate”?)

Even “agile” goes back a couple of decades. The Victorian Department of Finance declared itself “agile” around 2003, a couple of the big four banks were on to it about the same time, and very likely the word turned up in even less likely places before then.

Of course, it is strange to see neoliberals spruiking Keynesian policies; the same people who 20 years ago (and on and off ever since) mocked industry policy and did their best to tear it down, are now reinventing it and declaring “the future of our economy is in hi-tech advanced manufacturing”.

Somewhere in the national archives I am sure we could find Keating saying the very same thing around 1993. But such ironies abound in politics. Doctrine never could stand much exposure to democratic reality.

The greater anomaly is the failure of our political class to find a language in which to speak to us. We live in times that are every bit as astonishing and laden with opportunity as the Prime Minister says they are. The need to create an economy and a culture in tune with these times is as great as he says it is. Though the word is kin to mental vacancy, there may even be grounds for the optimism of which he speaks. Yet for our enlightenment and the enlargement of our senses we are offered the likes of this: “We should be able to transact with the government for most of our engagement on our smartphone.” Smartphone we understand, but the rest of it?

Assume for a moment that it is through language that ideas take hold and cultures are changed. Is it possible to “usher in the ideas boom” or “ensure that more Australians are imbued with a culture of imagination” in these drab terms? Or are the platitudes just another sign that while we are conscious of the change all around us, we have no grip on it; that, as usual, we are happily riding the wake of other countries’ inventiveness and that it will take a lot more than a billion dollars and “promoting coding and computing in schools” before we can begin to emulate them.

Perhaps it is because they have been made mad by media demands and afflicted with the managerial virus that our politicians have lost the power to say something concrete and persuasive. It seems just as likely the reforms that began back in the 80s and gave us not only prolonged growth and the lifestyle we adore, but such economic agility as we can manage, also deprived us of much that is agile in the language.

From there you have to wonder if we can think as well as we used to; or if the mantras of management and marketing, politics and PowerPoint, and all that goes with being knowledge workers and sovereign consumers are eroding and narrowing our cognitive abilities just when we most need them.

Still, echoing the textbooks, the Prime Minister tells us to expect failure and welcome it for the lessons it teaches. It turns out that zedonks can add value after all.