Federal election 2016: banal campaign rhetoric sign of the times

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The 24-hour news cycle and perpetually outraged special interest groups on social media have turned Australian election campaigns into protracted mitigation risk strategies.

Risk-averse candidates trot out banalities in sterile speeches ­divorced from the grand tradition of Western political rhetoric. The need to appeal to and avoid ­offending every target demographic of the 21st-century West has turned oratory beige. The leaders’ debate was a prime example of Australia’s descent into rhetorical subtopia.

To his credit, Malcolm Turnbull began the Sky News leaders’ debate last Friday with an inspired devotional to Western civilisation’s foundational value of freedom. By contrast, Bill Shorten’s opening pitch was so dull that host David Speers had to rouse the audience to applaud it.

Turnbull should have won the contest. During the first half he was presidential where Shorten was pedestrian. He was spontaneous where Shorten appeared scripted. He offered fact and substance while Shorten flogged tired class-war rhetoric. Around the midway point, however, Turnbull the statesman gave way to a hybrid political tone: an admixture of lawyer, financier and technocrat. He began to prosecute arguments on technical grounds and, in the process, ceded audience support to Shorten’s more engaging style.

It was on a question of extraditing suspected war criminals to Bosnia that the debate turned in Shorten’s favour. Both leaders agreed on the legal process for extradition orders, but Turnbull’s response was brusque and technical. He corrected the questioner by illustrating that the premise of her question was invalid. By contrast, Shorten discussed the human side of the Balkan conflict. Turnbull offered a perfectly sound corrective and won the point, but Shorten emerged as the superior rhetorician by taking the people with him. Turnbull won on matter, Shorten on manner and method.

Political rhetoric forms a critical part of any election campaign, especially in debating formats. It is usually less influential than the state of the economy or external shocks in swinging voters left or right at the ballot box, but it ­matters.

In a relatively stable economy, the incumbent should win the election. While Turnbull lost the first Sky News debate to Shorten, recent Newspoll results show he retains preferred prime minister status. The latest Galaxy poll shows the Coalition leading the primary vote 41 to 36 but trailing the opposition 49 to 51 in two-party preferred terms. The election is Turnbull’s to lose and in such a tight contest, words can assume formidable power.

Some problems with the government’s persuasive technique became apparent when the election was announced. The election announcement speech was optimistic. It was hopeful.

Turnbull presented a plan for economic growth to support working and middle-class Australians by stimulating a shift in social policy from welfarism to enterprise and empowerment. It aims to support inclusion by broadening workforce participation. It rewards battlers in family businesses, encouraging them with tax incentives. Despite all its merits ­— and there were many ­— the speech fell flat.

The Coalition’s campaign rhetoric is compromised by maintaining a centrist line against the green-left’s persistent appeal to the lowest common denominator of political rhetoric: populism. However, centrism does not demand value-free rhetoric.

When the government invokes rhetoric devoid of values, it sounds technocratic. Consider the “transitioning economy”. Despite the technocratic sterility of the phrase, it evokes strong emotions in the suburbs. The tradies and mechanics I’ve asked about the transitioning economy feel like it’s going to leave them at the starting line. The half dozen taxi drivers I’ve queried worry the government won’t provide workers with the skills needed to transition to it.

The Coalition has the sound objective of stimulating Australia’s transition from a resources-dependent to a scientific-technological economy. But the government needs to explain why such a transition is necessary for the nation by defining a goal and a path to reach it. To bring the people with it, the Coalition must articulate a participation plan for the transition to assist workers whose skills were developed for the old economy ­acquire those required in the new one.

A teething problem common to both leaders in the early days of this long campaign is brevity. Some early campaign rhetoric severely taxes attention spans. The circuitous nature of Shorten’s waffling indicates its essential purpose is evasion. He becomes verbally incontinent in response to pointed questions about Labor’s plans to increase taxes. Shorten’s team has nipped potential verbiage in the bud where possible by separating the content of his speeches into succinct, single sentences. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s team often does the same.

By contrast, Turnbull’s election announcement speech contained a number of sentences that ran into 50 words or more. His verbosity often emerges in an attempt to distil complex technical ideas, such as the relationship between economic reform, its impact on different target groups and the longer-term impact on the ­economy.

In such moments, Turnbull gets lost in translation.

A related problem is making the economic story a human story. Shorten lags on fiscal finesse. But he has lapped Turnbull using the Left’s traditional strength of spinning bad economics into a positive political narrative buoyed by appeals to people power and equality. To win the fairness argument, the Coalition must reverse over the Left’s equality fallacy to expose its false premise that politicians who leave citizens hundreds of billions in debt are champions of people power. Such politicians champion their own power, not people power. They sell the principle of equality, but leave the reality of intergenerational debt. They are vulture statists, not egalitarians.

In the early days of a long campaign, the election is anyone’s to win. Both major parties are hunkering down for a war of attrition, hoping to capitalise on any misstep their opponents make. Modern politics will not yield another master rhetorician while social media mobs who feed on human fallibility drown dissent in a storm of turgid tweets and moral vacuity.

Unless we stop heeding the ­perpetually outraged, the public square will become a Stepford ­subtopia.