Our Obama beats theirs

WHY the surprise over Barack Obama - the first black US President and the Democrat who ousted George W. Bush - winning the Nobel Peace Prize? On one level, it's a joke without a punchline. Yet, it also demonstrates the power of oratory. Whatever one thinks of Obama, he knows how to harness language to further his success.

From his speech at the 2004 Democratic national convention to his inauguration address, he has being wooing people with words. Obama has a gift worth reflecting on. A gift that should be, could be used for a greater good rather than just empty rhetoric. Imagine an Obama with substance. There is such a man in our midst.

First things first. You can only appreciate the sheer power of Obama's use of language by understanding the sheer idiocy of his winning the Nobel prize. As former foreign minister Alexander Downer pointed out last week, the nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize was made when Obama had been in office for 11 days. Eleven days.

Reams have been written about the nothingness of Obama's record. None of it needs rehashing. Except this: the best crack commentary came from the most unlikely place. The New York Times's Maureen Dowd imagined what Bill Clinton might be thinking.

"Clinton: First that prig Carter. Then that prig Gore. And now president Paris Hilton ... He should have gotten the Nobel in chemistry, because chemistry's all he's got ... This ... is ... just ... wrong! It's killing me, man ..."

Chemistry is an interesting thing. Before you even open your mouth, chemistry can make people turn their head your way. How you then use words can make them listen. And what you say - your ideas - can change the way people think.

Obama has the first two parts of that heady cocktail. But his oratory explains why a beauty parlour in Tokyo is playing Obama's inaugural address instead of the drone of indistinct Muzak. As the International Herald Tribune reported last week, Obama has become Japan's newest English teacher with language-learning titles such as "Speech Training: Learn to Deliver English Speech, Obama Style" and "Yes I Can with Obama".

One editor told the IHT: "Some even said the only phrase they caught was 'Yes, we can.' They said they were in tears nonetheless."

Crazy? Even those of us who deride his empty rhetorical flourish should appreciate Obama's oratorical skills: the calm tone, the harmonic cadence, the measured pause. He reads a good speech well.

Now let me put this proposition forward. Australia has its own Obama, only a much better one. One who has that final ingredient of being able to carry people with him, even those he skewers with his criticisms. Noel Pearson may not appreciate me saying this. But the Cape York indigenous leader has more than a touch of Obama about him, but with genuine substance.

It struck me one evening recently. When it's on, the sound of the radio in my kitchen is usually lost to the evening clamour of dinner cooking. Not this time. Not when Pearson's opening address to the Brisbane Writers Festival played on the ABC's Radio National. His voice stops you in your tracks. When you listen to Pearson's conviction and passion, the brain buzzes. He challenges you to think again, to think differently. This is oratory not wasted.

Oh, and Pearson's 40-minute address, which deserved greater press coverage than it received, was delivered extempore. I know that because I asked Pearson for a copy of his address. It was off the cuff, he told me. No Obama-style teleprompters.

It is hard to convey the power of Pearson without listening to him. So listen. The link is below. Listen to how he describes himself as "completely promiscuous" when it comes to drawing on the three great schools of political philosophy: conservatism, socialism and liberalism.

But he is indignant about that "strange state of affairs" where the "progressive position is regressive". Listen to how he attacks those who have told people that welfare is their right. "We in Cape York say no. We've got a better right than welfare. We have a right to take a real place in the economy, just like everybody else.

"And so on numerous policy settings, we set the sails in a completely different position from the progressive prescription. And ... when I think why those sails are set in ways that could not be more calculated against our interests, against what is really in our interests, I shake my head as to how it is that a culture can produce currents that get oppressed peoples to accept their oppression ... to accept that they have a right to welfare."

Compare Pearson with feminist Germaine Greer, who is no slouch with language either. Still charismatic, she knows how to use words to be noticed.

But hers is oratory wasted. Her exhausted ideology - she justifies indigenous rage on the basis of invasion, genocide and stolen land - does nothing to further the cause of indigenous Australians.

Now listen to Pearson. There is plenty of anger there. It simmers underneath every sentence, drawing you in, daring you not to listen, distinguishing him from the milquetoast mob in Canberra.

He directs his anger in productive ways: to stop people thinking of themselves as victims.

Most important, Pearson's oratory delivers results. As The Australian reported this month, he is the driving force behind a four-year Cape York Welfare Reform Trial. At the halfway mark of this grassroots initiative, which links school attendance to welfare, school attendance rates in Aurukun, on the western coast of Cape York, have risen from 37 per cent to 62 per cent. Western Australia is considering using the same reforms to tackle rising truancy rates. This is the power of ideas.

Pearson's latest battle is with the Queensland government's Wild Rivers Act, which limits the ability of indigenous people to pursue economic development on their own land. Listen to how Pearson describes how: "The dignity of being responsible for looking after their country is now taken away from them" in favour of "16-year-olds who run around in koala suits".

Listen to what he calls the final indignity of spending "10 years fighting the conservatives for the Wik decision, 10 years calling John Howard a racist scumbag, all for Anna Bligh to take it off me in five minutes. And all because she has a sacred (environmental) cause behind her. And not a word of support has been uttered by those who believe themselves to be in the cause of social justice. Not a word ..."

Comparisons never quite work, of course. Unlike Obama, Pearson is probably not made for politics because politics is not made for people like Pearson. More is the shame.

Pearson's address: www.abc.net.au/rn/foraradio/stories/2009/2686843.htm