Counterpoint

For years now, it's been conventional wisdom that politicians need a narrative. They can't go anywhere without one. Michael Cooney discusses the rise and relevance of the narrative as a political tool.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Earlier in the show we talked about an end to the black American narrative, but what about political narrative here in Australia? Is this a useful way to talk? That word 'narrative' has an interesting history in intellectual circles. Four names come immediately to mind; Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, because those foundational texts of the Christian Bible were described not as histories but as Gospel narratives. In the 19th century it came to be understood that while they were not perhaps historically true, in every respect they were nevertheless true in that they told us who we were, how we got here and where we're going. Let's talk about some more recent uses of the word. Not everyone is happy.

Michael Duffy: Yes, in a moment our guest Michael Cooney joins us, but before that here's a little grab from ABC TV's Insiders program a couple of weeks ago. You're about to hear a former prime minister and the current deputy prime minister.

Kerry O'Brien: [presenter 7:30 Report] How do you critique the first eight months of the Rudd government?

Paul Keating: Um, solid. Solid but cautious. I think if there's any problem the government has it is that...when I say a problem, I don't think it's a problem necessarily but it is to not have an overarching narrative in place.

Barrie Cassidy: Does Paul Keating ever annoy you?

Julia Gillard: Well, look, ex-prime ministers have a license I think to say what they want about contemporary politics. Paul exercises that licence from time to time. So does Bob Hawke and I anticipate in the future so will John Howard.

Barrie Cassidy: He does...the criticism of the Rudd government is that you lack a narrative, and then when he was asked about that, what he meant by that, he said you should be talking about productivity. Now, that's your area. In fact, people call you the Minister for Productivity. Is that a personal failing?

Julia Gillard: I'm certainly not taking it as such. Can I say I'm not a great fan of the term 'narrative' but I can tell you very easily what this government's about. We're designing and implementing the long term plans that matter for this nation's future and foremost amongst them is making sure we've got a productive and prosperous economy for the future.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Julia Gillard and Paul Keating there on the ABC's Insiders program a couple of weeks ago.

Michael Duffy: And to look at this word 'narrative' we're joined by Michael Cooney who is a former senior advisor to Kim Beazley and Mark Latham, he's now policy director at Per Capita which is a Melbourne based independent progressive think-tank. Michael, welcome to Counterpoint.

Michael Cooney: G'day Michael, g'day Paul.

Michael Duffy: Michael, people didn't talk about narrative outside of English classes when I was a young man. Can you tell us roughly when you think the word came across into politics?

Michael Cooney: It is interesting, it has made a big comeback. The new 'n' word is 'narrative', everyone's talking about it. But it does go back a long way. If you read your Aristotle, as I know you do regularly, Michael, we see that he talks about narration in argument, and he...

Michael Duffy: I think I've actually missed that, to be perfectly honest with you.

Michael Cooney: I'm surprised! He talked about three categories of argument. There's ceremonial rhetoric and there's forensic rhetoric, legal rhetoric, and then there's political rhetoric. He talks about the role of narrative in rhetoric as being to tell a story, but he actually says that narrative has the least application to politics and political rhetoric because politics is all about telling people about the future and, by definition, you can't narrate the future you can only narrate past events. So that's the classical version of 'narrative', is an idea that it's about...if it has a role in politics it's about telling people what happened in the past so they can expect something about the future or form an opinion about the future. But now it's made this big comeback as a left critique of the government.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Did it start in Australia with Paul Keating? Was he our first narrative speaker?

Michael Cooney: He had the expression at the time 'the big picture' and when he was prime minister, in particular, he said his big picture was Wik, Mabo, the republic and Asia. But the thing is that's really a policy project, that's not really a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and I think that you're getting two things happening. There's an American political style which has a beginning, a middle and an end because it's all about individual candidacies, and then at the same time you're getting an increasing influence of English literature theory really on the way we analyse culture, and politics considered as culture, and culture considered as text. So I think that that American concept that a candidate has a political story to tell is part of the reason why this word 'narrative' has exploded.

Michael Duffy: And of course if you fuse the two together—the candidate's biography and the political narrative—that's ideal, and we'll talk about that in a moment. But just sticking with Paul Keating for a moment, Michael...Don Watson I think was the first person I can remember involved in politics (and at this time he was working for Keating when Keating was prime minister) who said that politicians had a story to tell and some have a better story than others. I'm wondering if there might have been some influence there, that Watson, as a very fine writer, carried some of that theory of narrative you were talking about earlier across into that particular moment in politics.

Michael Cooney: I think that's right. Watson's probably the best writer to have worked in Australian politics, when you really think about it, certainly for a long time. That idea that he had that the government needed to explain why it was doing things, not just what it was doing and that there needed to be a way of speaking about politics which captured motivation, and I think that's a really important insight. It was particularly true...in Watson's case came into a late term government which had a lot of plans and a lot of policies and was doing lots of things but had sort of worn off on the people. So they needed to reintroduce themselves to the people somehow. And secondly ordinary people weren't listening anymore, particularly, so they needed a story to tell 'middle Australia'.

Michael Duffy: Do you think narrative is particularly important for a reforming government because they do need to tell you a story, drawing in those elements of history you referred to earlier, to sort of justify a package of policy proposals?

Michael Cooney: I think so, yes, because that means that their...well, first of all the task is just harder, they've got more to explain and more to defend if you're doing more things. But also if your role in government is not to do very much or to stop things happening, then that's easy to explain, but if you're trying to make a lot of different things happen and carry big reforms then you really do need to explain why it is that you're turning things upside-down all the time.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: If we look at some foreign examples now of doing a lot of things, I'm reminded of Lyndon Johnson's 'the great society'. That was a phrase that described a lot of things that were going on. Was that a successful political...well, it's more than a slogan, isn't it?

Michael Cooney: It sure is. It is a really profound way of describing his aspirations, and it's an interesting example of taking what could be seen to be quite liberal or soft policies around poverty and disadvantage and instead making them part of a big national aspiration for greatness, which in American politics has really been more a Republican concept, great nation conservatives. So I do think that that's an example of that kind of style of narrative, of not just saying 'I want to solve poverty because it's not good enough that black children's parents can't afford shoes' but actually saying 'we want to be a great society and here's how we're going to get there, we're going to declare war on poverty'.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: There's another narrative phrase used by someone from the other side of politics and that was George W Bush's 'compassionate conservatism'.

Michael Cooney: It's a good example, and it was an interesting example of reaching out to the centre of politics. I think after the Clinton period and a period where Republicans had sometimes been seen to be fairly extreme and fairly negative, George Bush as a campaigner in 2000 went to great efforts to reach out to the centre. He talked about a humble nation on the world stage, he talked about compassionate conservatism. The Republican convention in that election year made a big point of including African Americans in the convention proceedings. They said it was like a National Basketball Association game with ten black guys on stage and 10,000 white people in the audience. There was a genuine attempt by Bush pre-2001 to reach out to the centre by telling this different story about what Republicans might mean by their conservatism.

Michael Duffy: Michael, let's talk about personal narrative now, biography, and of course as always Americans do this sort of thing a lot more, they just seem to be better storytellers. Maybe they have less of a sense of privacy, I'm not sure what the reason is. But if you look at the current contest, you've got...Barack Obama and John McCain have pretty fabulous life stories to tell, don't they. They're narratives, in a way.

Michael Cooney: Oh they sure are. McCain has a very powerful expression that sometimes when he's asked why he is running for president he says, 'I just want one more chance to serve,' which is a wonderful way of giving people a sense of why he's doing it and reminding people of his service in the past, and also in an interesting way just does a little bit of work to explain to people that he's not planning to be there for ever until he's 100 years old, that he's after one more chance to serve. There's kind of an inference that he might even run for one term. So it's a short phrase but it does a lot of work. And Obama has obviously got a remarkable story of his own.

Michael Duffy: And what about in Australia? Can you tell us...which Australian politician in recent times has used their life story powerfully?

Michael Cooney: I don't know where you're going with this, Michael! In Australia it hasn't been done much, and I think there are two reasons for that. One is we have a different national style, which is kind of what Gillard has said in the way that the nature of our politics is more prosaic. And secondly in the literal sense it's not a republican system with individual candidacies, it's party government and parliamentary systems.

Michael Duffy: And if one were, for example, going to refer to Mark Latham, you would have to say that he did that a bit and probably to some extent it did get on some people's goat a bit, didn't it, it seemed almost a little un-Australian.

Michael Cooney: I think that's right. It seemed like an unusual way of speaking about the reason why he wanted to run. Latham did connect things like education policy or gambling policy or things about public housing to his own personal experiences, and it had a certain power. At a practical level what it does is invite scrutiny of your personal experiences and he certainly found that, and that's something that happens in America. I mean, if you go around saying 'here's where I'm from and here's what happened to me when I was a kid and that's why I believe in these political issues' then you necessarily allow people to look into whether it really is where you come from and whether that really is what happened to you as a child. So I think that's part of the reason why Australian politicians are wary of it.

Michael Duffy: Kevin Rudd found that a bit. He seemed in the early days to be sort of trying to copy that aspect of Latham but he got into a bit of trouble and he seems to have backed away from it.

Michael Cooney: Yes, you don't hear much about the Queensland share cropper experience. I don't think that in the end there was much...I think that his account of it stands up to that test, but as soon as there's any focus on your biography then straight away you open up a whole bunch of scrutiny. So I do think that's one reason why Australian politicians have steered away from it. But you're also right to say that actually people when they listen to it find it a bit soupy and a bit over-the-top.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Speaking of soupy and over-the-top, there are a couple of phrases that are used by the Labor side of politics but also by the other side, and I'll put it in a sentence that you could almost hear on The Chaser; when working families sit around the kitchen table and discuss politics, they're certainly not going to say, 'Oh golly, I think Kevin Rudd needs a better narrative,' are they?

Michael Cooney: No, you could say that. It's an interesting critique that's emerged. I mean, when you think about it, saying that a government lacks a narrative...well, the first thing is it's entirely a rhetorical problem. It's not a statement about the government's policies or how it's actually governing, it's completely a statement about what they say about themselves. And secondly it is such a highfaluting complaint to have about a government. It sort of suggests to me that critics haven't yet found a more substantial criticism.

But I think there's a bit of a paradox too because it's actually policy professionals and media elites and others who can engage with a government at a level of detail about what it really does in budget line items. There's an element to the idea that narrative actually conveys motivation to people who aren't listening very closely, and so if you get narrative right, if you don't spend all your time talking about narrative but actually just do it, then that is actually a way of communicating to middle Australia who are listening out of the corner of their ears.

Michael Duffy: Do you think it's also the case...to be fair to the...for example, I think Paul Keating was getting at this, that if you do want to change things you have to put it in a context of some sort of story about where you've been and where you're going. Do you think Kevin Rudd does need something of a narrative?

Michael Cooney: I think so. I think the difference in Australia is I think you need a narrative about your government and about the country. I don't think it should be as highly personalised as the American style is. Really another word for this is just you need a project, you need to explain what the problems are that are facing the country and what are the common motivations behind a range of different policies. I think that in the election year that the combination of Rudd saying that he was an economic conservative who was going to have an education resolution in order to serve working families better...that's a narrative. It's an election year narrative and now there's a government, so there's a different challenge.

But I think that part of the narrative criticism is coming from people to the left of the government who are looking for something to hang their hat on. If it was the 1970s or the 1950s you'd have much more diverse and radical critiques of the government coming from the left. Those are essentially exhausted now and so there's much more ideological consensus, in a way, on the progressive side. There are no strong ideological critiques of the government coming from the liberal left, and so in some ways the critique becomes a more rhetorical one.

Michael Duffy: Sounds to me from your talk about narrative, you really could almost use the word 'theme'. You're not really talking about a story so much, are you?

Michael Cooney: No, I think that's right, I think you just need themes and motivations that explain what you're doing. And if you don't have it...look, it's a small problem. I think that Kevin Rudd needs a growing economy more than he needs a narrative. But look, while he's got a growing economy, sure, the next thing...this is a fair way up the pyramid of needs but it is a need, it does do some work, and if you lose that...you can argue that Howard had a narrative of strength through his period of government which served him well for budget cutting and which served him well for foreign affairs, but when that strength became obstinacy and when he was seen not to be listening on climate change or industrial relations, that that narrative...he didn't have new theme which explained what he was doing.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Julia Gillard uses the phrase, in describing herself as being a member of 'the progressive centre'. Who's that important for? Who is she talking to there?

Michael Cooney: That's a good question. I think she's talking to potential critics from the left and saying that what the government is doing is not being done as an accommodation to the political right or to political reality but it's been done deliberately and for good policy purposes in itself. So she's not making a pragmatic argument for education changes and saying they're necessary to satisfy political concerns, she's actually saying 'this is what I really believe and this is why it's got to be done and why it's good for the country'. And so she's having to mark out a new ground which gives a political motivation to big changes on information and funding on schools.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: But it's polli-speak isn't it, she's not talking to the voters there.

Michael Cooney: That's true. I mean, what does 'the progressive centre' mean? It's a powerful symbol to editorial writers and to union leaders and to parliamentarians about where she's coming from, but that's an important audience. It's a bit like the front row in the rugby scrum, no one knows what's going on in there, but it has quite a bit of impact on the game...

Paul Comrie-Thomson: Especially in South Africa.

Michael Cooney: It sure does, that's right, if you're up on the high veldt and it goes badly wrong then you lose by 60 points. So it's a small but important part of the package.

Michael Duffy: Michael, there are other narratives, aren't there, apart from the narrow party political ones. Whatever you think of the science of climate change, you could argue that there's a competition of narrative there too.

Michael Cooney: Oh yes, it's a good example of where...there's been lots of debate about framing, about whether it's climate change or global warming, and different people think that what you call it is very important on what...

Michael Duffy: Wherever you look there are narratives all over the place. Look, I've just realised we're out of time, we'd better go. Michael Cooney, thanks very much for joining us.

Michael Cooney: It's an absolute pleasure, cheers guys.

Michael Duffy: Michael Cooney, policy director at Per Capita, a Melbourne based think-tank.

Guests

Michael Cooney
Policy Director Per Capita

Further Information

Per Capita

Presenter

Michael Duffy & Paul Comrie -Thomson

Producer

Ian Coombe

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