It is a commonplace that our political discourse is much impoverished. Speeches are built around the sound bite designed to be quoted. The Trump administration is experimenting with letting go of speeches and communicating within the limits set by Twitter.
In such a world there is little space for more complex rhetoric, for cultural reference, for reflection on historical precedents, or for wondering. From their speeches we would not know generally what politicians read seriously and what significant cultural influences have shaped them. Their words leave no echoes. Political discourse is dominated by barracking and by answers to 'how' questions.
To recall the world's great political speeches and their writers, ghost and fleshly, and the world of Paine and Burke, of Churchill and Kennedy and even of Rudd's Apology, can be an exercise in nostalgia.
Great speeches mainly belonged to a time when the majority of politicians were more highly educated than their constituents, and when the educational curriculum emphasised rhetoric. The speakers and audience alike shared a wide cultural reference and language that enabled them to speak easily about human goals and the good life.
Today the educational system emphasises technique and the solutions to 'how' questions. Paperless schools exist, and there is no cultural canon that is shared. Political discourse reflects this: once finely honed speeches had public effect; now they don't. So they are seen as superfluous.
It is worth musing on what may be lost in the thinning of public discourse. If language is thin, so is the perception of reality. That is dangerous in political life. It leads to shallow policies and destructive actions.
The value of reading, whether in history or of literature or within a religious tradition, lies in its encouragement to tease out the complexity of reality and of the subtle relationships and interconnections, the history of hurt and gift, the insights and fallibility, the mixture of motives, the pressure of events, the unseen consequences of well-intended actions and of the contingencies that characterise any domestic situation, let alone more public events. It provides words that enable reality to be seen.
An instinctive awareness of this complexity, depth and interconnection is important in political life because it corresponds to the reality of the parliamentary process and also of national life. Novels, poetry, biographies, histories and religious texts attend to the depth of human life and interactions. They provide a range of words and images that illuminate the world and