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February 17, 2004
My attention is focused on public language at the moment. A friend loaned me a copy of Don Watson's Death Sentence The Decay of Public Language. In the introduction Watson writes:
"Public language is the language of public life: the language of political and business leaders and civil servants – official, formal, sometimes elevated language. It is the language of leaders more than the led, the managers rather than the managed. It takes very different forms: from shapely rhetoric to shapeless, enervating sludge; but in every case it is the language of power and influence. What our duties are, for whom we should vote, which mobile phone plan we should take up. In all these places the public language rules. As power and influence are pervasive so is the language: we hear and read it at the highest levels and the lowest. And while it begins with the powerful, the weak are often obliged to speak it, imitate it."
The book says a lot of what I'd noticed when I listened to politicians speak their particular kind of sludge in Parliament.
But Watson has an explanation for the contemporary sludge. In the first chapter Watson writes:
"The public realm has been in decline since governments retreated from the economy and private companies moved into take their place. The operation extends well beyond privatised public utilites in gas, water, electricity and transport. Economic revolution has transformed our institutions---colleges and universities, hospitals and medical practices, the public service itself----and transformed our relationships with them in doing so. And as the private sector has replaced the public it has found itself obliged to pick up function and responsibilites that had belonged to governments. They pick them up in different ways, and they use a different term for them: they call it investing in social capital."
Yes and no. He's right about the economic revolution. But social capital refers to community and civil society not the state.
Never mind. Those working in the world of public policy in Australia speak coporate speak these days. That is the main point. Hence words such as 'flexibility', 'internationally competitive', 'downsize', 'the triple bottom line' and 'self-regulatory'. It's a 'global' style.
It is not the language of rhetoric and persuasion.
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