A Rhetoric of Change: The Language of the Howard Government's 2005 Work Choices Agenda

Abstract

Understanding how public political discourse acts or does not act as a persuasive force in promoting and justifying political policy remains of critical importance. This paper presents a rhetorical criticism of the public political language used by the then Prime Minister John Howard and Minister Kevin Andrews, the chief spokespersons for the introduction of the Work Choices legislation. We demonstrate that these speakers drew upon a metaphor of evolutionary change as a means of promoting their legislation to the Australian working public. We argue that although this metaphor has persuasive utility, this merit was outweighed by the contradictions that arose when the metaphor was situated within a surrounding discourse promoting the concept of individual choice.

Notes

¹The conjoined word ‘WorkChoices’ is used in many of the government's publications and in their advertising campaign. The more conventional ‘Work Choices’ is used in this paper.

²Australia was heavily reliant on rural and commodity exports during the 1970s and 1980s. Its position as a global exporter had fallen from eighth in the 1950s to 23rd in 1985. In 1985, Australia need to export 75% more by volume than it did in 1955 just to fund the level of largely manufacturing imports at the time (Bell 1993, 127).

³The Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd, achieved a landslide victory over the Howard government on 24 November 2007. The unpopularity of the Work Choices legislation has been identified as one of the key factors in this victory (Brett 2007b; Lewis 2008).

⁴Briefly described, the ‘tenor’ refers to the primary subject of the metaphor, and the ‘vehicle’ identifies a term, familiar to a given audience, which is associated with, or attached to, the tenor. An example of the use of this tenor-vehicle model as a means of critiquing political oratory is Ivie's (1987) exploration of five speeches about the Cold War delivered by the American Democratic politician Harry Wallace, in which he identified the metaphor, the ‘cold war is a game’. Here, the tenor of the metaphor is the ‘cold war’, and the vehicle is the ‘game’. Along with the vehicle ‘game’ was the cluster of associated terms or ‘associated implications’ (Black 1962) that included ‘race’, ‘cards’, ‘competition’, ‘play’, ‘view’, ‘pawn’ and ‘team’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Roan

Amanda Roan is a Senior Lecturer at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. She has researched and published in the areas of Industrial Relations and gender equity in the workforce. Catherine White is an independent industry consultant. Her research, publications and consulting work focus on the area of organisational communication. The authors thank the two anonymous referees for their valuable guidance, and Chris Diamond, Patty Renfrow, Mark Keogh and David Rooney, who provided comment at various stages of the document's development, and Jennifer Roan and Gareth Simpson for their editing assistance.