Over the coming weeks, around 40 newly elected members of parliament will be crafting their first speeches. Those who bemoan the quality of speech writing and public oratory in Australian political life may not be excited about this prospect.
However, the new media environment is rapidly increasing the rewards for MPs who invest in the art of speech making and the best of these speeches may soon be finding their way to a handset, tablet or computer screen near you.
All MPs have a strong incentive to make their first speech in the parliament a good one. For many MPs, it will be the oratorical high-water mark of their parliamentary service. It’s a relatively rare occasion in which a backbench MP speaks before a full chamber and public gallery.
It’s also the only occasion in which convention affords a member the ability to speak without interjection from the opposite benches and without an effective time limit (other than how rude you are willing to be towards the families and supporters of the MP following you).
Most importantly, it’s the one speech that is most likely to be used to take the measure of the MP. In years to come, more than any other, this is the speech that people will use as the yardstick against which to judge that MP’s parliamentary service. So all in all, it’s an occasion that allows MPs to aim for a higher level of rhetoric than they would otherwise get away with in a late night parliamentary debate.
The more savvy members of the Australian parliament’s class of 2016 will also realise that the changing Australian media environment gives even the most junior backbencher a far greater incentive to invest in the quality of their parliamentary speech making more than their recent predecessors did.
In the 1970s it was not unheard of for a particularly noteworthy second reading speech from a backbencher to get a mention in the next day’s newspaper. But over the next 40 years, as political power concentrated in the executive, and media attention followed it, it became rare for the parliamentary contributions of any but the most senior ministers and their shadows to be followed outside the chamber. A cynic might say they were rarely followed inside the chamber either.
That’s no longer the case. The relatively new ability for MPs, indeed for any member of the public, to capture and share parliamentary speeches online, has opened new channels for notable parliamentary speeches from any MP to reach interested audiences.
Powered by social media and a proliferation of content-hungry online journalists, today it’s not uncommon for the video of a timely, engaging and well delivered parliamentary speech to be watched by tens of thousands of people.
