A decade ago, former Prime Minister Paul Keating made a telling comment on the treatment of speeches in modern politics. ‘If Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1992,’ he said, ‘the chances are the journalists wouldn’t report the speech but the “doorstop” that followed it. And the first question they’d ask is, “How come you’re talking about democracy and freedom when there’s a war going on?” And there’d be learned articles at the weekend about whether it had been a lapse of political judgment for Mr Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg instead of Philadelphia.’

Keating was right. The speech is losing the battle for attention with the doorstop, the media grab and the press release, and in no country more so than in Australia. Being a laconic and rather vernacular people – ‘taciturn rather than talkative’, as Russel Ward put it – we were never overly disposed to big set-piece speeches anyway. Australian kids could easily grow up thinking that great speeches are delivered in a Churchillian growl or a Kennedyesque brogue, but never with an Aussie twang.