I have been writing speeches for other people since 2005. Most of the principals' names are in the public record, on Hansards and conference programs and YouTube uploads from sectoral events. Their words, mostly, are not mine. My words, on the page, are theirs. The relationship between those two facts is the substance of the craft.
I want to set down here, plainly, what political speechwriting actually involves. It is one of the more under-described jobs in Australian public life. The principals who use it would prefer the public not think about it. The speechwriters themselves are often on terms of contract that discourage them from talking about it. The result is that an essential piece of how public language gets made in Australia happens almost entirely off-camera.
The first job is to listen
You do not begin a speechwriting relationship by writing a speech. You begin by listening. If the principal is going to be reading words you wrote in front of an audience, the audience needs the words to sound like the principal, not like you. That requires you to have heard the principal speak — at length, on different subjects, ideally in different rooms — for long enough to know what they would never say, what they reach for under pressure, what makes them laugh, and which kinds of formality they consider beneath them and which they consider beneath the office.
For Duncan Pegg, who was my best friend before he died of cancer at the age of forty and a Labor MP for the Brisbane seat of Stretton, I had the easier brief. We had known each other for twenty years by the time I was writing for him. I had heard him speak in committee, in the chamber, at a kitchen table, at a friend's funeral. I knew that he liked a particular kind of dry shot at the opposition delivered with the timing of a comedian who had decided not to be one. I would write him speeches that included one or two of those. If he wanted them taken out, he took them out. He did not, often. Five years of writing on and off for him produced, I think, the closest thing to genuine collaborative work I have done. He could have written every word himself. He did not have the time.
For Malcolm Turnbull, the brief was different. The piece I am thinking of was on the North Queensland floods, in the period when he was the Opposition Leader, and the speech was a statement to the Parliament. The audience was the chamber and Hansard, not a public meeting. The job, in that case, was not to find his voice. It was to make sure the facts of what had happened in the catchments were correctly summarised, the references to the affected electorates were courteous, and the sentence shapes were ones a person of his cadence would deliver without stumbling. The voice question is almost not the question. The question is whether the factual content holds at the level of detail required by the audience.
For Bev McArthur MLC, in the Victorian Legislative Council in 2022, the speech was an adjournment statement on women's firsts in Australian politics. The substance of it was a list I had been maintaining for twenty years, because the Labor Party has a long-standing habit of claiming Australian first-women as exclusively Labor achievements, and the list of Coalition first-women is, in fact, longer. The speech happened because I had heard a Labor speaker on the radio one morning misattribute the 1986 ministry to Ros Kelly, sent the corrected list to a handful of contacts I thought might be interested, and McArthur's office wrote back asking if she could deliver it as an adjournment in the Council. I said yes. She crafted what I had sent into the timing and rhythm of her own speaking voice. The factual substance was mine. The performance was hers. Hansard does not, of course, record any of this.
The hardest skill is accepting their changes
Anyone who writes for principals quickly learns that the speech you deliver is not the speech that goes out. The principal makes changes. Sometimes they are good. Sometimes they break the cadence you carefully built. Often they put in a sentence you would never have written. The professional discipline is to accept this without resentment. The principal owns the words at the point of delivery. They are accountable for them in the chamber, in front of the cameras, in their electorate the following week. You are not. The price of that lack of accountability is that you do not get to insist on your draft.
I have, over the years, watched lines I considered the best in a speech be cut. I have watched other lines, which I considered weak, be kept and quoted. The lesson, which took me longer to learn than it should have, is that the principal is the one in front of the audience. They have read the room. They know which sentence they need to land. The writer's instinct is for the page. The principal's instinct is for the room. The room wins.
What the work is, when it is going well
The cleanest version of the work is the morning press release in a regional ministerial office during a sitting period. The radio runs the 8:30 news. I would listen to the bulletin, get in the car, drive ten minutes to the office, and the press release responding to whatever the news had carried would be written, in my head, by the time I arrived. I would sit down at the desk and put it on paper. The boss's quote would be in the second paragraph. The release would be out before nine.
There is no mystery in this. It is the practiced compression of a specific kind of professional reading. You have, over years, internalised what your principal would say about a category of news item: a flood, a federal funding announcement, a State Cabinet shuffle, an industry-sector lay-off. The news item arrives. The shape of the response is already in your head before you have processed the content. The content fills the shape. Then it goes out.
For me, in writing, it just comes magically, luckily, and it is difficult to explain to anyone how. I am aware that this is not a satisfying answer for a craft essay to give. The craft, as far as I can describe it from the inside, is mostly a long practice of listening to specific people speak about specific subjects and then writing in their voices about other specific subjects, until the patterns become deep enough that the writing comes out the right shape without conscious effort.
What it produces, on the page, looks like the principal's words. What it produces, behind the page, is a kind of double professional accountability — the speechwriter to the principal, the principal to the audience. The first is rarely seen. The second is the whole of public life.