AUSTRALIA
The Age
March 9, 2016
John Warhurst
Personalising political campaigns may not guarantee success but usually enhances the case being made.
Personalised advocacy can be extremely effective in politics. Cardinal George Pell was at the centre of the recent hearing conducted in Rome by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, but it was the Ballarat survivors of church abuse whose personal presence and shocking stories have created added momentum and political pressure for apologies and redress. The survivors were living testimony of the damage inflicted by the abuse. Pell, on the other hand, failed the test of personal empathy.
In other commission hearings into institutional child sex abuse where the passing of time means that there are no surviving personal stories, or where privacy demands that the identity of the victims is hidden from view, the issues can appear much more abstract and so lack the same political impact.
The general point is that personalised advocacy is one of the main characteristics of many of the major social campaigns now crowding the political agenda. Making the political personal may not guarantee success but it usually enhances the political arguments that are being made. Such personalised arguments can put the other side very much on the back foot.
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