By Tony Wright
It's a fraught business, giving a big speech to a foreign audience. There is, for a start, the need to balance the tone of the thing. Julia Gillard's address to the US Congress this week was pretty clearly music to the American ear, though syrupy to Australians listening back home.
The level of difficulty becomes greater when words in an extra language are inserted.
Gillard, keen to captivate her American audience with a reference to one of their sanctified sites of sacrifice during World War II, intoned that: ''For my parents' generation, the defining image of America was the landing at Normandy. Your 'boys of Point du Hoc' … risking everything to help free the world. For my own generation, the defining image of America was the landing on the moon.''
We'll return to the moon presently, but Gillard's rendering of the boys of Point du Hoc caused foreign affairs types, historians and - without much doubt, the Americans listening - to wince. Point du Hoc (or more correctly, Pointe du Hoc) is a 100-metre cliff face on Normandy where in 1944 a detachment of US Rangers scaled the heights to take on the Germans threatening the Allied invasion. In US military mythology, it is equivalent to Australia's veneration of Gallipoli.
On the 40th anniversary of the event, US president Ronald Reagan gave one of his finest speeches at Pointe du Hoc, and he and his advisers spent hours and much research figuring out how to pronounce the name of the place.
They settled on an acceptable blending of the French and the American pronunciations and Reagan spoke of ''the boys of Pwant d'Hawk'' (the French sounds like ''pwante d'oc'').
Gillard and her advisers might have spent an extra hour or two of research themselves. When she reached that stirring part of her speech, Pointe du Hoc rang out as ''Pronta Ho''. It was a clanger as sharp as if an American had declared Gallipoli to be ''GAllipOlee'', though the excessively polite Americans applauded with vigour.
A small enough clanger, perhaps, and one from a long line of tone-deaf politicians trying out foreign language affairs. It was no match for UK prime minister Tony Blair's effort some years ago during a news conference with French PM Lionel Jospin. Blair, who spoke French quite well, meant to say: ''I admire Lionel Jospin, although we have differing views.'' Unfortunately, his French apparently translated as: ''I desire Lionel Jospin in many different positions.''
But back to the moon. There has been some reportage questioning where Gillard might have got her lines about America putting a man on the moon.
This was the emotional high-note at the end of the speech, where Gillard's voice wavered and, according to scribblers who were there, she choked back tears. The Speaker, John Boehner, was already wiping away a real tear by then.
''As I stand in this cradle of democracy,'' our Prime Minister said, possibly forgetting in the charged moment that the actual cradle of democracy was Ancient Greece, ''I see a nation that has changed the world and known remarkable days. I firmly believe you are the same people who amazed me when I was a small girl by landing on the moon. On that great day I believed Americans could do anything.''
It is a nice picture: seven-year-old Julia in July 1969, thunderstruck at the wonder of the Apollo mission and having a blinding flash of illumination. ''Why, America can do anything.'' The Australian delegation at the event reportedly went wild, rushing to shake the hand of Gillard's principal speechwriter, Michael Cooney. So where might Cooney have gleaned the childhood memory of Gillard's amazement at the man on the moon? From Gillard herself, you'd have to assume.
Ah, but there are cynics abroad who sniff something approaching plagiarism.
Most exotically, she is being accused by a columnist in another newspaper of pinching the line from Bono, lead singer of Irish rock band U2, who said something similar during a concert in Chicago some years ago. (''When I was a boy, my first impression of America, was a man walking on the moon … I thought what can this country do, what can these people do when they put their mind to it, it's incredible.'')
There is, however, a more likely source. Last year, Harvard Business Press published a book by two long-time advisers to business and government, William Eggers and John O'Leary. It became an instant sensation among government insiders in the US and it wasn't long before it was being devoured by Gillard government advisers.
And the book's title?
If We Can Put a Man on the Moon - Getting Big Things Done in Government.
Eggers and O'Leary recounted in the preface of their work the impact of Neil Armstrong's stroll in the lunar dust.
''Instantly, a new cliche entered the lexicon,'' they wrote. ''If we can put a man on the moon, the saying went, then surely we can achieve anything we set our minds to.'' The book chronicles monumental stuff-ups that have happened in government since 1969, and offers advice on how the difference between policy success and failure is execution.
Perhaps Gillard and her advisers might have gone beyond the cliche and studied the book more closely before announcing a detail-free ''framework'' for a carbon tax, a vacuum being filled by a debate back home as substantial as a wrestling match with a wraith of smoke. The policy currently looks as likely as Australia putting a man on the moon.
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