THE EVOLUTION OF PARADIGMATIC POLICY CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA: A NOTE ON RHETORICAL PATTERNS AT THE 1999 NEW SOUTH WALES DRUG SUMMIT by

In his The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman (1991) argues that each major advance in the development of citizenship in Western democracies has provoked three common forms of reactionary rhetoric by opponents of reform which, in turn, have been met by their three “progressive counterparts” advanced by advocates of reform. In this short note, we apply Hirschman’s taxonomies of rhetoric to the 1999 New South Wales Drug Summit. We find that the rhetorical patterns predicted by Hirschman are indeed evident in the arguments surrounding the Drug Summit. We conclude that rhetoric does matter in paradigmatic public policy change.