Over the weekend I read my children the story of Easter. The real one. Betrayal, arrest, a trial, an innocent man tortured and killed, and three days later a tomb found empty.
My daughter is five and my son three. It was a long story, so when I paused and asked if we should stop, my daughter looked at me with something close to indignation. “No Dad. You need to finish it.”
We got through the Last Supper, the Garden, the crucifixion, the burial, and the resurrection. The three-year-old, who cannot sit still for a bowl of milo ice cream, didn’t move.
I mentioned to my wife that the kids had been really taken in by the Easter story, despite the length. She said they’d have sat through anything, council papers included, if it meant staying up past bedtime. I wasn’t convinced. So I tested it.
Next chance, I opened an agenda from the most recent Ordinary Council Meeting and began reading. Within minutes, both children were asleep.
The council agenda was not trivial. It contained decisions that affect how elected representatives in Western Australia are allowed to speak in public. But it was written in a language that the human mind is not built to love.
Governance Assurance Review.
Behavioural Breach Determination Pathway.
Complaints Framework.
Risk matrices, compliance flowcharts, triage procedures.
Information arranged so carefully that all the life has been squeezed out of it.
The Passion narrative has survived for two thousand years because it does the opposite. It compresses the hardest questions – loyalty, injustice, suffering, mercy, what it costs to do the right thing – into a story so vivid that a five-year-old will not let you stop reading.
Children are not unsophisticated. They respond to what is real. A story with stakes, consequences, and resolution holds them because it is telling the truth in a shape their minds are built to receive it.
Institutions could learn something from this. My private view is that if they did, they would realise that they have a lot less to say.