Speechless Updated Edition: A Year In My Father's Business

By James Button

James Button spent a year writing speeches for Kevin Rudd. Before that, he reported on politics as a highly regarded journalist for Fairfax. But James also has politics in the blood: his father was the diminutive but larger-than-life Senator John Button, who was a minister in the Hawke and Keating governments.

Growing up, James watched a roll-call of political luminaries debating the fate of the Labor Party. He saw great victories and defeats at close hand. He believes both his father and his family paid a heavy price for politics.

Speechless is James’ highly personal account of a year working in Canberra, seen from both the inside and the outside. It’s told through his experience of Kevin Rudd’s failure to tell his story, and how this helped destroy his prime ministership. It also reflects on how far the Labor Party has moved from the idealism and pragmatism of his father’s generation. He ends on a note of hope for the Party’s revival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522864724

Book preview

‘James Button weaves painful family history into his year spent in Canberra as a frustrated speechwriter to then-PM Kevin Rudd. Subtle, fresh, moving, it ripples with surprises.’

Helen Garner, The Age

‘A beautifully written, personal essay; by turns tender and wise and, when necessary, brutally honest. Above all else, it’s an offering of love to a father and a brother.’

Brett Evans, Inside Story and Canberra Times

‘A fascinating read, because it connects the lives of this generation of progressives — both Greens and Labor — with the lives of their parents.’

Joel Deane, Australian Book Review

‘Exceptional ... the most perceptive assessment of the Australian public service that I’ve come across: an inside account written by an outsider.’

Peter Shergold, former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, The Conversation and Canberra Times

‘Button evinces genuine admiration for the competence and dedication of the boffins who have co-opted him.’

Amanda Lohrey, The Monthly

James Button worked in 2009 as a speechwriter to the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. He was previously Europe Correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former deputy editor and opinion editor of The Age, and has won two Walkley Awards for feature writing. He lives in Melbourne with his wife, May, and children Harry and Lola.

SPEECHLESS A YEAR IN MY FATHER’S BUSINESS

JAMES BUTTON

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2012

Reprinted (twice), 2012

Reprinted 2013

This edition printed 2013

Text © James Button, 2012

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2011

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by Patrick Cannon

Cover design by Design By Committee

Typeset in Bembo 12.5/15.5pt by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

Cataloguing in Publication data available from the

National Library of Australia

ISBN 9780522864397 (pbk.)

ISBN 9780522864724 (epub.)

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

1. Would You Want to Die Wondering?

2. We Are All In This Together

3. Kevin, USE MY STUFF!

4. The Party, The Program, The People

5. We Don’t Care What’s Under The Bonnet

6. A Big Australia

7. The Dejargonator

8. Father and Son

9. I Decided to Say Nothing

10. The Dogs Bark, The Caravan Moves On

Postscript

Acknowledgements

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK IS the result of a childhood in a political family, a working life in journalism, and a mid-career invitation to write speeches for a Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

My father, John Button, was a federal minister who had spent a lot of my childhood years away in Canberra. The commentary that followed his death in April 2008, reminded me of his role in helping to run the country during both the Hawke and Keating governments. Now I had a chance to see how it all worked.

From December 2008 I spent sixteen months working in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. During that time the Rudd government faced two huge challenges: the global financial crisis and climate change. The Prime Minister needed to pull the government’s response to these problems into a larger story about his government and himself. He needed to distil the essence of his policies and program into spare, compelling speech that connected with ordinary people.

I was inspired to try to help Kevin Rudd tell the story of his government—and of the country—through speechwriting. It did not work out as I had hoped, but I had an extraordinary experience, and gained something I had not expected to: an insight into the public service.

As a speechwriter—a job poised somewhere between dreams and delivery—I learnt about the practical problems of communicating with a sceptical media and the switched-off public. As a passing Canberra insider, I saw how aspects of both Rudd’s leadership and the complexities of public policy making were unknown to most of the country. As the son of a former politician, I thought a lot about the impact politics had on him, and on our family. In July 2010, three months after leaving my job and shortly after the fall of Rudd as Prime Minister, I decided to put these experiences into a book.

There are writers whose fierce allegiance is to the story. Tell it all. I admire those writers but I am not one of them. In Canberra I observed other ethical codes at work: loyalty, collegiality, respect for the ministerial office and the secrecy that allows sensitive decisions to be made with confidence. I have tried to navigate these different conceptions of honour, without sacrificing the story.

In one sense, any book that draws on inside information is an ethical breach. Beyond the public service’s strong prohibitions against disclosure, there is always a time to speak, and a time to be silent. I wrote this book because I feel that an important issue is at stake. Our politics seems thin and barren. Ordinary people are increasingly uncomprehending and disengaged. A friend in his sixties who has followed politics intently, all his life, says he no longer does because it is too dispiriting and dull.

But this view, however understandable and widely felt, does not do justice to the many people I met in Canberra who are trying to do good things, and often managing to do so, yet sometimes failing for reasons far more complicated and human than the usual explanations that emerge. On the inside, the stories of politics and government are as fascinating and vital as ever. We must find better ways to tell them.

CHAPTER 1

WOULD YOU WANT TO DIE WONDERING?

AT THE AGE of ten I ran for election to the Swan Hill Excur sion Committee of Hawthorn West Primary School in Melbourne. I was keen to get on this committee. The students voted; Miss O’Mara counted the papers. Of thirty students, I got thirty votes. That was my downfall.

Miss O’Mara turned to me, her voice very cold: ‘You voted for yourself, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I piped, ‘I did.’

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re off the committee. Go to the back of the room.’

I took a desk in the corner and buried my hot face in a book. I was ashamed all right, humiliated. But I was also bewildered. If it was fine to want to be on the committee, why was it wrong to vote to make it happen? Would Gough Whitlam not vote for himself for PM? I came from a political family. I knew the deal. To get ahead, you had to get the numbers.

A year later my parents sent me to a private school, Melbourne Grammar, where many boys had metal smiles and all called me ‘Button’. It was a jolt at first, but my young teacher, Steven Shann, was perhaps the most inspiring I ever had. He threw out regular lessons and turned the classroom into a miniature city, with a newspaper, law courts, businesses, a stock exchange, political parties and a parliament that debated issues of the day. I was editor of the 6-S Weekly, my first job in journalism. I was also a judge, and Leader of the Opposition. But it wasn’t enough for me.

Elections for Prime Minister were held every two weeks. Near the end of the year, I noted with alarm that only one election remained. My window was closing. I moved a motion in Parliament that two elections be held in the last two weeks—to give more kids a go at being PM, I said.

The MPs were not fooled. One told Parliament: ‘Button’s only doing this so he can be Prime Minister.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ I protested.

It was everything of the sort. My motion failed. In the election the students smelt a candidate who was a little too hungry for the job, and voted for the other guy. I came second. My political career was over. I was eleven years old.

*

Thirty-six years later, in December 2008, I got a phone call. The measured, authoritative, friendly voice belonged to Terry Moran, head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (or PM&C). Moran had a public servant’s delicacy but his drift was clear: the Prime Minister’s speeches were not going well. Moran said he needed a writer to work with him to help him simplify and lift his prose. He also needed some one to help him shape his ‘narrative’ and that of the government. A clear writer, engaged with politics and policy, capable of elegant prose and, ideally, with a sense of humour. ‘I don’t know how you are with humour,’ Moran said.

I didn’t know either. I didn’t know the first thing about speechwriting. For twenty-three years I had been a journalist. Moran’s unexpected offer was both troubling and tempting.

‘I haven’t read your book,’ Moran continued.

‘That’s because I haven’t written it,’ I said, embarrassed. For three years I had been Europe correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Now I was fiddling with a book based on the London bombings, the French riots, the Danish cartoons and other events I had reported on that raised questions about immigration, national identity and the place of Islam in the West. I knew something about these subjects but to make the book more topical I was trying to relate them to Australia, without much success.

I was also reluctant to go back to my old job at The Age. I didn’t want to be another ex-correspondent on the features desk, pining for the glory days overseas. Moran’s call came at the right time.

But why was I right for the job? The worlds of journalism and politics are so interconnected and intimate, yet so far apart. I felt Moran probing for a bridge, too, when he said: ‘I think the Prime Minister might find a pleasing symmetry in your working for him.’

I assumed he was referring to my father, John Button, who had been Industry Minister in the governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Would Rudd really care about that, I wondered. He had not come to my father’s state funeral in April. This had been interpreted in the media as evidence that Rudd was not a true Labor figure, as this had been a true Labor event. But neither I nor anyone in my immediate family had really minded. He had only known my dad a little.

I only knew Rudd a little. When he was Shadow Foreign Minister I had heard him speak at a conference on the looming Iraq War. His speech was logical and clear, and funny in parts. He said Labor would support the war if four conditions relating to evidence of weapons of mass destruction and United Nations’ support for the war were met. He went through them one by one. He explained precisely how the party would make a vital decision.

Although I was in London when he became Prime Minister, the reverberations from his victory, and from his Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, reached me on the other side of the world. A friend emailed me when Rudd, speaking at Beijing University, criticised the Chinese leadership over Tibet. At last, an Australian leader with courage, she wrote.

My talk with Moran turned to Rudd, who had been Prime Minister for less than a year. He and his government faced two huge challenges, Moran said. The first, the spiralling economic crisis, threatened to be the worst since the Great Depression. The other was climate change. Moran thought the Prime Minister had the intelligence and strength to take the right decisions on both. Helping him form his language around them would be my job, and an exciting job it would be, he said.

*

Five days later I found myself waiting with Moran and John Cairns, another senior Department official, in the Prime Minis ter’s Office in Parliament House. A few moments passed, then the Prime Minister, flanked by Alister Jordan and David Fredericks, his Chief and Deputy Chief of Staff, swept into the room.

Rudd sat casually, a foot pulled up onto his seat revealing an R.M.Williams boot, and for five minutes fired questions at me. Was I excited by ideas? What was I reading now? Did I read the work of the American and Australian think tanks? What political questions mattered most to me?

I answered as best as I could; I think it was a good meeting. Rudd said he didn’t know my work. He said he liked to write speeches but gave so many he had no time to write them all well. ‘OK, I want to do this,’ he said, leaping up. Then he was gone.

Did I want to do this? Back in Melbourne I did some due diligence on the job. There was a rising consensus that Rudd’s speeches were long, dense and dull. Bob Hawke had said Rudd should get himself a speechwriter. The Australian reported unnamed advisers as saying that he already had a speechwriter, Tim Dixon, who wrote perfectly good speeches that Rudd rewrote. When you’re PM, Hawke said, ‘writing your own speeches is a luxury that you basically have to forgo’. Rudd apparently would not. Instead, he often toiled to three in the morning at The Lodge until he had the words he wanted. Since he gave as many as thirty speeches a month this was exhausting him and, by all accounts, putting him in a foul temper.

I started reading the speeches. Many were dominated by lists of policy achievements, often not related to the topic of the speech. In a forty-minute address on education to the National Press Club, Rudd talked about the economy, national security and the planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme before he got to education. It was another ten minutes before he got to his point: that the government planned to improve schools by investing more in teaching and by publishing school results. On the 7.30 Report Paul Keating had described the Rudd government as solid but cautious, with no narrative. Narrative had been Moran’s word, too. I needed to know more about what, in this context, the word meant.

I was also concerned that I would be housed in the Prime Minister’s Department, not his Office. It gave me less chance of gaining access to the PM, which seemed essential. Moran had been clear that as an employee of the Department I would write non-political speeches and that any political material would have to be added in the Office. Yet good speechwriting surely required passion and a degree of partisanship; highbrow cheerleading for the team. Could I do this within the apolitical public service?

Finally, I spoke to four people who knew Rudd. I was taken aback by the vehemence with which two of them virtually urged me not to take the job. Rudd was simply too difficult, they said. He treated people too badly. One doubted my speeches would be used, and said that if Rudd did not like the first one I wrote for him, I would be done for. Even a supporter of Rudd’s, who was keen for me to take the job, said, ‘Be prepared for a lot of early disappointment. This is someone who has spent many years thinking that only he can capture his own voice.’ He agreed that access to the PM would be hard, and suggested I try to schedule regular spots in the car next to him as he was driven from Parliament House to Canberra airport.

Yet I was always going to take the job, despite these warnings, despite my concerns about leaving my partner and two children, aged twelve and eleven, who were all settled in Melbourne and not going to relocate. It wasn’t just the impasse I had reached in my job and book. How often do you get a chance to write for a Prime Minister? Would you want to die wondering? Anyone would ask these questions, but for me they had a particular force, revived by something John Cain, the former Victorian Premier, had said at my father’s funeral seven months before.

My father was seventy-five when he died, six months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had been a labour lawyer, a senator for nineteen years, Industry Minister for ten and a member of the Labor Party for fifty-five. After retirement he wrote three books on politics as well as a lot of articles on politics, life and football. He also wrote a Quarterly Essay, ‘Beyond Belief’, on the dire state of the ALP.

He was a small, intense, intelligent man, with thin hair and a high forehead—both of which he passed on to me—an elusive charm, a sharp tongue and the power to make people laugh. He had two marriages, another long relationship, and three sons, all to his first wife, my mother, Marj. He had a big life and mostly a good one, but a hard death.

As he got sicker, my family and I cut short our time in London and came home. I spent five weeks with him alongside his partner, Joan, and my brother, Nick. We watched him suffer, saw his last hopes for recovery steadily dwindle. Although old friends and confederates from his days in politics visited him—John Cain and Jim Kennan often, Simon Crean several times, Bob Hawke two days before his death—in that hard time I mostly forgot that he had ever been a politician. He was my father, both near to me and disappearing, setting his face to the job of dying, and silently getting on with it.

We emerged from those grim days on a sunny April morning to find the church packed. More than eight hundred people had come to the funeral, including two former Prime Ministers, Paul Keating and Malcolm Fraser. The speakers told funny and uplifting stories about him; how he helped the ALP to emerge from the constant defeats of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, its long night.

In his eulogy, Bill Hayden spoke of the most painful episode of his career. He and my father had been friends. As two of the four leaders of the Parliamentary Labor Party, they had worked closely together to rebuild the party after the heavy defeats of 1975 and 1977. But in early 1983 my father had switched his support for the leadership from Hayden to Bob Hawke, saying in a letter that while he had been loyal to Hayden at all times, ‘My ultimate loyalty must be to the ALP … I believe that you cannot win the next election.’

From that deed emerged the Hawke leadership and the Hawke–Keating government, the second-longest and arguably the best government in the country’s history, as I was to hear often in Canberra in the coming year. But it broke the friendship for a long time. Twenty-five years later, here was Hayden saying that my father had conveyed the hardest of messages in the manner of a friend ‘who delivers bad personal news with honesty and courage and, I think I’d add, grace’. Hayden said with a twinkle that he was left with only one regret: ‘I should have challenged John and inquired directly: But do you really think Bob would want to take this job?’

Although Hayden and my father had mended their rift many years before, I was moved that he told this story on this day. Yet, of all the speeches, it was John Cain’s that affected me most.

I had known John all my life. He and my father had belonged to a small but influential group, the Participants, that had fought to modernise and broaden the Victorian ALP in the 1960s. In later years, I think he and my father had drifted apart. But when Dad was dying, John, his political companion and friend for nearly fifty years, was one of the few people he asked to see. As John and I talked in my father’s study about his imminent death, John turned away and walked to the window so that I would not see his tears.

In the church, he began his speech by describing a certain kind of Melbourne person, one who loved the arts, café society and sport. Who loved talk and ideas. Who advocated for human rights and democracy, and who saw education as the key to a fairer society. Who was not materialistic, and whose sympathies lay naturally with the underdog. And who believed that political involvement was a duty of citizenship.

Of course, Cain was myth-making, yet I thought he captured pretty well the city I grew up in and some of the best people in it.

But this society had not come about by chance, Cain said. There had been great battles to make Victoria and Australia more modern and sophisticated, more open to the world. Some of them had been fought first inside the Labor Party.

In the early 1960s, said Cain, the party leadership was authoritarian, arrogant and out of touch. ‘If I were to paint the picture in Victoria, I would say it was bad for Labor people. Many forget how bad, and many choose to forget!’

Cain’s words unsettled me. These men had believed in something, something big enough to have drawn them deep into the drudgery of politics. They had written articles and party constitutions, run candidates for committees, handed out how-to-vote cards, endured a thousand meetings. They had lobbied, caucused, plotted, persuaded. They weren’t radicals or ‘idealists seeking some earthly Utopia’, as Cain put it. They were social democrats, practical men, who knew in their bones the truth of the Whitlam line my father liked to quote: ‘The way of the reformer is hard in Australia.’

He and his mates rarely called it the Labor Party. It was always ‘the party’ or the ALP. As a boy I stared at that word on papers lying around our house: the ALP, the Alp, the mountain we had to climb. I was born in the era of Robert Menzies, in his own blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Kooyong, in a state then called the jewel in the Liberal crown, in a country my parents saw as one of the most conservative on Earth. To be Labor was to be perennially out of power, almost against the grain of the society. Throughout the 1960s the party scarcely won an election, federal or state. When Whitlam finally won, in 1972, Labor had been out of office for twenty-three years. Then the powers-that-be granted Gough a mere three years before the Dismissal. On 11 November 1975, I stared in disbelief at the glassed-in Herald posters at Flinders Street Station: ‘KERR SACKS WHITLAM’. Was it a typo? Shouldn’t it read: ‘KERR SACKS FRASER’? On the tram home, the middle-aged man and woman opposite me chatted about their gardens. In my mind I roared at these faces of respectable, bland, blind Australia: ‘Don’t you know what has just happened? Don’t you CARE?’

But my father stuck it out. From joining the ALP in 1952, through the 1955 Split, Labor’s non-swinging ’60s, federal intervention into the Victorian branch in 1971, then the Dismissal and seven more years in the marshes of Opposition until he finally became a minister, he kept the faith. If he and his companions could change the party, they could also change the country. Sitting at his funeral in April, 2008, with Labor in power in Canberra and in every state and territory, in an Australia that was profoundly changed from the one I grew up in, and mostly for the better, I was sure his work was done.

But what, by contrast, had I done? I had been a journalist. I had written some things I was proud of. I had risen quite high at the paper, mentored some younger journalists and writers, helped to change a few things here and there. I wasn’t sure it added up to much. ‘My ultimate loyalty must be to the ALP,’ my father had written. And to what was my ultimate loyalty? I had never put myself in the service of an ideal, never worked with a group of people, year after year, on something bigger than ourselves. Political involvement, said Cain, is a duty of citizenship. ‘Many forget how bad, and many choose to forget.’

Was I one of those people who had forgotten, I wondered, as Cain spoke. Why had I never got involved in politics?

After all, it had fascinated me all my life. I’m not like those Australians who say, ‘They’re all a bunch of bastards.’ I have an instinctive sympathy for politicians. I am not blind to the bastardry, the will to power, the craven decisions, the cowardice. But I’ve seen it from the inside.

Politics was the phone ringing at all hours, the barbecues in our backyard, the

Reviews for Speechless Updated Edition

[michele48 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A highly readable and often moving personal recollection of family life and Labor Party politics in recent Australian history.

[questbird · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

James Button experienced a gentle midlife crisis. Instead of buying a red car and running away with his secretary he quit journalism and journeyed to Canberra, ostensibly to be Kevin Rudd's speechwriter. That did not work out and this book is the result. It rambles between topics such as the Australian Public Service, the Australian Labor Party and the author's father's long involvement with it. There is also a mixture of biography and autobiography. These topics are interesting but read more as a sequence of essays than as a coherent book. James Button changed career from journalism to public service (and later, grassroots ALP volunteer). Unfortunately, his public servant's circumspection overcame his journalist's need to reveal truth to the public. Even the biographical elements seem muted and restrained. As a consequence of this restraint, the book does not ultimately say much.

[philipjhunt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Since I was attracted by the insider's point of view of the Kevin Rudd leadership style, I inevitably found the rest of Button's book underwhelming. My fault rather than his perhaps. I liked the sections about his short and unsuccessful attempts to write speeches for a Prime Minister who preferred to sit up until 3am writing his own. His autobiographical reflections were engaging too, but I found his account of life as a public servant rather turgid. Others may not, I suppose.