Speechless: by James Button

In 2008 I was asked to write speeches for then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It was a tempting offer. The trouble was that I would be based in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), not the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and would work as a public servant, not a political staffer. Having worked as both a public servant and a political staffer, I believed the best way to do the job – which is all about intimacy of belief and thought – was to be embedded in the leader’s office. I also knew that the PMO already had an incumbent speechwriter, Tim Dixon. I said no. The person the department wanted me to work alongside, Fairfax journalist-turned-speechwriter James Button, said yes. Speechless: A Year in My Father’s Business is Button’s account of what happened once he became PM&C’s principal editor and communications adviser. As public service careers go, Button’s was as short as it was unorthodox. He was part of PM&C for just sixteen months, during which he operated as the department’s resident writer and drafted speeches for Rudd and Terry Moran, the then-secretary of PM&C. His recruitment was the kind of lateral move typical of Moran, who earned a reputation for hiring irregular talents when he headed Victoria’s public service. As one public servant tells Button, he is Moran’s new ‘snow leopard’ – a ‘rare and beautiful creature’ that is ‘always at risk of extinction’. Inevitably, after four meetings with Rudd and just seven months on the clock, Button was dropped from the roster of speechwriters – his words not required, the snow leopard extinct. As one Rudd staffer explains to Button: ‘He read one of your speeches on a plane, had a tantrum, and that was it.’ Button spends the rest of his time in Canberra coming to terms with ‘this vast but largely silent and invisible beast called the Australian Public Service’. The discovery process, Button writes in one of many striking passages, is ‘like the blind man feeling the elephant’. Button writes intelligently about his time in the public service and the need for a greater understanding of the role it plays, but, unsurprisingly, what’s attracting attention is his take on Rudd. Media reports have alleged that the book is in breach of the Public Service Code of Conduct and the Commonwealth Crimes Act. Shortly after its publication, PM&C Secretary Ian Watt and Australian Public Service Commissioner Steve Sedgwick jointly issued a statement condemning Speechless as ‘corrosive to the relationship of trust that must exist between ministers and the Australian Public Service’. Having read Speechless, it is hard to see what all the fuss is about. Rudd’s triumphs (the apology to the Stolen Generations, the response to the global financial crisis) and quirks (asking four people to write competing drafts of the same speech) are duly catalogued and a diagnosis proffered (‘Rudd seemed to be both obsessed with order and a peddler of chaos’). None of this is as revelatory as David Marr’s landmark Quarterly Essay: Power Trip (2010), nor as devastating as the character assessments bandied about in the lead-up to Rudd’s disastrous leadership challenge on 27 February 2012. It should be noted that one of those critics was James Button. Writing for his old masthead, The Age, Button said that Rudd was ‘impossible to work with’, ‘vindictive’, and could emanate an ‘icy rage that was as mysterious as it was disturbing’. Speechless is more measured in its criticisms. Ultimately, though, this book is not about Kevin Rudd. Speechless opens in 2008 with James Button attending the state funeral of his father, John Button, a former Hawke and Keating government minister and a major player in the post-Split history of the Australian Labor Party. A ‘who’s who’ of Labor leaders past, present, and future attend the state funeral, including Bill Hayden, Julia Gillard, and Paul Keating, but not Rudd, who misses the service in Melbourne to kiss actress Cate Blanchett’s baby in Sydney. Within months of the funeral, James Button abandons journalism to work for the man who skipped his father’s funeral. Speechless is, in many ways, the reprise of John Button’s own memoir, As It Happened (1998). Both Buttons come to terms with the deaths of their fathers, and the death of their brother and son, David Button. In As It Happened, John Button had this to say about the death of his father, Dr Clifford Norman Button – the minister of St Andrew’s Kirk, Ballarat – in the winter of 1950: ‘I was seventeen. For the first and only time we sat in the front pew of the church. For once he seemed close. The coffin was a few feet away in front of us.’ On the death of his son David, who died of a heroin overdose shortly before the election of the Hawke government in 1983, John Button is equally unsparing: We sang a hymn, ‘Now Thank We All Our God,’ which for some reason I chose. I imagine I chose it because I hoped that the celebration of a life would help overcome bitterness and remorse. It didn’t. In Speechless, James Button completes the story, revealing that, once or twice a year right up to his death, his father would drink too much and cry about David. Should John Button have thrown in his political career when David’s life started to go off the rails? ‘I know he later thought of that many times,’ James Button writes. ‘I have no answer. You never think your son is going to die.’ Speechless is a fascinating read: fascinating because it connects the lives of this generation of progressives – both Greens and Labor – with the lives of their parents. On the night of the 2010 federal election, for example, Button throws a party in inner-city Melbourne, but the night ends badly, with one former Labor minister, Gareth Evans, telling Deborah Cass, the daughter of Whitlam minister Moss Cass, to leave because she is a Greens Party supporter. That fascination only deepens when one realises there are actually three Button memoirs. John Button’s sister, Muriel Mathers, published a redacted version of their father’s memoir as part of her own memoir, Father and Daughter (2004). Like his son, Clifford (who used to beat young John with puritanical vigour) lost his father when he was still a teenager. It was the northern summer of 1902 and, as the youngest of twelve children, Clifford was forced to leave school and become an office boy in London. The Button clan was also forced to find a new home. It must have been a traumatic experience, but Clifford Button disposes of those hard times in one brusque sentence. No wonder John Button would later write of Clifford Button: ‘I have regrets but no complaints … From my father, I acquired the instinct of taking what comes in life and learning to cop it without complaining.’ As James Button says, his father wrote ‘an unusual political memoir’. The same compliment can be paid to Speechless.

Joel Deane

From the New Issue

The Empire of Climate: A history of an idea by David N. Livingstone

Advances – October 2024

Letters – October 2024

An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific essays by Damon Salesa

You May Also Like

Elite Capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) by Olúféṃi O. Táíwò

Lion Attack!: I'm Trying to be honest and I want You to Know That by Oliver Mol

Ramming the Shears by Michael Leunig

Fear and Politics by Carmen Lawrence