A thoroughly worthwhile politician. See The Australian: ALP legend Button dies at 74.
HE had a wicked sense of humour, was so small and politically nimble they said he could dodge raindrops and if it is possible to go to heaven before you die, then John Button was there with a Geelong scarf around his neck last September as his beloved Cats won the AFL grand final.
Button, who died in his sleep early yesterday of pancreatic cancer, aged 74, was remembered as a Labor legend and an architect of Australia’s competitive open economy. He was also remembered as having been so Cats-mad that he would sit in the parliament mulling over team selections on a Senate blotter and send letters of advice to the coaches…
Bob Hawke remembered him for his intellect, courage and whimsy, while Paul Keating remembered him as a quixotic reformer and a loner with a penchant for devilment.
Hawke, who visited the ailing Button on Sunday, said: “He was very small, but a giant in many ways, certainly a giant in the history of the Labor Party.” He said that when he sat with Button, he reminisced about politics and football, which he was passionate about in almost equal measure. “With the same uncomplicated directness that characterised his life, he said, without a trace of self-pity, ‘I am on my last legs, mate’,” Hawke said…
Button was born a minister’s son in Ballarat, loved and encouraged by his mother and belted by his father “for a range of offences which seemed to have no end”. He attended Geelong College and studied law at Melbourne University. He campaigned against the Menzies government’s referendum to ban the Communist Party and was punched in the face by a gentleman in a striped suit.
He joined the Communist Party to get a free trip to a youth festival in Moscow, taught at a tough London school and mixed with British politicians and Welsh miners. In 1959, he came home to a Melbourne “depressingly the same” and joined leading law firm Maurice Blackburn & Co.
As a member of the small but influential “Participants” group, he helped reform the Victorian ALP of the 1960s, which he called “a potent mix of authoritarianism and incompetence”.
He arrived in the Senate in 1974 with the Whitlam government in its death throes, but emerged, as Keating recalled, as one of those who knew that “the old, closed way for Australia, the old Australian economic defence model, was coming to an end”…
In his memoirs, John Button, As It Happened, he wrote of Whitlam: “I admired Gough Whitlam, but not as much as he did.” And of Hawke: “I couldn’t help but admire his capacity to stand back, look at himself, and like what he saw.” He observed of Keating’s demise: “People could no longer see what was in the big picture for them.” And he wrote of Tim Fischer: “He spoke a strange language, a sort of Albury Afrikaans.”
He also wrote of the uncontrollable grief that swept him in 1982 when one of his sons, David, “the risk-taker”, died of a heroin overdose at 19.
After leaving politics, Button increasingly turned to his first love, writing. He wrote for newspapers and magazines about politics, society and football. He was the founding patron of the Melbourne Writers Festival, whose chairwoman Jan McGuinness yesterday described him as a maverick politician, a lover of words and writing and an enemy of humbug and cant…
I can’t improve on that, but Jim Belshaw is well qualified to comment, as you will see in his post John Button – a personal memoir.
The death of John Button came as a shock. I know that it will be more so for my wife. I worked in his Department, she as a policy adviser in his office.
Given this, I thought that I might record a personal memoir, in so doing perhaps also giving a feel for Canberra in the earlier period of the Hawke Labor Government…
I can’t improve on that either.
Floating Life 