Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House record its deep regret at the death on 8 April 2008 of the Honourable John Norman Button, former Federal Minister and Senator for Victoria, and place on record its appreciation of his long and meritorious public service and tender its profound sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

When commentators and historians write of the extraordinary talent of the Hawke and Keating ministries of the eighties and nineties, John Button’s name is always one of the first names mentioned. John Button was an extraordinarily successful industry minister, almost certainly the most effective minister ever to serve in that portfolio in Australia. But his contribution to Australia goes beyond his role in internationalising the Australian economy and the transformation of Australian industry during the eighties and nineties. As his good friend the former Premier John Cain said at his funeral a few weeks ago, ‘John Button was never a one-dimensional politician.’

He played a critical role in party reforms in the sixties, which brought Labor back to the political centre and made it possible for Labor to win federally in 1972. He was crucial to the successful leadership transition from Bill Hayden to Bob Hawke early in 1983, helping to make possible Labor’s win just a few weeks later. John Button made an extraordinary contribution to the community through his passionate support for the arts, education and his beloved football team, Geelong.

John Button was born the son of a Presbyterian minister in Ballarat in 1932. He won a scholarship to Geelong College at the age of 13 and then went on to study arts and law at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1955. After spending two years travelling the world, he came back to work for a well-known labour law firm and in the following years played an increasingly important role in the Victorian Labor Party leading up to his election to the Senate in 1974.

John Button was passionately committed to Labor values—to the fair go, the expansion of opportunity through education, the promotion of human rights and the modernising of the Australian economy. From 1965 John Button became active in the small but influential Participants group, pressing for reform within the Victorian ALP. He believed, rightly, that Labor’s job was not to spend its energies on internal fights but to get into government and to deliver for working people. Although it took 10 years, the Participants group played a critical role in the federal intervention of the Victorian ALP in 1970, which in turn helped make Labor viable and politically successful in the 1972 election.

Some of his tactics were unorthodox to say the least. For example, he created an alter ego named Arthur Cartwright, who wrote highly critical and, many have said, defamatory articles and letters about key figures in the Labor Party. As he tells the story in his memoirs:

Under the nom de plume of Arthur Cartwright, I wrote two articles critical of the performance and ideology of the Ruling Group in Victoria. It was distressing to be told by Bill Brown, the President of the Victorian ALP, in the back bar of the Lygon Hotel, that he thought he and I could talk frankly about our differences but that if he ever got his hands on that bastard Arthur Cartwright he would strangle him.

Anonymity has its place!

After his election to the Senate in 1974 he served in the shadow ministry from 1976 and became the party’s Senate leader in 1980, a role that he played for the next 13 years. From 1977 he also served on the ALP national executive. Just as he contributed to Labor’s return to power in the early seventies, he also played an important role in Labor’s success in the 1983 election. As a trust-ed friend of party leader Bill Hayden he was influential in persuading him to stand aside from leadership to make way for Bob Hawke. This was a very difficult time. As he retold the story in subsequent years, it was a most difficult task for him personally. But, as even Bill Hayden has acknowledged since, he did it with sensitivity and grace, recognising that whatever his personal feelings the changeover was in the best interests of the party.

The unusual feature of John Button’s career in government is that he served in just one portfolio, industry and commerce, throug-h-out his career yet he is remembered as one of the most outstanding politicians of recent decades. He understood that there was no future in manufacturing remaining focused purely on the domestic market shield-ed by high tariff walls. He recognised that the only future for Australian industry was to be globally competitive. But he also recognised that the path from insular protection to global competitiveness would not be easy and that, as the Minister for Trade said recently, it was never just a question of deregulating and dismantling. His best known policy contribution was the Button car plan, but he led reforms to many other sectors, including steel, pharmaceuticals and white goods. Those plans lowered tariffs and other forms of protectionism while assisting industries to modernise and become internationally competitive. He dedicated his decade in the industry portfolio to building a viable future for Australian manufacturing and he succeeded very much against that measure.

His legacy is reflected in the competitive manufacturing sector that Australia had built by the 1990s, with exports of manufactured goods expanding rapidly year after year. He was always sensitive to the human impact of the policies he implemented. When structural change resulted inevitably in job losses he worked assiduously to ensure the best possible assistance and retraining so that former employees could find work elsewhere.

John Button lived a passionate life and contributed enthusiastically to the community both during and after his political career, including to tourism, the arts, epilepsy organisations, Monash University and, of course, the Geelong Cats, who finally won a grand final after 44 years in the wilderness. Throughout his career he brought a warmth, a candour and a mischievous sense of humour that made him among the most liked politicians of his generation. In 1989 he wrote to the finance minister, Peter Walsh, complaining that he was bored by the view from his Parliament House office window and asked if the finance minister would purchase some sheep for the patch of grass nearby. The Sydney Morning Herald of 6 May 1989 reports him telling a journalist: ‘They ran out of money when they got to this part of the new Parliament House. You must understand that the courtyard is pretty boring to look at all the time. Other courtyards have pools and works of art so I thought I would have some sheep, a sort of moving landscape.’ This was not taken up by the finance minister.

In recent weeks John Button has been variously described as funny, witty, mischievous, compassionate, curious, irreverent and profound, all qualities reflected in the three books he wrote after leaving political life—Flying the Kite: Travels of an Australian Politician in 1994; On the Loose in 1996; and As it Happened in 1998. John Button was one of the most significant figures in the Australian Labor Party in the second half of the 20th century. He left an extraordinary legacy of service to the Australian Labor Party, to Australian industry and to the Australian nation. On behalf of all of us here I offer condolences to his partner, Joan, to his sons, Jamie and Nick, and to his close family.

Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the opposition I join very strongly in supporting this condolence motion, and it is with sadness that it is necessary to support it. John Button was one of those characters in Australian public life of whom all Australians can and should be very proud. He brought integrity, passion, good humour and enormous intellectual depth to Australian life and to the Australian parliament. He was a successful politician by any standard: a senator for 19 years, leader of the Labor Party in the Senate for 12 years and industry minister for 10 years. He was a key figure in the Labor Party’s modern history and instrumental to much of its success.

John began his working career as a labour lawyer and he rose to the position of senior partner at the Melbourne firm of Maurice Blackburn and Co. and stayed with the firm until he was elected in November 1974. He had joined the Carlton branch of the Labor Party in 1952 and was one of the ‘four just men’ who resolved in 1965 to challenge the extreme Left, which then controlled the state ALP and had been responsible for rendering Labor unelectable in Victoria. They formed a loose group known as the Participants to push for reform and to revitalise his party, and helped to bring about federal intervention in the Victorian branch of the Labor Party in 1970. On the eve of the 1983 election John Button wrote to his friend Bill Hayden convincing him to stand down in favour of Bob Hawke. At his heavily attended funeral Bill Hayden paid tribute to him and said:

... the quality of a good friend who delivers bad personal news with honesty and courage, and I think I’d add grace.

Button was appointed minister for industry following the 1983 election and he stayed there until his retirement in 1993—the longest tenure in a single ministry in the Hawke and Keating governments. He also played a role in establishing the Centre Left faction, bringing a flexibility to Labor’s restrictive factional system and providing the opportunity for many of Labor’s greater talents to attain frontbench positions. As a minister, John Button was central to the Hawke government’s moves to open up the Australian economy and Australian industry to international competition, for which this nation should be very grateful. This included implementing tariff reductions, including in the car industry, at a time when many in the Labor movement were arguing that protection was still required.

Following his political career, John Button continued to be active in the community. He served as chairman at the Melbourne Writers Festival, and his books and other writings are a significant contribution to the political history of this country. A Geelong tragic, his involvement with and lifelong passion for the Geelong Football Club is widely known. John Button was also a man whose character embodied those Aussie values of good humour, irreverence to authority and larrikinism. He was a man of great wit and a prankster. Describing Tim Fischer, he wrote, ‘He spoke a strange language, a type of Albury Afrikaans.’ And for years John Button would pen illiterate letters under his pseudonym, Arthur Cartwright, peppering Labor colleagues and public figures with acerbic advice. He also once wrote, ‘I admired Gough Whitlam but not as much as he did.’

John Button was a great Australian: a reformer and a creative policymaker. He was respected and he was well liked right across the political divide. He was a thoroughly decent man and a man of wit and grace. He was someone who added to the general public esteem for government, for parliament and for politicians generally. He was a giant of the Labor movement and should be honoured as such. He also endured what we as parents fear most, and that was the loss of a son under the most tragic circumstances. To his partner of 10 years, Joan Grant, his sons, James and Nick, and his grandchildren, Harry, Lola and Otis, I extend the deepest sympathies of the opposition and the Liberal Party of Australia.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am a very great admirer of John Button and, as a person who has spent an awful lot of money on steel in my lifetime, I do not think I could leave without putting on the public record exactly what John Button did in the steel industry—he and John Prescott. The Australian steel industry produced 80 tonnes per man per year at the same time as Kaochin plant was producing 600 tonne per man per year. His program, along with that of John Prescott, the head of BHP, led the Australian steel industry to move from 80 tonnes per man not to 600 tonnes per man, which was the international benchmark, but to 720 tonnes per man per year, which was the most efficient steel industry in the world.

I have to disagree with the leaders when they say he was a great champion of deregulation, because he had done that by a $360 million subsidy. He was a clever fellow because he had actually promised $780 million on condition that BHP put in $1,500 million. They ended up putting in $1,800 million but the federal government put in $386 million. He was responsible very much for discussions with the unions—and there was deregulation as far as that went—that enabled this industry to become the most competitive industry on earth. What a great monument to leave to the Australian people. In the car industry it was a desperate fight against, from where I sat, deregulation and the removal of tariffs to the circular arrangements in the car industry—and I do not wish to discuss that today—that preserved that industry and fought off its demolition for some 10 or 15 years.

My last memory of John Button was when I ran into him in the street in Melbourne. I said, ‘You rescued the Australian car industry, you rendered the Australian steel industry internationally competitive and you were sacked for your achievements,’ and he roared laughing. I said, ‘Can we have lunch some time?’ and, roaring with laughter still, he said, ‘Love to.’

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a mark of respect I invite honourable members to rise in their places.

Honourable members having stood in their places—

I thank the House.

Debate (on motion by Mr Albanese) adjourned.