Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to pay my respects and to pay tribute to the Hon. John Norman Button. I do so because I think it is appropriate that someone from Ipswich should do so. Bill Hayden is a life member in a branch in my electorate and a personal friend and I thought it appropriate for someone to say something in parliament to pay tribute to John Button, who was a good friend of Bill and Dallas Hayden for many years.

The Hon. John Button was the Minister for Industry, Technology and Commerce from 1984 to 1993, the only member, as I understand it, of the Hawke-Keating government to serve in the same capacity for that period of time; the Minister for Industry and Commerce from 1983 to 1984; the Minister Assisting the Minister for Communications from 1983 to 1984; Leader of the Government in the Senate from 1983 to 1993; Leader of the Opposition in the Senate from 1980 to 1983; Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate from 1977 to 1980; and a senator for Victoria from 1974 to 1993.

John Button was the son of a Presbyterian minister from Ballarat. Many great Labor politicians have been sons or daughters of ministers of religion; the number in the history of the Labor Party who have made a contribution to this parliament is quite extraordinary. He went to Geelong College and studied law at Melbourne university. It is interesting to note that he campaigned against the Menzies government referendum to ban the Communist Party. He was a great civil libertarian. After a brief sojourn to Europe, he joined the labour law firm of Maurice Blackburn and Co. and was a partner in that firm from 1959 to 1974.

He was a great Labor figure, small in stature but large in contribution. I have talked to Bill Hayden about John Button. Words like quixotic, loner, whimsical, intellectual, wit and grace came to Bill’s lips. John Button was a man of honesty and integrity. His long service to this parliament is evidence of his contribution.

It must have been lonely as a participant in the Victorian branch of the ALP, but he backed Gough Whitlam’s efforts during the 1960s to reform the dysfunctional Victorian branch, which had made Labor almost unelectable because of its left-wing extremism. It was very happy and willing to argue over the spoils of defeat rather than the fruits of victory. That was best evident in 1969, when the Whitlam Labor Party won 18 seats to cut the coalition majority to seven, but in Victoria Labor picked up only three seats, leaving it with 11 out of 34. The federal takeover was necessary and acceptable to the party, and John Button should be thanked for the contribution he made which led to the victory of the Whitlam Labor Party in December 1972.

The Button car plan was extraordinary. His contribution, his great skill and courage in negotiating with the unions and business, was long and arduous and must be respected. It resulted in the reduction of tariffs, of import quotas and in the number of locally manufactured models, but it provided tremendous assistance to R&D and to retrenched workers. We would not have a car industry without John Button.

What he did is amazing, and I mentioned it before. As someone in the Queensland branch of the ALP, in what has often been described as a factional menage a trois—as a member of a minority group—I find it extraordinary that Button survived with a five per cent contribution to the Victorian branch of the ALP. My group, which is often derisively called the ‘old guard’ in Queensland, has about four times that and I know, as one of the leaders of that group, how difficult it is with the colossus of the big Left and Right unions. But Button managed to negotiate great deals. He was often hated by both the Left and Right, but he survived for a generation. The contribution he made is quite extraordinary. Paul Keating talked about this and said of John Button:

A lawyer who inhabited the centre ground of Victorian Labor politics, he was material in returning the pendulum of Labor politics from the left, where it had stuck fast for a quarter of a century, to the political centre.

               …            …            …

In his prime, he was more or less despised by the left and the right. In the swing position, he played corner politics with cunning and elan.

It is quite extraordinary.

I want to pay tribute because my former role in life was as a partner of a law firm, and I know how much that helped me in coming into this parliament. Bill Hayden was a great friend of John Button, and John is often most remembered for a certain letter he wrote to Bill. He sent this to Bill in March 1983:

I have been consistently loyal to you in every major difficulty you have faced. I am still loyal to you as a person ... My ultimate loyalty, however, must be to the ALP.

The letter tipped the balance. Bill moved aside six days after that letter, and 4½ weeks later Bob Hawke became Prime Minister of this country.

I know, as someone who has lived in Ipswich all my life, how Bill’s failure to become the Prime Minister affected the people locally. I remember a great story that Bill told me once: someone came up to him and said, ‘Bill, the Labor Party did the dirty on you and I’m never going to vote Labor again,’ and Bill said, ‘If you don’t vote Labor, you won’t be voting for me at this election.’ But Bill and John went on to remain friends despite it all and worked together as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Industry and Commerce. Bill has paid tribute to John, the friendship and the contribution he made. It must have been hard to overcome the disappointment and it must have been hard for John Button to write that letter, but Bill said years later about that letter and about what John did that day, ‘One cannot seriously quibble about the quality of a good friend who delivers bad personal news with honesty and courage and, I think, added grace.’

On behalf of my seat, Blair, on behalf of Bill and his wife, Dallas, and on behalf of the people of Ipswich, I pay tribute to John and the immense contribution he made. We have no hard feelings, John. We thank you for what you did for the people of Ipswich. We thank you for what you did for the people of Australia and the part that you played in the Whitlam resurgence, in the Hawke ascendancy and in the Keating victory. Thank you, John, on behalf of the people of Ipswich.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment Participation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to place on the record my views of John Button, a great Labor minister and a great reformer, both in terms of what he did for industry policy in this country and what he did for the Australian Labor Party. I do not have a great deal of time, as I am on duty in the main chamber, but I wanted to express my gratitude to Senator John Button, who provided many of us in the Labor Party with a fantastic role model. It was not because he was in a particular faction, the independent faction, but it was because he was an independent thinker. He was willing to challenge the current construct, whether it was factions or an industry policy that was not assisting Australian workers and Australian business in the longer term. He was able to quite effectively, and like very few others, challenge the way we did things. Because of that inclination, that genius that he had, his mark was left in many areas, especially on the Australian Labor Party and the way in which it operated, particularly in Victoria, and on the way the Hawke-Keating period is now perceived.

Firstly, I will turn to the Victorian Labor Party. John Button was someone who we desperately needed. The branch of the Australian Labor Party in Victoria in the period in which he became active was a moribund, incestuous and dysfunctional outfit—and I do not think I am overstating things. He had the capacity to challenge the way people behaved and the strength to challenge people’s undemocratic approaches to preselection and the way policy was formulated. He was one of only a number who in the end contributed to the opening up and the democratisation of that particular branch. I think he was therefore in many ways responsible for the success that the party had in that state subsequent to his assistance in reform.

With respect to his role as a parliamentarian, he was of course Leader of the Government in the Senate, a remarkable leader of the Senate. He was the Minister for Industry and Commerce and he was renowned for his role in the area of industry, not just in the car industry but also in the steel industry. There are many thousands of workers and their families in Whyalla who could thank him for ensuring that the industry remained in that town. Many people now work for the car industry, an industry that is beset with constant challenge because of its highly competitive nature. They can thank John Button in his role as industry minister for providing the framework that allowed that industry to remain and to grow in this country. A lot more has to be done, and the industry constantly finds it has new challenges to confront and deal with. I do not think it is going too far to say that, without John Button as minister, that industry may not have survived and we may not have been talking about a car industry in today’s Australia.

He brought a strong intellect to everything he did. I had the great fortune of seeing him relatively recently at a function in my former electorate, in the town of Woodend, which is a fantastic town in central Victoria. I was to introduce him. I remember speaking to someone who was a little antagonistic. I turned quickly, as you do when you feel someone spying on you, and I saw John looking at the way I was handling the situation. He had a writer’s mind; he was an observer of human behaviour and of human nature. He gave an almost imperceptible nod to me as if to say: ‘You’re doing okay, son. Keep it up. You’re a fledging politician but you’re doing okay.’ This was in my first term as the then member for Burke.

I got to speak to him about his role in the parliament, what he got out of it and what was important. People like him provide great guidance to new members of parliament. He certainly did that for me. As we now know, he was struck down with cancer, which was diagnosed only shortly before his death. It was quite a sudden and tragic end. I was aware of the fact that last year he had chaired an inquiry into workforce participation for the Victorian government, for the then minister Jacinta Allan. Before he fell ill, I was going to ask him about the inquiry and whether he could provide assistance to the Commonwealth. Of course, if he had been involved, it would have been our gain, because he did everything in public life to his fullest and he brought a great capacity and a great sense of purpose to it. He was not one for wasting time.

We could recall many anecdotes and witticisms, because he had such an extraordinarily good sense of humour. He saw that life has its absurd side and, when the moment struck him, he liked to shine a light upon those absurdities. In the end, I think he will be remembered for his bravery, his intellect and his capacity to think and not be swayed from doing the right thing. I therefore want to express for the record my appreciation to him and my condolences to his partner, Joan Grant, his sons, James and Nick, and his grandchildren, Harry, Lola and Otis.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

John Button was a very important figure in Victorian Labor politics and indeed on the national stage. It is a mark of John Button’s stature that the tributes to him flowed from leaders and former leaders of all major political parties and from people of all walks of life. All acknowledged his role in reforming the Australian economy. All acknowledged his commitment to the Australian manufacturing industry. Many of the tributes recounted his achievements through his life—and we have heard during the debate on this condolence motion that kind of acknowledgement.

Many people also referred to John Button’s personal qualities, like the former Leader of the Opposition in the Senate and minister in the Fraser government, Fred Chaney, who said that John Button brought ‘wit and grace’ to politics. We heard this tribute from the former Premier of Victoria, John Cain:

John Button was self-assured, never cocky, always modest and understated.

Michael Duffy, a former member of this House and a great friend and ministerial colleague of John Button, said that he had made a threefold contribution to Labor and to the country. He said:

Before politics John Button played a major role in reforming the party. During politics he was an outstanding minister whose structural reforms helped put the Australian economy on track. And finally, he was a good bloke.

I first met John Button in 1976, when he was a new senator. They were dark days for the Labor Party after the defeat of 1975. John had set up his first electoral office in Cheltenham, where my electorate of Isaacs now is. I was then a second-year law student. I went to him for advice, partly about my career and partly as to what role I might play in political life. Demonstrating the practicality that John Button always brought to advising people—and he had a great role in advising younger people, particularly in the Labor Party, for which he was known—the advice he gave to me was, rather than go into politics or pursue a job in a political office: ‘Finish your law degree.’ I fear that that advice might have delayed my arrival here for quite some time, because I did just that and indeed went on to practise law.

John Button’s qualities were qualities that all members of this Australian parliament might aspire to. I will leave it to others to record in detail his ministerial and parliamentary achievements, but his personal qualities, of which I have already spoken—his practicality and good humour, his sense of respect for the democracy and its institutions, the sense that he brought of involving young people in the political process and his humility in the sense that John Button never lost touch with ordinary Australians—were all qualities that all of us in this place would do well to aspire to.

John Button wrote very well. It is a great reflection of his ability to think clearly that he did write so well, and he saved much of his observation and writing for the time after he left parliament, when he wrote three books: Flying the Kite: Travels of an Australian Politician in 1994, On the Loose in 1996 and As It Happened in 1998. He wrote for the newspapers; he wrote for journals; he wrote on architecture, on art, on history and on politics. In those writings, after he left politics in 1993, he was able to demonstrate a freedom to express himself that perhaps was not available to him while he was a member of this parliament. I said before that John Button never lost touch. Indeed it is easy to do that in this place, as he commented, very soon after leaving the parliament, while writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1993. Perhaps wearily after 19 years in this parliament, he wrote—and it is a passage that appeared later in his book On the Loose:

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the Canberra thing. For newcomers to national politics, the Sunday night flight to the capital is a date with destiny, a ticket to where it all happens.

As time passes, things change. You present your ticket to the flight attendant with the heavy heart of an inmate returning to a lunatic asylum after weekend release.

That is of course John Button writing after he had left the parliament and he was, as I have suggested, perhaps demonstrating some weariness in the month immediately after he had left the parliament after 19 years. That weariness with the political process, if indeed that is what is reflected in the passage that I have just read, is not something that stayed with him, because John Button continued to participate, continued to write and continued to agitate in the political life of this country with tremendous vigour, continuing to put forward many of the ideas that he had put forward during his time here.

I cannot resist recounting at least one of the anecdotes from John Button’s life that have been much repeated in the speeches and tributes over the last month. It concerns his use of the nom de plume ‘Arthur Cartwright’. It is now known that John Button wrote to newspapers, ALP officials and even, on occasion, state and federal ministers using that nom de plume. It appears that, while using that nom de plume and often writing publicly to the same people to whom he himself using his own name had written, John Button had the freedom to say things that he might not have been able to say in his own name. In one story about his use of the nom de plume Arthur Cartwright, it is said that he had written to an ALP state president in Victoria with whom he had been publicly arguing and that, at a meeting with this state party president, the state party president apparently said to him—and John Button was very proud of this—something along these lines: ‘John, I can put up with blokes like you; I know what you’re about. But wait till I get hold of that Arthur Cartwright!’ It is a mark of the type of man that John Button was that he continued to use the nom de plume in that way, providing him with considerable private amusement while also possibly serving a purpose as he conducted his debates and as he participated in discussion on the matters that he wanted to comment on.

John Button persisted with an adherence to the idea that politics matters. It was evident in all of the speeches he gave in this parliament that, for him, being a member of parliament was a high calling. He never lost faith. He never lost sight of the idea that through politics great things can be achieved. He was in that sense a true democrat. He never stopped expressing his adherence to the rule of law, to the importance of a free and independent media and to the importance of striving for the civil liberties of all people in Australia.

I say with some regret that one of the ideas that John Button spoke very passionately about in his first speech in the Senate in 1974 bears repeating because it is something that is still with us—that is, the difficulty that our nation has experienced in achieving constitutional change and in achieving change to the framework of government. John Button, in 1974, spoke of ‘the Constitution providing the framework of government in Australia’. He went on to say:

It is sometimes stated by Opposition spokesmen that in some peculiar way which has never been explained to my satisfaction, the existing federal structure in Australia provides a bulwark for the freedom of the individual. I have never heard any evidence for that assertion, and I look forward to hearing it in this chamber because whatever we do we must be sure that the democratic institutions and the framework of government in Australia reflect the aspirations of the Australian people and allow the members of this chamber and of the other chamber to act in a way which fulfils the aspirations of the Australian people …

I go on with a little more of the next passage, because it shows the lightness of touch that John Button was able to bring to weighty issues and, in so doing, make the point that much better. In his first speech, John Button went on to say:

I have sometimes heard Opposition senators speaking of the Australian Constitution with the reverence which an antique salesman sometimes displays when he is trying to sell an old chair. The point is always made that because of the age of the chair its value is so much greater. While that may apply to furniture it cannot apply to the framework of government in Australia …

John Button, as I have said, continued to write on the issues that concerned him. In particular, he wrote a sparkling essay published in the Quarterly Essay series in 2002. In it, he expressed very eloquently the importance of ideas in politics generally and the importance of ideas for the Australian Labor Party, of which I am proud to be a member. I will read just a couple of passages from this essay that John Button wrote in 2002, about ideas:

It’s worth remembering that the ALP has always done best in federal elections when it has set the political agenda, when it has involved its members as agents of change and enthused a wider section of the community with a sense of excitement and vision. A small target strategy does none of these things. It’s contrary to ALP sentiment and tradition, demoralising to the membership and boring for the electorate.

And you can hear the vigour with which John Button was writing even in 2002. He further wrote:

Ideas are crucial to an ALP agenda. Ideas are about all the ALP has going for it and they are something which the coalition has never been good at. Some ideas and examples for the ALP will come from overseas, but history has shown that the best political ideas, the ones which have been successful for Labor, are those developed here in response to Australia’s particular circumstances. These particular circumstances include our position in the Asia-Pacific region, a highly urbanised population, multiculturalism, unique environmental challenges and our history, including the story of Aboriginal Australia.

And one can hear in that passage the clear-sightedness which John Button brought to the practice of politics. He never lost his passion for the Australian Labor Party. In that same essay he analysed the major political parties and finished with this:

Who among these parties is going to be able to build a better Australia? The Democrats and the Greens can’t do it. The Coalition won’t do it. The ALP remains the sole genuine avenue for political change.

Lastly, I would like to read a contribution to politics from John Button’s last major publication and some observations that he made about the importance of our institutions, particularly the Public Service, the judiciary and the media. John Button wrote:

A public service committed to the public good is a keeper of a country’s corporate memory. The best public servants know what has happened in the past, what has worked and what hasn’t. This can be a useful guide to the present and sometimes the future. It is an important part of a healthy democracy.

So too in different ways are an independent judiciary and institutions like the ABC, the universities and a diverse and critical media. Menzies understood this. Latter-day politicians have understood it less. Politicians should respect the integrity of these institutions.

I am in John Button’s debt for showing me that it is possible to achieve good results and real change through parliamentary work. All parliamentarians and all Australians are in his debt for the contributions he made and the example that he set. I extend my condolences to his family.

Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In John Button, the Labor movement, and indeed our country, has lost one of its greatest figures. John Button was born in Ballarat in 1933. He went to school at Geelong College and from there went to Melbourne university. I followed much later in his footsteps, in a way, being educated in Geelong and also doing law at Melbourne university. John Button was a man who loved Labor governments. He passionately believed in what Labor governments did for our country and can do for our country. In the passages that we have just heard from the member for Isaacs, you get a sense of John Button’s passion and love of Labor governments. He was utterly committed to putting Labor governments into power.

But winning government is a very difficult endeavour. It is a hard thing to do and it requires difficult decisions. It is a measure of John Button and his significance that at the commencement of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments he played a pivotal role in putting in place the architecture of the Labor Party which allowed those governments to ultimately occur. Many would say—indeed, I would say—that Gough Whitlam’s greatest achievement was to modernise the Australian Labor Party and put Labor in a position where it was finally electable after a long period in the wilderness. The coalface of that struggle of making the Australian Labor Party an electable party was occurring in Victoria, which was failing to recover from the split of 1955 and was being run by an authoritarian and very left-wing Victorian central executive.

John Button was a founding member of a group called ‘the Participants’, which was formed in 1965. The group was formed out of frustration at Labor being out of power for a long time and a commitment to try and put Labor back into power once again. The group saw that for that to occur the Victorian branch of the Labor Party needed to be reformed, so they campaigned for federal intervention and for the federal executive to involve itself in the affairs of the Victorian branch. That federal intervention ultimately occurred in 1970, very much at the behest of the then opposition leader, Gough Whitlam. It was a potent combination—Gough Whitlam on the one hand and the Participants, a local group of activists, on the other—and together they managed to change the Victorian branch of the Labor Party.

In what is a fantastic, unpublished book by Senator-elect David Feeney, which was written in 1996 after extensive interviews with all of the Participants, he came to the conclusion that the Participants themselves credited John Button with the idea of putting together the combination of Gough Whitlam on the one hand and the Participants on the other. It was John Button who led that move, and ultimately Gough Whitlam met with the Participants on numerous occasions and helped to bring about that federal intervention. In the aftermath, John Button was a key figure in reinvigorating the Victorian branch of the Labor Party, sitting on the then advisory council. The 1970 intervention into the Victorian Labor Party was a critical precondition for Labor winning government in 1972. It was very difficult work indeed and at the heart of it was John Button.

In 1974 John Button was then elected to the Senate and briefly participated in the Whitlam government. But nine years later, in 1983, John Button famously participated in another event which put in place the architecture that allowed the then Hawke-led opposition to win the 1983 election. It is an often quoted letter, particularly in the last few months, which put Bob Hawke, a very charismatic and popular leader at the time, in a position to contest the 1983 election. It must have been an acutely difficult letter for John Button to write and it has been quoted before but I intend to quote the passage again where he wrote to Bill Hayden, a close friend of his, and said:

I have been consistently loyal to you in every major difficulty you have faced. I am still loyal to you. My ultimate loyalty, however, must be to the ALP.

That quote says volumes about John Button’s attitude to loyalty but also his loyalty to the Australian Labor Party. I think it is with incredible generosity and grace that Bill Hayden ultimately said at John Button’s funeral that John was absolutely right on all of those points. It is a measure of John Button’s significance, as I said, that he was a critical player at the most important, pivotal moments in the lead-up to both the Whitlam government and the Hawke and Keating governments. He was a player in the background but he was a player who ultimately made the difference and allowed those governments to occur.

John Button did have his own time in the sun. As the industry minister of this country—and it has been put on record on numerous occasions in the last month—John Button was the longest serving minister in a single portfolio during the Hawke-Keating era. He is best remembered perhaps in that sense for the Button car plan, which again tackled a very difficult issue and made hard decisions but did so in an intelligent and sensitive way. Reducing tariffs, he made the car industry much more internationally competitive, but he did so on the basis of providing export focused industry policy. The need for our manufacturing sector to be export focused is as critical now as it was then. Indeed, that is absolutely the case in the car industry and it is absolutely the case in the car industry in my electorate of Corio, where last year we saw 600 employees lose their jobs in the Geelong engine stamping plant of Ford. That ultimately was a decision which flowed from a much earlier decision by Ford in Detroit not to export Australian made vehicles into the Middle East, but that stood as an example of how important export industries are to our manufacturing sector and, in particular, to our car industry.

I first met John Button in 1990. I enjoyed hearing the account from the member for Isaacs; it sounded very similar to my first meeting with John Button. I was writing a number of letters, not of any particular note, as a university student to a number of ministers in the then Hawke government. I wrote off a number of letters but one person replied and that was John Button. I ended up having a wonderful interview with him where I think I asked similar questions to the member for Isaacs about what my future might hold and how I ought best go about it. It was the kind of interview that I suspect he would not have remembered for long after it occurred, but of course it was an interview that I will never forget. That I am obviously not the only person to have had that experience says a lot about the generosity of the man and his generosity with his time.

I have another association with the Button family, through John’s son James. James Button and I had briefly overlapping careers at Melbourne university and I came to know him in that time through student politics. But I also knew James and, vicariously through James, John through a shared love that we all had of the Geelong Football Club. What I really remember—and it is a lesson that I have certainly carried on in my life—was a ritual that the two of them had. It may have involved Nick as well, I am not sure, but I came to know of it through James and so here I refer to James and John. Their ritual involved frequently going to watch the Geelong Football Club play throughout the winter months. They loved the club a lot, but the event also played a very significant role in their own relationship. They got to spend the day together—father and son—and whilst the principle focus was on watching the ‘Hoops’ run around the ground, no doubt they also shared stories about their week. It was a very important interaction in their lives, as John’s commitment of time to this place made family life difficult. John expressed that on numerous occasions since he left this place. Emerging from that period and having my own children—an 11-year-old son, a three-year-old daughter and an 11-month-old son—I am very keen that football and Geelong should be a part of the relationship that I have with them. Whilst Sam is very much on the road to being a Geelong supporter and understands it all, my daughter, Isabella, and my younger son, Harvey, will get there as well.

In 1995, while at the grand final that Geelong contested against Carlton, I read a fantastic piece in the Age written by James Button. I had got to the ground early, as you do on grand final day so that you can get a good seat. There was a lot of time to kill, but there was this fantastic feature piece in the Age written by James which described the trials and tribulations of barracking for what until recently has been a heartbreak team. He went through in detail the particular pain that Geelong Football Club supporters have suffered over the years. It was difficult to read that piece and not start crying, which indeed I did on that day after my anticipation of what I had expected to be a fantastic achievement. Aficionados of AFL history will know that I was to be very disappointed later in the day as Geelong got absolutely pumped.

I have since learnt that there was a ritual that James and John used to go through after each grand final where they would take a sheet of paper, write down on it each player on the list, imagine them in peak form and injury free, and then fantasize about what that would mean for the following year and how Geelong might go. A very intelligent mind applying itself to the trials and tribulations of the Geelong Football Club needed venting and some form of expression, and John Button did that by writing to the coaches of Geelong as industry minister to suggest players who should be picked, others who should be delisted and where particular players should play. He tells a story, and there are a couple of versions of it. In 1989 a new coach came to Geelong, Malcolm Blight, who replied to John by talking about the new policies he was going to put in place at the club and then gently suggesting to John Button that he did not need his advice as industry minister because he would be able to coach the team on his own. The first version of that story involved John being confident about that assertion by the coach and his sense that this was a man who knew how to coach. So with some confidence he put his pen away and stopped offering that advice.

Last year was an incredible year for the Geelong Football Club. There was an enormous amount of emotion leading up to the grand final and it turned out to be an utterly extraordinary event. It is difficult to convey to people who do not support this team exactly what it meant. It bears some similarity to Collingwood’s 1990 victory, but Geelong’s particular geography and the whole town’s commitment made it even more emotional and even more special. On the Friday before the grand final, there appeared in the Age again a wonderful piece of writing by a Button about what it meant to barrack for Geelong. On this occasion it was John Button himself who was writing in the Age. He told the story again of sending those letters to the coaches of the Geelong Football Club and Malcolm Blight’s rebuff of those suggestions of his. He said—and this is a slightly different version to the first version that I heard of this; I suspect that John gave both versions:

He then gave me a cold stare. As coach, he said, he wouldn’t need any letters of advice from me. I thought this was churlish. I gave up writing letters in disgust. Disgruntled, I went underground and became caught up in a loose and semi-secret network, not unlike the People’s Liberation Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It involved meetings in pubs and coffee bars and restaurants to discuss “the situation” of the club. Like the Liberation Front, our deliberations were mostly irrelevant to anything that actually happened.

Perhaps it was a good thing. In May last year, for example, I met with a co-evil in a Collins Street coffee shop. He turned up with a black notebook containing a list of Geelong players’ names. We reached agreement on those who should be delisted. Six of them are playing in tomorrow’s grand final.

They are a strange lot, the Cats Liberation Front, not beyond the fringe, but on it. There’s an actor who can keep a lunch table laughing for hours and becomes as serious as Hamlet when the football is discussed. Only last week another fringe dweller said he wanted to meet and discuss tactics before the final. This man, I thought, is deranged. But it’s catching, and I met him. I can’t help wondering if other teams have people like this. Or is it all a result of long suffering in the wilderness?

Geelong now is, of course, a strong club with healthy finances, a professional football department and a good player list. It’s the best Geelong team I can remember. It should win. There’ll be a bunch of cheering fringe dwellers there to watch it, unless someone locks us out.

That piece says everything about John Button’s wit, about his love of the Geelong Football Club, about his intelligence and about his wonderful ability to write.

I last saw John Button—and indeed the last time I saw James—at the grand final. John and James were sitting next to each other, father and son, participating in a ritual that they had done over decades and I was quite near them. On this occasion I was sitting with my son Sam. It was an incredibly special day for me. It was an incredibly special day for the Buttons. I spoke with James afterwards and I spoke with John. His eyes were failing during the grand final—he did not see it all—but he absolutely understood what was going on.

My greatest joy on that day, amongst all the joys of Geelong winning that grand final, was experiencing it with my 11-year-old son. Without a doubt, James Button’s greatest joy, amongst all the emotions of Geelong winning a flag after 44 years, was being there with his father. Now looking back at it and seeing what has happened since, how significant and how wonderful it was that John Button got to see that event. But of course it ultimately was a prelude to a far more significant event that John Button got to see which occurred in November last year—Labor being elected to power once more. With all his passion for Labor governments it would have meant everything to John to see that, much more in fact even than to see Geelong winning the flag.

My thoughts very much go to John’s family—to Joan, to Nick and in particular to James, as I know James. There is unquestionably grief and sadness with John’s passing, but there must also be comfort that John left this earth with Labor back in government, with Geelong as the reigning premiers and with the knowledge that everything was right with the world.

Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I understand it is the wish of honourable members to signify at this stage their respect and sympathy by rising in their places.

Honourable members having stood in their places—

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Committee.

Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That further proceedings be conducted in the House.

Question agreed to.