Noel Pearson's 2010 John Button Oration - "Nights when I dream of a better world: Moving from the centre-left to the radical centre of Australian politics" — 02.09.2011
Since the late John Button delivered his devastating analysis of his beloved party in his 2002 Quarterly Essay, it is plain in 2010 that the Australian Labor Party never did step up to the challenge of renewing its purpose in Australian national politics. Which way forward indeed for those who dream of a better world?
John Button’s 2002 Quarterly Essay Beyond Belief laid out a devastating analysis of the state of the Australian Labor Party in the new century. It was required reading then, and – there being little evidence that it was ever heeded in the eight years since – is required reading today. Anyone seeking to work out how it has come to this in August 2010 is well advised to return to this essay. Let me say from the outset I am a Labor outsider. My father and his father before him drove cattle in Cape York Peninsula in the days before our citizenship: the picture of black stock-workers sitting out on the dark woodheap, looking through the kerosene lamp lit windows of the boss’s station house, dining on damper and black tea while the white fellas sit eating their corned beef, potatoes and white sauce, is an enduring metaphor of black rural and remote Australia.
I confess that whilst I have never stood with my nose pressed to the glass of the big house of Federal Labor, I have looked from the fireplace out back with some perhaps untoward and certainly unrequited feelings of desire, but for native Australians that door has never opened from the outside. I was obviously reflecting on my own embarrassed condition when, in my 200x essay for the Griffith Review, I referenced Robert Penn Warren’s machine politics saga based on Louisiana Governor Huey Long, All the King’s Men. Penn Warren’s nailing of the essential condition of that hayseed Willie Stark drove a six-inch bullet head unnervingly close to my own dyslexic heart:
Back in those days the Boss had been blundering and groping his unwitting way toward the discovery of himself, of his great gift, wearing his overalls that bagged down about the seat, or the blue serge suit with the tight, shiny pants, nursing some blind and undefined compulsion within him like fate or a disease.