"Romance in Politics - the Public Good" - Bill Kelty's inaugural John Button Oration — 04.09.2011
Romance in Politics – the Public Good
When Paul Keating encouraged me to accept your kind invitation, he told me, “They are a romantic lot, most of them are old lefties, their hearts are still in search of a better world”. He reminded me that Mahler was a social democrat at heart.
I can recall from my youth that our literary and artistic giants had a slight political bent – Frank Hardy, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Mary Gilmore, Robbie Burns, Paul Robeson, Henry Lawson, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck.
However, as the Romantics might have their politics – so politics has its Romantics.
It is a great pleasure to give this lecture – the John Button Oration.
The essential case I seek to make out is the case for the Romantic in politics. There is no better banner to do so than under the name of John Button. The Romantic here is defined in the sense that it is applied to Keats, Byron and Shelley of “a belief in some positive ideal of good”. It was said of Keats that “He had the power of putting a spirit into life so that the world is not dead or so dull.”
In making out the case for the Romantic I would like to draw on the political life of John Button and the unfinished contribution of Laurie Carmichael and Paul Keating. John Button – the Labor Party Independent who became a Senator and Minister; Laurie Carmichael, the Communist who led one of the toughest unions, the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and later became Assistant Secretary of the ACTU; and Paul Keating, the Treasurer, Prime Minister, and the source of one of Australia’s most brilliant home grown musicals – Keating the Musical.