State Government backs John Button Prize
The State Government has donated $20,000 to support the inaugural John Button Prize.
The gift follows the successful public launch of the Prize Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Victorian Premier John Brumby and Victorian Minister for Public Transport and the Arts, Lynne Kosky, at Queens Hall in the State Parliament on April 30.
Mr Rudd told the audience that the $20,000 annual prize for the best piece of writing on politics or public policy was ``long overdue recognition of the importance of critical, thoughtful, political discourse beyond the Kibuki play that often passes for political debate in this country.''
He said he hoped the Prize would ``throw a spotlight on the best emerging talent among writers. And in an age when we can more easily treat ourselves to the best of international journalism, I hope it can nurture a distinctly Australian voice.''
Premier John Brumby said that Victoria, ``as the centre of literature and creativity in Australia,'' was proud to be the home of the John Button Prize.
The State Government's generous donation represents a substantial boost to funding for the Prize, which is seeking to raise money through government, corporate and individual donations, in order to maintain the Prize in perpetuity, and to ensure that the Prize becomes a landmark of Australian intellectual life.
The Chairman of the John Button Literary Foundation, Dr John Miller, said he was delighted with the Government’s pledge and looked forward to a long connection between the Victorian Government and the Prize.
Posted on: 12.06.2009
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
I acknowledge the First Australians on whose lands we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
It is an honour to launch officially the John Button Prize tonight.
It is equally an honour to serve as a patron of the John Button Foundation.
This will be the most lucrative prize in the nation for political writing.
And it’s long overdue recognition of the importance of critical, thoughtful, political discourse beyond the Kibuki play that often passes for political debate in this country.
A healthy, vibrant democracy needs nourishment from healthy, vibrant political discourse.
Separating wheat from chaff.
Separating substance from sound bite.
Separating good policy from pure politics.
This Prize is about encouraging such public discourse for Australia.
It is also about saying that Australians value good writing and good public intellectual debate is important.
It’s about saying that while the daily news is important, the deep trends of the decade past and the deeper trajectory for the decades ahead is even more important.
Put simply, it is saying that ideas matter, and that they matter profoundly, including Australia’s response to the great global events that now confront the nation.
The Prize will award $20,000 to the best piece of writing on politics or public policy in Australia in the past 12 months.
The Foundation also hopes to be able to make a separate award to the best piece of public policy research, and, funds permitting, award a scholarship to an Indigenous student working in political science or public policy.
I strongly applaud each of these goals for the Foundation.
John Button
I am also pleased to see an award that will honour the life of John Button, a proud son of the Labor Party, a proud son of Victoria, and a proud son of Australia.
John Button was an remarkable Industry Minister; almost certainly the most effective minister ever to serve in that portfolio in Australian history.
He was an integral part of a government that played a critical role in transforming the Australian economy, from the closed, almost sclerotic economy of McEwenism in the past to the open economy of the future.
He and his colleagues were audacious, adventurous thinkers, not afraid to take hard decisions in the pursuit of long-term reform.
And the end point of their agenda: to advance opportunity for all, to reward individual hard work, achievement and success while always protecting the weak.
The good society.
As others have called it, the Great Society.
A public purpose well beyond the mere aggregation of individual greed – an exercise in aggregation that neo-liberals afford the gallant term “a philosophy”.
Some may describe unrestrained greed as a philosophy.
Others more accurately, an ideology.
Others again, neither philosophy nor ideology, simply a malady.
But John Button’s contribution to Australia therefore goes beyond his role in internationalising the Australian economy and the transformation of Australian industry during the 1980s and 1990s.
John always understood that it was ideas that changed politics, that changed economies and that changed societies.
He understood that as a minister.
And he understood it when he left politics to write three books about his experience and his outstanding Quarterly Essay on the future of Labor, Beyond Belief, that won the Victorian Premiers Literary Award in 2003.
As John Cain said at his funeral last year, John Button was never a one-dimensional politician.
Some would say he was a great writer whose talent was lost on politics.
Others might say he was a great politician whose talents were wasted on writing.
I’d say he loved both politics and writing – and he made an outstanding, unique, contribution to both.
John Button’s life offers inspiration for us all engaged in public life – that there is a land to occupy between the sterile world of political apparatchiks on the one hand and dreamy almost other-wordly intellectuals on the other.
Some might describe this as normal-land, be it of the left or of the right.
I call it a real political life, driven by ideas for the future but enjoyed equally in the brutal praxis of the present.
John was a big fan of George Orwell as a writer, and Ben Chifley as a politician.
He liked people who said it the way they thought it.
And that view informed his life as a politician and as a writer.
In his autobiography, As It Happened, he wrote about his early ambitions:
“I wanted to be a writer. Other things happened. My life went in different directions, including a long spell in politics."
Well, we in the Labor Party – and all Australians – are much the better for that.
His spirit has helped shape the soul of the modern Labor Party.
And political debate in Australia today is the lesser for John having left us.
Australian political writing
The establishment of the John Button Prize comes at a time of great political and intellectual change in Australia.
The most obvious observation one can make is of course the threat to traditional media from technological change.
Business models are changing as old revenue streams dwindle and readers switch online.
So too, the nightly news bulletins face much heavier competition from round-the-clock news services and online publications.
Media organisations are also in the front line of those affected by the global recession because of their sensitivity to changes in advertising and marketing spending.
The result seems to be that fewer resources will be stretched further.
Yet at the same time, we see new voices emerging both in traditional media and online.
There has perhaps never in our lifetimes been such a range of publishers and small magazines, producing such thoughtful explorations of Australian politics and culture.
Melbourne is home to many of them.
Indeed, the innovation experts would tell us that the cluster of small publishing houses in Melbourne represent something of an “innovation hub”.
Although I am cautious about such pronouncements - as the Premier can attest, when you hear such statements with an interesting adjective attached to the word “hub”, they are usually to a plea for public funds.
Among magazines we would think of Quarterly Essay and The Monthly among others – which have both seen some outstanding contributions.
They’ve also seen some very lengthy but nonetheless outstanding contributions – like a certain 7,700 word essay on the global financial crisis.
I doubt that particular contribution will get any nominations for the brevity division of the John Button Prize.
Haiku it is not.
We might also think of titles such as Meanjin and Overland – both of them great Australian titles that have been reinvigorated in recent years.
As well as Heat in Sydney and Griffith Review in Brisbane.
Among publishers, there is Penguin, a great publishing house that in recent years has renewed its focus on Australian culture with the publication of some great non-fiction books; there is also Text, Black Inc, Scribe and Melbourne University Press in Melbourne; while prominent names in Sydney include Allen and Unwin, Random House, Harper Collins and University of New South Wales Press; and then in Brisbane, the Queensland University Press.
In short, at a time when we are all crying ‘time poor’, when the digital revolution is said to be atomising our attention spans, when some accuse the mainstream media of sensationalising the news, the truth is we are witnessing a welcome enlargement of our national intellectual life.
And allow me to say something quite revolutionary against the norms advanced by my predecessor – this is a good thing, not a bad thing.
The new media environment
As we all know, the mainstream media is facing profound challenges.
Newspapers all over the world are challenged by the capacity of the Internet to eat into their traditional reader base and advertiser revenues.
And they are challenged by the changing habits of the young, who get so much of their news and entertainment on-line.
Some pundits in the publishing world divide their readership into two groups – the “digital immigrants” and the “digital natives”.
The digital immigrants are those over 35 who as adults have migrated to the new digital world unfolding so fast around us.
Those under 35, by contrast, are digital natives. They live with ease in the digital world and less familiar with more traditional products such as hard copy newspapers and magazines, and even mainstream television news and current affairs.
In this schema, I’m unashamedly an immigrant, and I carry two passports.
An immigrant who reads a lot on his blackberry.
But who loves going home to the thwack of the paper on the front step on the weekend, to read the news stretched out on a bold and physical canvas.
The challenge for both our professions – politics and journalism – or, more broadly, politics and writing – or politics and the media – is to continue to preserve a public commons through which the nation can continue to have a public discourse on the nation’s present the nation’s future.
This is not just the responsibility of public broadcasting, important as that may be.
It is a wider responsibility for us all in public and private broadcasting, new and old media, in politics and in journalism.
This challenge is made greater with the individualisation and the atomisation of debate that has been accelerated by the revolution in information technology – a process that has reduced the role of traditional media that serve as a common forum for the great debates of our age.
Because what is ultimately at stake here is how our democracy itself evolves - given the traditional means through which a democracy has had much of its life, being and conversation for the last half century is undergoing radical transformation.
This will require careful husbanding by us all.
But the encouraging news is that both because of and despite the information revolution, public intellectual debate in Australia is alive and well.
It’s my hope that the John Button Prize becomes a prestigious award for the best of Australian journalism and political writing.
In particular, I hope it can throw a spotlight on the best emerging talent among writers.
And in an age when we can more easily treat ourselves to the best of international journalism, I hope it can nurture a distinctly Australian voice.
If it succeeds in so doing, it will help build a richer political culture, a stronger democracy and therefore a more humane future.
And it comes at a time when there is a whole new public debate opening up around the world on the future of social democracy after the collapse of the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy – a debate about the future that is more open now than at any time in the last quarter of a century.
So with great optimism in the future of our democracy at large, and great enthusiasm for the great debate now launched on the future of our social democratic project both here and abroad, I’m delighted to launch the John Button Prize, and to pay tribute to John himself, a pioneer in this great enterprise.
Posted on: 01.05.2009
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we stand – the Wurrundjeri people – and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.
Victoria is proud to be the home of the John Button Prize.
After all, we are the centre of literature and creativity in Australia.
Almost one-in-three Australian authors and book and script editors live in Victoria.
We have the largest number of small presses and independent publishers in the country.
And Melbourne has more bookshops per capita than any other Australian city.
That’s why Melbourne was designated a City of Literature by UNESCO late last year – only the second city of literature in the world after Edinburgh.
But we need to build on that love of books and ideas.
That’s why our Government is working to make Melbourne one of the world’s creative capitals through initiatives such as
Fostering a love of reading through the Premier’s Reading Challenge,
Providing a new focus for literature by opening Australia’s first Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas later this year,
Standing up for our literary culture by arguing against the wholesale lifting of parallel import restrictions on books in our submission to the Productivity Commission,
And supporting the John Button Prize.
Why the John Button Prize?
Let me explain by quoting John Button:
“Few writers about politics have defined Australian social democracy. A vision emerges in dribs and drabs. In articles, in journals and occasionally in speeches, ideas are advanced that seem to hint at a conceptual framework.”
In other words: the greater the understanding, the stronger the democracy.
John wrote that critique in his 2002 Quarterly Essay about the future of the Labor movement.
That essay, Beyond Belief, went on to win the Alfred Deakin Prize as part of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – which are being held for the 25th time this year.
I suspect John’s harsh opinion – stated with typical clarity and candour – was influenced by the writing of one of his first political heroes, George Orwell.
In his memoir, As It Happened, John quotes an Orwell line that some would say Button embodied …
… “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
John goes on to say this of Orwell: “He wrote with an economy of style and fearless intent, but he was more than just a talented scribe. He was also a man of action.”
Again, much the same could be said of John Button.
As I said, Victoria is proud to be the home of the John Button Prize.
The John Button Prize is all about rewarding those writers writing about politics with economy of style and fearless intent, and encouraging the production of work that defines our social democracy.
The establishment of this Prize – coming on top of so many other literary prizes for essays and journalism, such as the Alfred Deakin Prize, the John Curtin Prize, the Melbourne Prize, the Quills, and the Walkleys – begs the question:
Do we need another literary prize?
Of course we do.
Communities are built on ideas about democracy and culture and dissent – and those ideas need to be in constant contest.
Without that contest of ideas, there is no democracy – there is no change – there is no creativity.
Nothing is ventured. Nothing is gained. And, right now, in the face of unprecedented global challenges, we need to be bold.
We need to reach for new ideas and be creative – as John Button did. And we need to be men and women of action – as John Button was.
In conclusion, let me leave you with another John Button quote:
“I wanted to be a writer. Other things happened. My life went in different directions.”
Other things did happen, but John Button achieved his ambition.
He was a great writer, as well as a great politician – and that’s why the John Button Prize as a prize for political writers is so appropriate.
Posted on: 30.04.2009
