John Button

I think it requires a certain boldness of being able to speak truth to friends who are still in power.

Substantial example in Australia, I think, was John Button, former industry minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, who published a series of really interesting and progressively more self-reflective, introspective, critical memoirs and autobiographies.

And the last really big publication that he produced was a quarterly essay in 2002 about really the past and future of the Labor Party It won a major literary award in Victoria, the Deakin Prize for essay writing, I think it was.

And the judges said that what gave this essay its strength was its willingness to speak from the perspective of the insider, but one who has nothing to prove and nothing to lose.

Well, I stopped expecting literary greatness in them fairly quickly.

I note the Lifeline Book Fair is on this weekend and I was well served by securing several of the copies of the books that I worked on there.

One that I find myself going back to quite often is John Button's autobiography, As It Happened.

So it's published in 1998 and...

Or rugby.

I've always loved the stuff about the car industry in Keating because there's this wonderful, one of my favourite anecdotes about him actually, in John Button's memoir, As It Happens, where one of the other cabinet ministers says, if we keep doing this with tariffs, keep reducing them, you know, all have in this country are people driving Daimler Benz.

And according to Button, at that point, his eyes were smiling.

He was referring to Keating.