Book Review: Speechless: A Year in my Father’s Business

The author was employed by the Department of the Prime Minister. That was unusual in that he was not employed as part of the PM’s personal staff.

The book is, on its face at least, about that experience. James Button is a gentle empathetic writer. He speaks well of public servants and of political staffers. He writes a story that we seldom hear: the narrative of the contribution by public servants to constructive policy making. He puzzles about how all in the process of policy making and delivery can operate successfully in a world of fractured media and a crazy twenty-four news round.

Two of the public servants featured are Button’s two bosses. The first is the source of the job offer, the head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Terry Moran. The second is his immediate boss for the second half of the employment period, Subho Banerjee, head of a small unit, the Strategy and Delivery Division or SDD. The impression the reader receives is of thoughtfulness, wide knowledge, sensible strategic thinking and a desire to help politicians make the world a better place. All of this conducted in a world where what one has worked on for the last ten months can be shelved indefinitely.

The author was hired to help Kevin Rudd form his language about the two great challenges that then faced the government: the reaction to the global financial crisis and the response to climate change.

The primary tale of James Button’s attempt to engage with the Prime Minister and to write material that Mr. Rudd would feel sufficiently comfortable with to deliver to his audiences is of tremendous interest. It is a story of the craft of speech writing: research to understand the historical context; getting a handle on the policy being discussed; and then finding words that will resonate with both speaker and audience.

But it is also a story of speeches rewritten and, thereby, hardly used. It is a story of something that brought Kevin Rudd undone. It is an eyewitness account that confirms much of what Rudd’s eventual political opponent’s within his party came to say about him. That something is an inability to accept the input of others; an inability to take advice; an inability to make decisions and stick with them; and, in the speech-making context, an inability to respect the audience’s reaction in favour of creating some didactic public record that, hopefully, would echo more broadly in the world of media.

(I wonder, in that context, why Rudd’s wife, Therese Rein, could not convince her husband to change his ways. It would be hard to find a more sensible and loving spouse. And, if one’s partner cannot set one on the right course, few others can.)

For its eye witness account to the undoing of Kevin Rudd, Speechless is an important book.

But it is much more. It is a recent history (say, the last forty years) of the Labor Party; of Australian politics; and of the Australian Public Service.

It is also a personal story. It is the story of a son’s and family’s reaction to a father who, because of public life and politics, was hardly ever present. But also a father who, despite family separation, never went away and was always there. It is the story of the human being behind the public John Button that everyone loved and respected. It is the story of a father and son coming to terms with the loss of another son and a brother and the mistakes they made in not communicating about their mutual and respective losses. That is the significance of “speechless” in the book’s primary title.

All of these themes are introduced early in the text. They are reworked and re-visited. Just as the author seems to be drilling deeper to find his understanding, the reader journeys with him and makes similar discoveries.

It is a loving book and a book about love. Not often, a man pushing fifty writes a book that is a coming of age but Speechless is a book of a man discovering himself and others through his work; his childhood; and through his father’s writings.

Speechless is a book that is as important as it is a joy to read. 

Stephen Keim SC
Angourie