Is Life too Short for Politics?

Terri Butler MP is Shadow Assistant Minister for Preventing Family Violence, Shadow Assistant Minister for Universities and Shadow Assistant Minister for Equality. Sje is also the federal member for Griffith. Terri Butler was elected to the House of Representatives in a by-election following the resignation of The Hon Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia. In 2017, Terri Butler oublished Labor of Love outlining the sacrifices made by those who stand for parliament and the reasons she believes all that is worth the contribution made to civil society. To discuss her book and the issues it raises, Terri Butler addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 10 October 2017.

IS LIFE TOO SHORT FOR POLITICS?

TERRI BUTLER

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet.

Thank you to the Sydney Institute, and especially Gerard and Anne Henderson, for inviting me along tonight, to talk about my new book, Labor of Love. And thank you to my publisher, Melbourne University Press. I thought I would keep things fairly light, so I am going to talk to you about death, life, security, economics, and politics.

First, a story.

Arthur Crease was born in 1911, in Surrey, England. He married in 1935 and welcomed two daughters, the first on Christmas Day in 1936. He was an accountant, and later owned a stationery shop and was a sub-postmaster. As it was for so many others, his life changed when the world went to war. Arthur left his family behind and flew for England. Back home, his wife and daughters headed north to Yorkshire, to be safe, with family. But Arthur wasn’t safe. He became a prisoner of war, finding himself in stalag VIIIB. He survived, and after the war was over he brought his family to the other side of the world for a new life. Like his other great grandchildren I dimly knew that he had been in the war. But I didn’t know the details, and nor did my mother and aunts.

The eldest daughter, the Christmas baby, raised her own family: three girls. She saw them through their own marriages and children. She started a successful business with her then husband. As a child she helped found a girl guides group and started a lifelong involvement with the guides. The business is still running today, and so are the girl guides, but Nan is no longer with us. We lost her in 2013. When she died, we went in to sort out her effects, as you would expect after the loss of a member of your family. Amongst her treasures was an old, cloth-covered book. It turned out to be Grandy’s war journal. None of us had seen it before.

I have looked through it only once. It’s too much. The loss of a grandmother; the reminder of the loss of a great-grandfather; the inevitable reflection on the lives they lived: these events and circumstances that bring the concept of mortality to the forefront of your mind. And when looking back at the lives your family lived – their tragedies, their pleasures, their values, their sacrifices, and their work – you wonder how they felt, as they got older, about the choices they had made and the lives they had lived.

Death gives meaning to life. If we all lived forever and had infinite time, imagine how indolent we would be. The fact that life is finite means that time is scarce. As with economics, in which the scarcity of resources forces us to make choices about what to consume and what to produce, and how to use our resources to do so, in life the scarcity of time forces us to choose what to do with it. Each choice has an opportunity cost. If you’re doing any given thing, you’re not doing everything else. Some of us choose to spend time practising politics. Life seems short and that creates urgency. There are big problems that need tackling, and you only get a limited amount of time to step up to try to make a contribution to resolving them.

My life has been lived at a much luckier time than grandy’s, and than nan’s. I have not been called to go to war. I am the beneficiary of previous generations’ success. I got to go to university: the first of my family to have done so. I joined a profession. I am grateful for the privileges I have. A few years have passed since the loss of my grandmother – who was just forty years older than me, and cared for me often in my childhood. In the year that she died, I decided to run for parliament. Thinking about her death, then and now, and the secret she carried with her all those years about her father’s time as a prisoner of war, and about his life, inevitably makes me wonder how I will feel about mine should I be lucky to live to old age. How will I look back on the time spent in politics, as a branch member, a participant in Labor’s administrative wing, a unionist, and now a member of parliament? Will it have been worth it? What will my children think? What would my great-grandfather make of it, if he were alive today? And can I, in conscience, encourage others to give up their time to participate in the practice of politics?

So, it was partly with death in mind that I wrote a book urging involvement in organised politics and, specifically, in Labor. If you read Labor of Love, you will see that there is a chapter devoted to people I have known in the labour movement, and have lost. I have also written about an old friend who is presently battling cancer, about his life in the movement. This chapter reveals the point of this book: to argue that the practice of politics is worthwhile; that lives lived as part of the labour movement are good lives, and that working for the public good is worth the sacrifices that come with doing so.

Though I have told you that a significant motivation for reflecting on the value and purpose of politics is the certainty of death, this is a book that seeks to give politics life. It is, at least ostensibly, a lightweight easy read; it’s not a weighty tome, at all. Nor is it a text in which I take myself or the subject matter particularly seriously. It’s written in a conversational, and I hope accessible, style. It certainly includes a good dose of polemic. There are silly stories, sad stories, and stories about good parties, as well as a chapter devoted entirely to what I think good political songs. I deliberately wrote it this way, because I am trying to reach people who might not necessarily read a “serious political book”. I am trying to reach busy people who might have a bit of an interest in politics and are looking for something that provides a soft entry, and hopefully demystifies the workings of our political party a bit, and maybe even explains things a little. And, if you want to encourage people into organised politics, there’s no point making it sound bloody miserable.

I am not trying to sugar coat things. There is, obviously, pain in politics. At the grassroots, it’s the Saturday morning spent staffing a street stall, or the time spent knocking on neighbours’ doors to talk politics when you could be at the beach with the kids. As part of the union movement, it’s the members’ meetings at all hours and the tough problems and the people who call in distress because they’ve been sacked. In the organisational wing, it’s the fights you have over resources and rules and candidates and preselections and the platform. And as a parliamentarian, there is plenty that’s not easy – being in the media, and the seemingly endless time away from home. I don’t deny that things can be very hard.

As you know, I became the member for Griffith after Kevin Rudd left the parliament. I am very fond of Kevin and I am fortunate to have had him as my local member. Even more than that, he was wonderful to me, in the 2014 by-election: generous, thoughtful and supportive.

Well before then, I had been a Kevin07 campaigner, and I write in the book about the joy we all felt, when Labor took government in 2007. I have also written about how I felt about the later disunity. It was heartbreaking. Sometimes, though, those difficulties are allowed to overshadow the real achievements of the government. I am relieved that Kevin was Prime Minister during the global financial crisis and, of course, that Wayne Swan was the Treasurer. I know people disagree about the size of the stimulus, and even about the fact of it. I am so pleased we had a government that was decisive. The alternative – the wrong stimulus or, worse, no stimulus, would have led to unspeakable consequences.

In Labor of Love I write that my kids sometimes say that they wish Kevin was still Prime Minister. They say that because then, I wouldn’t be going to Canberra. I wish Kevin were still the Prime Minister too, but my motivations are very different. For example, if he were still Prime Minister, we would have a real NBN. Significantly, we would never have had the disastrous 2014 budget, that smashed confidence and was a blow to economic growth in this country. And where would I be, if Labor were still in power, having never lost the 2013 election, or the 2016 one?

Another motivation for this book was to help humanise politics: to try to make a modest contribution to making the practice of politics something that real and relatable people do. I wanted to help mitigate some of the inevitable caricaturing that happens to people in public life. The way that people who hold public office are reduced and over-simplified, to two dimensional stereotype. I am particularly vulnerable to being a stereotype myself, as a labour lawyer turned politician. If Labor had never lost government federally, I would still be a lawyer.

For most of my working life before entering politics, I had a career in the business of law. I was a solicitor, practising in labour and employment law. I started at a boutique Queensland firm, where I made partner before the age of 30. I was then headhunted to move to Maurice Blackburn, to establish a labour and employment law section in the firm’s Queensland practice. There had been an employment and IR practice in Melbourne since the firm’s inception in 1919, but in 2008, in Queensland, they had yet to start one.

It was an exciting opportunity for me, to start a practice group from the ground up, but with the resources of a large firm. It was also a chance to join the leadership team for the entire Queensland part of the business. So, shortly before my 31st birthday, I started there. I stayed almost exactly five years. I made good business decisions, attracted work, built referral relationships with colleagues and opponents, and strove to hire people smarter and better than me. At first my practice group was just me, and half the time of someone else’s secretary. When I left, to stand for and then take up office in parliament, I had a team of ten, and had attained significant recognition from my peers across the law, including through “pre-eminent” listings in Doyle’s guide to the legal profession.

I’m proud of my legal work, and I am proud of the work that I did to build my part of the business. I’m especially proud of the excellent people I left behind. It is satisfying knowing that your work is in good hands once you’ve left. As proud as I am, I am pleased I made the decision to move to politics. And, more importantly, I want more people to consider trying to do it, too. I also want more people to get involved in political parties – and specifically Labor – regardless of whether they have any interest in standing for public office.

So, this book is a pitch to people to become politically active. It seeks to make an argument that being involved in organised politics is something that a lot of people can do alongside the stuff of our lives – working, raising a family, caring for others, and even socialising. That’s not to say there aren’t choices, and sacrifices, to be made: far from it. I make the argument that branch meetings and campaign activities can certainly impinge on your social and family life, but that it’s worth it. I have certainly foregone opportunities to go to the beach or go out for cocktails, and more recently, to spend time with my family – in favour of doorknocking, or going to a community forum. But you can make these things work, and in the end being part of the public life of  your community including through our politics, the exercise of public power, is a worthwhile part of a good life.

This seems to me to be an important point to make: that involvement in politics is both possible and worthwhile. There is a turning away from politics and from engagement. There has been research suggesting that faith in democracy is ebbing. I worry about that. If we move towards a situation where, more and more, zealots and cranks are over-represented in the practice of politics, and people who are living lives with ordinary demands and challenges, without the time or inclination to be hyper-partisan, are under-represented, then the incentives that affect the exercise of power will be skewed. So, I argue that not just parliaments, but rank-and-file organised politics, needs to be more representative, in order for public power to be exercised in a manner that better serves the public good.

As is logically necessary from what I’ve said, this book also seeks to provide a defence of being moderate, and making compromises. It does so in the face of increasingly polarised public sentiment, and the rise of the minor parties at the far ends of the spectrum, the Greens and One Nation. Compromise is hard, and it’s usually harder to explain than the opposite – taking a hard line. Compromise is not always the right thing to do, and there are plenty of occasions on which taking a stand is more important. That is not universally the case, though. So, in this book I talk a bit about a highly contested situation in which I believe compromise was unpopular but nonetheless right. I write in a little detail about the parliamentary response to proposals to change our data retention laws, under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act.

Those changes, you will remember, were about widening the scope of telecommunications data kept by phone companies and internet carriers. For years before the changes were mooted, the companies were already storing metadata, and there were already a few hundred thousand incidences, every year, of police and others obtaining metadata without a warrant. The ramifications of extending such a scheme are obvious.  I write, in the book, about the choices that must be made in public life when confronted with such an issue. Often the first choice is whether to refuse to engage, or whether to negotiate.

That issue, like so many others that confront parliamentarians, involved considerations of national security. Data retention is far from predominantly used for that purpose: its primary use is for ordinary crime fighting, and the agency that has used it the most is the NSW Police.  But there were national security justifications raised as well.

National security issues are particularly challenging for holders of public office. Every generation is confronted with arguments that civil rights should be reduced in the interests of security. The executive in each generation will be faced with the question of how to act. The parliament will be faced with the question of what the laws should be. The courts will be put to the task of upholding the rule of law. These issues were famously canvassed in another context.

At the same time as my great grandfather was a POW, Britain’s courts were considering moves by the executive to imprison suspected collaborators. Lord Atkin’s dissenting judgement in Liversidge and Anderson was a strong statement about the importance of the rule of law even during war: he contradicted Cicero’s claim that in war laws are silent. Instead, he said, they speak the same language in war as in peace, and the role of the courts was to “stand between the subject and any attempted encroachments on his liberty by the executive, alert to see that any coercive action is justified in law.” Here in New South Wales, writing ten years ago, your own Justice McDougall has seen a similar role for Australia’s courts in the face of measures to combat terrorism. He also reminded us of Benjamin Franklin’s famous statement that a nation that “gives up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety.”

Having said that, liberties take their shape and scope from laws. For law-makers, these questions of the risks of terrorism, and the curtailment of liberties, are not academic discussions. We, collectively, have to make the laws that largely provide for people’s liberties and for the ways in which coercive power can be exercised. It is a responsibility that must be taken seriously. That means, at the very least, seeing legislation before forming, let alone expressing, a concluded view. It also means that those who are initiating proposals for change should act in a manner consistent with utmost good faith. The seriousness of national security issues militates towards bipartisanship, negotiation, and compromise. That does not necessitate meek or ill-informed acquiescence.

In our politics, compromise remains crucial. But at the same time,  compromise seems to be becoming less popular with the public. Any bipartisanship is seized upon by minor parties who characterise the parties of government as a duopoly, “the Coles and Woollies of politics”. This is reckless and contemptible. The parties of government are deeply different. The values, philosophy and ideologies stand in stark contrast to each other. So, these are two of the themes that I draw upon in the book: that compromise must remain possible in appropriate circumstances, and that it actually matters how you vote.

The last point seems so obvious as to go without saying. But one of the lessons I’ve learned in the parliament is the importance of saying things that seem obvious. So, I spend a lot of time in the book arguing that how you vote matters, and that decisions made in the nation’s parliament affect people’s lives.

The ANU’s 2016 Election Study gives weight to the idea that a lot of people need to be persuaded of these things. It found that 22 per cent of people think it doesn’t make any difference who is in power. 40 per cent are not satisfied with democracy itself! And on the question of relevance, 74 per cent of people felt that government had made “not much difference” to household finances, and 69 per cent felt government had even made not much difference to the national economy.

These sentiments are interesting, and they are disturbing. They’re interesting because they fly in the face of reality. It is just a fact that decisions made by governments and parliaments – about regulation, economic institutions, spending, and taxation – affect the nation’s economy. Household budgets are necessarily affected by macroeconomic changes. Similarly, they’re affected by taxes and transfers. Spending decisions – the good old social wage – affect household budgets. So does regulation, like fair work laws and laws that make superannuation compulsory.

Who you vote for has a direct impact on these matters. The parties of government are different. We’re different when it comes to transfers: the Liberals’ pension indexation changes and energy supplement cuts, versus Labor’s 2009 increase to the pension, for example. We’re different when it comes to taxes: negative gearing and GGT is an obvious example. We’re different in relation to regulation: our industrial relations laws are very different to Work Choices. And we’re different, too, it seems, when it comes to economic institutions: for example, the 2014 Budget’s cuts to funding ASIC and the ATO.

So, in part, this is a book that states the obvious. But it does so because in order for politics to work, we first have to convince people that it matters.

I have told you a few things about why I wrote this book, and what’s in it. I want to say something briefly about what this book is not.

This book is not a memoir of my time in parliament. I still feel as though I’ve only just got there. I don’t pretend to have any great insight into being a parliamentarian, though I think I can say a few things about being a new parliamentarian. For example, question time is more deafening than you would think while watching it on television. Committees are more collegiate than you would imagine, if you don’t follow them. I have built some good relationships on committees; one of my first inquiries was into the child support system, and we managed to produce a unanimous report: no mean feat with Liberals, Labor MPs and a chair from the National Party all working on producing something in relation to such a highly contested and political subject. It becomes apparent to you, as a Labor MP, after a while that some people on the other side don’t think any Labor government is a legitimate government. The days are longer and more frantic than you might imagine: for example, my step counter tells me I walked more than 12 km on a single day during the last sitting.

This book is not an assertion, tacit or otherwise, that I am cleverer than anyone, or better at politics, or more suited to being in parliament than others. To the contrary my claim is that I am a pretty normal person. I share a lot of the same challenges and interests as a lot of other people. It sounds self-serving and obviously I’m not ignorant of the privileges that I have. But even so I think it’s relevant to point out that some days it is a struggle to hold it all together, to deal with mother guilt, to get the kids to school on time, and to manage to remember family birthdays and paying the bills on time. These things are important because if you want to make the practice of politics seem possible then you can’t pretend to be perfect, and nor should you portray an unrealistic image of what it’s like.

I hope this book makes a small contribution towards making practical involvement in politics seem possible, and making political involvement seem like a worthwhile pursuit in which sensible people should engage. Hopefully it will make a case for compromise when compromise is warranted, and for the importance of being moderate in preference to being extreme. And I hope it goes some small way to persuading people that government decisions affect lives, and that who you vote for matters.

I haven’t gone to war. I wasn’t born in the Depression. I haven’t had to evacuate my city for my own safety. I don’t know what it’s like to look back on a life like the on my great-grandfather had, or my grandmother’s. I am grateful to them; when I die, my contribution in this life will have been more modest than theirs. Loss means you can’t help but think how you will feel at the end. For so many people, our life’s work has involved political involvement, as a humble how-to-vote hander-outer, a knocker on doors, a participant in committees, a policy advocate, a party delegate, and in some cases a parliamentarian. In a life that is both short and finite, we have chosen to give some of our precious time to the pursuit and exercise of public power. Without wanting to give you too much of a spoiler for the book: in my opinion, it’s worth it.