Speechless: A Year in My Father's Business by James Button

Author:James Button [Button, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780522860504
Google: Ms4UG0urgcQC
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Published: 2012-10-01T21:14:27+00:00

Chapter 6

A Big Australia

‘Well, first of all, Kerry, let me just say: I actually believe in a Big Australia. I make no apology for that. I actually think it’s good news that our population is growing. Contrast that with many countries in Europe where in fact it’s heading in the reverse direction. I think it’s good for us. It’s good for our national security long term. It’s good in terms of what we can sustain as a nation.’

Sitting in Treasury Place, I read with amazement the transcript of Kevin Rudd’s interview with Kerry O’Brien the night before. O’Brien had cited ‘startling’ new figures showing that in a mere forty years Australia would have thirty-five million people, thirteen million more than it had now. He talked of significant increases on Treasury forecasts of just two years before, of population moving upward rapidly and unpredictably, and he asked, ‘Is this going to be a time for a national leader to come well and truly to the fore across the whole spectrum of problems thrown up by that?’

In response, Rudd sounded as authentic as I had heard him, and on a charged subject, too. He was by nature a deeply cautious man, who never said anything until he had forensically calculated its possible impact. Now he was making a claim that all the polling and focus groups, not to mention his own staff, would have told him not to make. ‘I’m a Big Australia man,’ Kim Beazley used to say, but only in company boardrooms, never beyond. Rudd, however, had said the unsayable: that a large and growing population was good for Australia.

I had no idea what the implications of a Big Australia were, but I felt excited at the lack of spin, the kernel of a big idea that we should welcome, not fear, a large, growing, optimistic nation, with more heft, vitality and global clout. I thought, ‘Kevin, maybe you’ve found your grand narrative at last.’ Or if not a whole narrative, a memorable phrase about the nation—like Bob Hawke’s clever country, Paul Keating’s Big Picture, John Howard’s relaxed and comfortable Australia—that might help him define his prime ministership.

At various moments, Rudd would grasp for such a phrase. There were ‘working families’, ‘we are all in this together’, ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’. The deep magic of politics is to find the resonant few words that say everything you are on about: Whitlam’s ‘It’s Time’, Keating’s ‘bringing home the bacon’, or Howard’s ‘We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ But, in politics, words can be explosive.

It was late October 2009, and I was writing a speech on a cities policy that Rudd would launch at a Business Council dinner the following week. For two months, I had worked with an SDD team on that policy while also writing a paper on water policy in the Murray–Darling Basin. Change was afoot in both city and country. Since the 1980s politics had been dominated by a set of abstract issues: economic modernisation, taxation, industrial relations, privatisation.

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