Bill Shorten's speech at the launch of Catch and Kill

Speech delivered on August 3, 2015 at the Fitzroy Town Hall.

It’s an honour to say a few words tonight at the launch of Catch and Kill. I’m conscious we have a panel of distinguished speakers and an author to interview, so I will keep my contribution brief.

This is a book about Labor in power, and it is also a book about power in Labor.

There will undoubtedly be reviewers and commentators who focus on the latter. Who write breathlessly of ‘shocking’ revelations. The factions and rivalries, the personal ambitions and broken pledges.

The backroom conflicts and last-minute compromises.

But this book should not be read through the prism of palace intrigue. This book, its author and the protagonists are worthy of better.

Catch and Kill is much more than a ‘who promised what to whom’ account of internal machinations. It is the story of a group of genuine, talented Labor people who came together to win government, and worked together to govern well and to make Victoria a better place.

It’s a reminder Opposition can sometimes be a slog – and I can tell you, that’s a bit of an enduring truth.

But it’s proof of the rewards that come from doing the hard yards.

Learning the lessons of defeat, re-engaging with members and the community. Working out the problems people faced in their daily lives and crafting the solutions.

And it is, especially, a story of the great things the Bracks and Brumby Governments achieved for Victoria.

Fiscally conservative, socially progressive.

Governments that knew, as all of us in modern Labor do, that economic growth is always stronger when it is shared.

That prosperity always lasts longer when more people are a part of it.

And that the true measure of successful economic management is to ensure that the dividends are re-invested in what matters:

• Great schools

• Quality healthcare

• A sustainable environment

• Stronger regions

• And social justice

This is the proud story of the 11 years of Steve Bracks, John Brumby, Rob Hulls, John Thwaites and all their team.

Of people who believed Victoria could be a national leader, driving national issues and shaping the Commonwealth.

It’s also a deeply personal book.

Personal in its substance and its style.

The writing is vintage Deane.

There are the historical titbits, the footy references, the flavour of country childhood, Fitzroy youth and Catholic upbringing.

But above all, there is the wordsmithing I remember from every one of Joel’s drafts. Joel’s prose has always had a kind of Spartan clarity. A relentless, military pursuit of the logic and argument.
Every sentence a trim, disciplined, self-sustaining unit. Each one formidable on its own.

And when the paragraphs lock their shields with each other and advance in formation – it’s unstoppable.

No syllable is ever wasted, no excess adjectives are allowed to clutter the field. For example he would have cut that whole Spartan analogy. 

This means the character sketches are spot on. Neither coloured by hagiography nor tainted by bile.

And it injects refreshing candour into the chapter titles ‘Jesus Freaking Bananas’ would have to be my personal favourite.

The expletives alone mark Catch and Kill as the book of a political staffer. There’s a great line in here where Joel describes political advisors as: 'a tribe specialising in snap judgments and Olympian disdain.'

And it’s fair to say there are shelves full of books written by ‘insiders’ which build from the premise that it was only their presence behind the curtain that kept the show on the road.

Joel’s book isn’t like that.

We get glimpses of the speechwriter’s life: the long hours, shuttling drafts back and forth, making peace between the news imperative and policy purity.

But this isn’t a story of one man carrying the Labor party on his shoulders.

Joel doesn’t present himself as the unmoved mover or the spider in the centre of the web.

He doesn’t pretend he had a voice in every decision or an eye to every keyhole. Joel doesn’t make it all about him. 

And this tells you everything you need to know about him. Joel Deane the staffer and Joel Deane the man.

Joel was a volunteer, not a conscript. He came to politics to add his contribution, not further his ambitions.

This is the book of a man who counted himself lucky to serve Labor – not someone who considered Labor lucky to have him.

And Joel, this is precisely why we were lucky to have you.

Congratulations on Catch and Kill – I wish you and your work all the very best in the future. 

Michael Gurr's launch speech for Catch and Kill

The night before the 2006 State Election campaign launch in Ballarat. Left to right: Kim McGrath, Joel Deane, Michael Gurr 

On August 3, 2015, my friend Michael Gurr launched my political book, Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power, at the Fitzroy Town Hall.

It was a big night.

Steve Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls were there; Bill Shorten spoke; and the joint was packed.

Afterwards, Michael came up to me gave me the hardcopy of his speech. I was rapt and went home and put it someplace safe. So safe I couldn't find it again.

I've been looking for that bloody speech since Michael died on May 2 and, finally, have found that safe place. Here it is.

Michael Gurr launching Catch and Kill

When Joel asked me to be here, I was very chuffed.

Because this is my kind of book and this bloke is my kind of comrade.

I’m a little luckier than some of you because I’ve read it – and James Button has got it dead right when he says on the cover that this is a “cracking good read.”

It really is.

It joins some very good company – other older Labor memoirs. Tales from the front-line. War stories. Hard work. Pragmatism. Heartbreak. And hope.

The endless Labor arm wrestle between what should be and what’s practically possible. 

You shake your head in love at our cause and we do like a good war story.

Joel does doubt well.

But doubt is one of the many parents of creativity.

It’s the moments of uncertainty that lead to new thoughts.

The squeaky freaks of the Coalition will never get this.

For them, to wonder and to worry is weakness. 

To us these things are life’s blood.

The Labor movement, to a glorious fault, always wears its underwear on the outside.

Sure, it’s am infuriating and unglamorous thing – but it’s more honest than its opposite: that bland certainty that treats every troubling question as a sort of doubt-free Dorothy Dixer.

Joel’s long history with our Party has given him regular slugs of doubt, for sure, but it has also called on his moral steel.

Not for him the poisonous vacuum of cynicism.

Not for him the lazy shrug of “Oh well, nothing you do makes any difference.”

Instead, Joel has stayed an activist.

You can be an activist at a computer keyboard.

In fact, you could mount an argument that this is exactly where you’ll find the best ones.

Great big words like “justice” and “fairness” and “hope” – these are the graffiti in Joel’s soul. 

These are the things that run through his speeches and run through this book. 

He writes honestly.

His portraits of the four amigos are spot on.

His book had me scratching at the old question again: How can you breathe and love and fuck and even consider voting LNP?

It just makes no sense. 

It’s OK, I’m much more courteous at the polling booths.

The words “sensible” and “poet” aren’t much heard in the same sentence. 

But I think Joel’s work as a poet is the work that’s kept him sane.

His poetry has given many of us sustenance – and it has leaked through in a sly way into his political speechwriting. 

It runs like an artery through this book. 

And there is another artery. Curiosity.

Curiosity about how things work.

How power works.

How the lives of others are more than equal to our own in the attention they deserve. 

And curiosity is an endless river.

Around the next bend there is always someone whose life, because it’s not our own, is unexplored, unexplained, not given a place in the scheme of things.

But deserves it.

The woman who asks difficult questions about decent pay and proper respect and a life lived free of fear.

Who needs a voice.

The child with a disability who makes us re-think education and inclusion. 

Who needs the well-enough-abled to have their back.

The invisible army of office cleaners who, when they are loud enough, show us that what we experience as convenience is simply another kind of privilege.

That’s the job of our movement. 

That’s the job this book honours.

Political speechwriters know each other on sight. 

They tend to look a little bit weary, a little bit “I wrote this at 3AM therefore it’s either very very good or possibly completely barking.”

Some speechwriters are lucky though. And Joel is one of the lucky ones.

He’s written for good people whose ideas he shares.

Sometimes political speechwriting is a love affair. 

Sometimes it’s more like an arranged marriage. 

But, you know, sometimes even the arranged marriage can yield the odd unexpected delight. 

The two Labor Premiers here tonight, and former Ministers as well, are fortunate indeed to have had the hairy man on their team. 

I promise you this: you’re going to really enjoy Joel’s book.

Well look at that: it’s launched. 

Thank you.

Catch and Kill named one of the Top 10 books of 2015

The Walkley Foundation has come out with its list of the top 10 non-fiction books of 2015 -- and Catch and Kill is on the list.

Here's what they said: 

Four men dubbed “the Golden Four” by a party member were responsible for Labor’s historic rise from a dire political low to its longest hold on power in Victoria. Joel Deane, as the speechwriter and press secretary for premier Steve Bracks, was there through it all. This is his inside account of Labor’s dream run in Victorian state politics through the 1990s and 2000s thanks to Bracks, John Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls – a formidable team who remain friends today. Deane, a novelist and poet, weaves together dozens of interviews with party insiders as well as his own experience as a staffer to explore Labor’s run in power and the winner-take-all game that is politics.

The full list of books is here. There are some good reads. I'm especially partial to Brenda Niall's Mannix and Andrew Fowler's The War on Journalism.

Sharing the stage with John Brumby

I spent yesterday in Geelong.

While I was there I visited Geelong's magnificent new Library and Heritage Centre with my old boss, John Brumby, and former ABC radio host Derek Guille. 

JB and I were there to talk about our respective books; The Long Haul and Catch and Kill. Unsurprisingly, all of the audience questions went to the former Premier.

Sharing the stage with John felt like the completion of a cycle for me because The Long Haul and Catch and Kill are linked. I only started writing my book because I was asked to by John Brumby; and John only started writing The Long Haul because, after I had a stroke in 2012, I told him I probably wouldn't be able to finish Catch and Kill.

By the way, if you haven't seen the Library and Heritage Centre it looks like a giant deconstructed soccer ball. Very cool. 

An unrequited journalist comes in from the cold

Catch and Kill is a finalist for the 2015 Walkley Awards.

It's part of the long-list for the book award, together with nine other books.

Those other books are:

• Quentin Beresford, The Rise and Fall of Gunns LTD,
• Ross Coulthart, Charles Bean,
• Andrew Fowler, The War on Journalism,
• Erik Jensen, Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen,
• Chip Le Grand, The Straight Dope,
• Debi Marshall, The Family Court Murders,
• Brenda Niall, Mannix,
• Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide, and
• Sam Vincent, Blood and Guts.

That's pretty good company to be in, so I am rapt.

Given my career path as a unrequited journalist, it means a great deal to me to be a part of journalism's premier awards. I started out as a 17-year-old copy boy at the Sun News-pictorial on January 29, 1987, and now, all these years later, I have a walk-on part in the big show.

The lessons I learned in newspapers in Australia, then the Internet and TV in the United States, have stayed with me. In fact, you could say journalism and poetry have taught me everything I know. 

And, no, I don't mind that the Walkleys misspelt my name in their media release that announced the finalists. As far as I'm concerned, they can call me anything they like.