Paul Kelly wins John Button Prize for Triumph and Demise

Paul Kelly has won the $20,000 John Button Prize for writing on policy and politics for his book Triumph and Demise.

The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly. Picture: John Feder

Veteran political journalist Paul Kelly has won the $20,000 John Button Prize for writing on policy and politics for his book Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation.

The judges said Kelly’s chronicle of the tumultuous prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard was a “well-informed and powerful’’ account by an “experienced journalist who was deeply disappointed by the failure of the reform process in Australia’’.

“In 70 years’ time, when people want to know what was going on in Australian politics in this period, they will turn to Kelly’s book,’’ the judges said.

Triumph and Demise, which also won last year’s Walkley Book Award, is the latest instalment in Kelly’s history of post-Dismissal Australian politics, with books such as The Hawke Ascendancy, The End of Certainty and The March of Patriots: The Struggle for Modern Australia.

The John Button Prize was ­created to honour the life and work of the popular Labor senator, a senior government minister under Bob Hawke and then Paul Keating. Button died in 2008.

Kelly, The Australian’s editor-at-large, worked in the Canberra press gallery when Button was in cabinet, responsible, among other things, for the restructure of the Australian car industry. Kelly said winning the prize meant a lot to him because “John Button was a friend and I valued my association with him during his career in politics and afterwards’’.

Kelly, 67, prevailed over two other shortlisted journalists, Annabel Crabb for The Wife Drought and Philip Chubb for Power Failure: The Inside Story of Climate Politics under Rudd and Gillard.