Gerald Butts
speaker
1,669 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
Gerald Butts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And both of those things will be remembered far longer than many of the random monotonous Tuesdays you spend in public life.
So pay close attention to how you enter and how you leave.
But Jim said to me when I was thinking about leaving the premier's office, and I wish he'd been around when I was thinking about leaving the prime minister's office.
But he said, look, always go when more people want you to stay than want you to leave.
And it's really difficult to assess that because the minute you enter these really important, difficult, almost impossible to do jobs, you start accruing people who want you to leave every single day.
You probably add to them every day you're in the office.
And for politicians, I think polling can be a lagging indicator.
Right.
Sometimes you don't see the change in the public mood until after it's happened and it's in the rearview mirror.
And then that creates a really bad circle of incentives for you to try to turn things around.
And you probably know in your gut it's not going to turn around.
And you get past a point and then it's sort of people start writing that you're holding on to office too long.
And by the time it gets to that point, you're kind of already tumbling down a cliff looking for a branch to hold on to.
And I think that's where I would really agree with what James said, that the only...
The only durable sense of satisfaction in politics, because it's full of ups and downs is what you accomplished while you were, you had the privilege of being in one of those offices.
And that's why you're kind of designing your own ending from the minute you walk into those buildings that you're, are you going to spend most of your time working on the things that are important to you?
And therefore you,
When you leave, you aren't filled with regret that you wasted all that time, right?
And the only thing you can really control in public office, unless you're the prime minister or the premier, and even then there are lots of things you can't control about your government.
You can't control who the Americans elect president of the United States, where war breaks out, et cetera, et cetera.
Showing 741–760 of 1,669 · page 38 of 84
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