‘No Prime Minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam’
Photo: Richard Crompton
by Jenny Hocking
‘The importance of an historical event lies not in what happened but in what later generations believe to have happened’.
– Gough Whitlam, speech at the Unveiling of the Eureka Flag, 1973.
A controversial political life never rests. From the moment Gough Whitlam left the parliament, the impact and legacy, even the basic facts of his life, became a construct, fashioned and refashioned by others in a fiercely contested history.
Of all the elements in this narrative there is none on which so much turned, politically and (for some) personally, as the dismissal of the Whitlam government by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr. Tempers might have ebbed and memories clouded over time, but this is one area where the incendiary mix of personal connection and political position ran on unabated. From determined positions, every unfolding revelation, every addition to the historical record or new interpretation, became a contest over the historical record - Was Gough Whitlam good or bad? Was Malcolm Fraser right or wrong? Was John Kerr weak or strong? To an ever-diminishing number of lingering ideological warriors, this simplistic frame continued to cast every aspect of this complex history in black or white. But like all good stories this one is less obvious, and more interesting, than these easy dichotomies suggest.
One of the most intriguing aspects of any review of Gough Whitlam lies not in the episodic battles over history, but the evolution of that history. It has taken nearly forty years for the bitter, obscurantist air that clouded historical assessments of Gough Whitlam, his government and their dismissal to clear and for Whitlam to assume a more settled place in history – as neither saint nor sinner but as an exceptional reformer whose term in office, both as leader of the Labor party and as Prime Minister, changed Australia. Whitlam, who died on Tuesday aged 98, sits in unusual tension between enduring controversy and belated recognition – at once “elder statesman” and, to some, the unrepentant leader of the “worst government in Australia’s history”. But even among those who deplore the nature of his government’s reforms few would now dispute, as conservative think-tank the Institute for Public Affairs has acknowledged, that “no Prime Minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam”.
For Whitlam, politics was both passion and practicality – he brought passion to a reformist vision and practicality to its detail – although its implementation, while just as ambitious, was less successful. He had an unusual political depth of field in which the local and the international would fit together in a national transformation that did not end at Australia’s borders. Whitlam’s world stage was one in which Australia as an independent state, subservient to neither Britain nor the United States, could itself be a driver of international action. At home, his vision was no less ambitious, a pixelation of countless smaller and local initiatives from regionalisation to universal sewerage, from equal pay to no-fault divorce, votes for 18-year-olds and Aboriginal land rights that, while incomplete and sometimes clumsy in their execution, together changed the face of modern Australia.
The power of ‘the dismissal’
And while an extraordinary amount has been written about Whitlam over the years, its focus has been remarkably narrow. Few have moved beyond the obligatory invigilation of Whitlam’s three-year period as Prime Minister, his interrupted second government and its unprecedented dismissal by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr. It is a reflection of the power of “the dismissal” in the popular imagination that it has came to overshadow the detail and the understanding not only of the Whitlam government but also of Whitlam himself. For too long, the formative influences of his childhood, his war service and his decades in Opposition were overlooked, and equally little was written on his life after politics. – his appointment as Australia’s Ambassador to UNESCO by the Hawke government, his election to the UNESCO Executive Board, and his work in the 1990s with his wife Margaret on her study tours through Europe, Britain, South America and Asia.
Whitlam’s unusual background shaped an adolescent steeped in politics and in his parents’ strict Baptist sensibility. His father, the highly respected Commonwealth Crown solicitor Fred Whitlam, had moved his family to Canberra with the great wave of public servants in 1927, literally to create the new national capital. Whitlam’s childhood in Canberra, from its earliest years, the influence of his father and his childhood milieu of government, bureaucrats and legal figures, brought a familiarity with all sides of politics and a deep understanding of parliamentary processes.
Whitlam’s four-and-a-half years of active service as RAAF navigator in the Pacific and his proselytising for Labor Prime Minister John Curtin’s unsuccessful 1944 referendum on post-war reconstruction and democratic rights, cemented the two most significant aspects of his politics: his belief in the party system as being at the heart of parliamentary democracy and in the Australian Labor Party as the great party of reform. He never wavered from either. Despite more than one attempt by the Liberal party to engineer a Billy Hughes-style revolt and entice Gough Whitlam over to their side, he was contemptuous of conservative politics as protecting privilege and entrenching inequality, at home and abroad.
With unerring self-belief and the essential political quantum of arrogance, resilience and capacity for hard work, Whitlam’s ambition was clear – he would be a Labor Prime Minister and he would complete Curtin’s unfinished reform agenda. It was with more than a nod to Curtin as “Australia’s greatest Prime Minister”, that Whitlam chose Curtin’s own words as the opening lines to his now famous 1972 policy launch, “Men and women of Australia”. But if his ambition was clear, its trajectory from hope to reality was far from simple.
Immediate impact
By the time Whitlam had arrived in the parliament in the 1952 by-election for the seat of Werriwa, the Labor party was well down the tired path of internal ruction based in personalities, policies and broader post-war politics, that would culminate in the irreparable damage of the 1955-6 Split.The formation of the Democratic Labor Party from the rump of disaffected former Labor members, would leech votes to the Liberal party for decades, effectively denying Labor any chance of government.
For twenty years and through seven elections Whitlam sat in a parliament led by Liberal-Country party governments, and dominated for most of those years by the doyen of Liberal leaders, Sir Robert Menzies. Whitlam’s own party meanwhile laid waste to its electoral prospects with years of self-indulgent internecine recrimination at the expense of much needed policy renewal, trapped in the ideas and arguments of the 1950s and consigned to irrelevance.
Whitlam’s impact in the parliament was immediate, even from the grind of endless opposition. On hearing Whitlam’s maiden speech the Labor member for Hindmarsh, Clyde Cameron, reported that he had just heard the words of a future prime minister, an assessment with which Whitlam could only agree. His temper was legendary and his parliamentary retorts quick, at times cruel and always devastating. His literalist description of the member for Wentworth, the high-pitched, short-statured Billy McMahon, as “a truculent runt” and “a quean”, could scarcely be repeated today.
After eight years of what was surely the most frustrating barren parliamentary decade for Labor, Whitlam was elected Deputy leader, and in 1967 he replaced the old-style Labor leader Arthur Calwell as leader of the ALP. To enforce his authority over a still deeply divided party was never easy and barely one year into his term as leader, Whitlam resigned abruptly and risked it all in a bid to curtail the errant Labor federal executive. In the leadership ballot which followed, Whitlam barely resecured the leadership against Jim Cairns., who ran against him with the telling campaign line, “whose party is this, his or ours?”.
In the end, it was his by just four votes but with this victory he secured an authority over the party that would lead to its modernisation at every level and, eventually, to government. The episode had a critical longer-term impact, reinforcing in Whitlam his self-described “crash through or crash” approach which, while effective in the brawling Labor opposition politics of the 1960s, did not translate well to the more diplomatic expectations of government.
Policy implementation
From the policy method of Opposition came the policy implementation of government – evidence based, insistent – and too often at the expense of consultation with a fractious and suspicious caucus. “That blessed word, consultation”, Graham Freudenberg lamented. For a public used to the slow and steady years of Menzies and the absurd, but uneventful, incompetence of Billy McMahon, the pace of change was unsettling, even fearful. In Whitlam’s uncomplicated political algebra ‘the program’ was more than just a statement of intent, it was ‘a command to perform’. Whitlam’s view was literal and unbending, he saw the program as the articulation of the electoral mandate of 1972 and confirmed with the government’s re-election in the 1974 double dissolution. Every one of its policy prescriptions was to be met and he would hear and heed no caution.
Even those reforms now considered vital, welcome and non-controversial, were then met with strident opposition. Moves towards the introduction of legal aid and the universal health insurance scheme, Medibank, were lambasted as thinly veiled socialism, as the first steps to controlling the professions and resisted with well-funded protracted campaigns. The government’s unilateral 25 per cent tariff cut hit the manufacturing sector hard and was the first indication of the government’s distance from a business community accustomed to proximity both to government and to policy formulation.
Whitlam was no economist, having lived through the extended post-war period of growth he assumed no more and no less than its certain continuation. Faced with the OPEC nations’ decision to cut oil production, a 4-fold increase in oil prices and an unprecedented rise in both inflation and unemployment, by 1974 the government’s economic policy was in tatters and its relations with Treasury disastrous.
Further tensions came from the government’s tightening of foreign ownership rules and of controls over mining taxation and subsidies. “Buying back the farm” was part of a larger vision for energy infrastructure and self-sufficiency overseen by Whitlam’s legendary Minister for Minerals and Energy, the lugubrious Rex ‘the Strangler’ Connor. It was Connor’s forced resignation in October 1975 that would precipitate the blocking of supply by Liberal-Country party Senators, leading to the dismissal of the Whitlam government by the governor-general the following month.
Whitlam’s social reforms fared better, both in their implementation and longevity. The 1973 Karmel report into secondary education and the introduction of needs based funding reshaped education in a way not matched until the Gillard government’s Gonski review. Free tertiary education, while not surviving the economic rationalist ascendency within the Hawke government, was Whitlam’s emblematic reform and the one with the greatest individual impact, particularly for women. Legal aid, Medibank, one vote one value, abolition of the death penalty, the end of the white Australia policy, the Racial Discrimination Act, multiculturalism, signing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, no-fault divorce, the Family Court, increased childcare and the law reform commission; the list of reforms is staggering – and the list of those yet to be done, even more so. Among these was the National Rehabilitation and Compensation Scheme, a precursor to the Gillard government’s National Disability Insurance Scheme – Disability Care.
One of the Whitlam government’s most controversial moments came not from a policy but a painting. Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, memorably described by a Country party member as “a foreign painting of accidental value”, was purchased for $1.3 million and is now valued at as much as $100 million. Pollock’s “action painting”, in its incautious rupture with both realism and the security of recognisable form, lent an obvious metaphor to the action/reaction dynamic that was the Whitlam government. Whitlam relished the now farcical Philistine storm and made Blue Poles his defiant choice for the 1973 Prime Minister’s Christmas card. It remains a fine testament to a government and a time that continue to provoke.
Professir Jenny Hocking works in the National Centre for Australian Studies. She is the author of Gough Whitlam: His Time, Melbourne University Publishing, 2012, and Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History, Melbourne University Publishing, 2008
This article has appeared in the Australian Finanical Review.