Gough Whitlam: A Personal Retrospective

HEADY DAYS
All my sins are remembered

Part 1:

When one writes about politics, the people and the events, the ideas and the issues, one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other and engages millions in hair-splitting discussions on topics about which they usually or, at least, often know very little. Often the opinions are endless, opinions which get dropped-about now in cyberspace's social media and elsewhere, and in real space.

I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement more than half a century later. I am now 70. My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those early, those embryonic, years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. That in-house political discussion was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes in what were my pre-puberal years, and the scene has changed little in the last several decades, some 60 years of my life-narrative.

But such experience of political wrangling in my childhood and adolescent years has not prevented me from being interested in the political world. Nor does it prevent me now as I go through these years of my retirement from a 50 year student and paid employment life, 1949 to 1999.

I just finished watching a two-part doco on Gough Whitlam.1 He was Australia’s 21st Prime Minister from 1972 to 1974 just after I arrived in Australia from Canada when I was in my late 20s as an international pioneer from the Canadian Baha'i community. I wrote the first draft of this statement after watching this political-doco in the evening of my life, early or late it is hard to say. I updated this statement today on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/14, and on seeing that doco yet again in the first 24 hours after his passing.

Part 2:

More books have been written about Whitlam, including his own writings, than about any other Australian Prime Minister. According to Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, for a period of at least a decade, the Whitlam era was viewed almost entirely in negative terms, but that has changed. Paul Kelly(1947- ), an Australian political journalist and author who has written seven books on political events in Australia, wrote the following 3 paragraphs on hearing of Whitlam's passing at the age of 98 yesterday:

"Gough Whitlam’s passing is a sad moment for the nation, but it is the time to recognise one of the most extraordinary and inspiring figures produced by the Australian nation and our democracy. Gough’s glories and follies were writ large. Nothing he did was small, mediocre or apologetic. He was a giant in stature, learning, presence and achievement. Nobody who ever met Whitlam will forget him and those who dealt with him regularly in political life will retell Whitlam stories to the end of their days."

"He was a prime minister yet he became a figure transmitted into our national mythology, joining that bizarre cast of uniquely Australian figures that include Ned Kelly, Don Bradman, Phar Lap, Charles Kingsford Smith and Nellie Melba, among others. The great paradox of Gough was his abiding love of tradition yet his visionary sense of Australia’s future. His mind was an organised expanse of rigid, disciplined rationality yet his temperament was explosive, thrilling, funny and egocentric."

"This implanted the fantastic contradiction at the heart of his career and government. The implementation of the most planned agenda in the nation’s history was rocked by excess, upheaval and boundless impatience. Gough called it “crash through or crash”. He meant it and he lived it and, as a consequence, the Whitlam government became the best of times and the worst of times."

Part 3:

Kelly's book, The Dismissal was used as the basis of the television miniseries The Dismissal in 1983. I used this film, this miniseries-doco, when I was a lecturer in politics to matriculation students in Western Australia a decade later. Whitlam didn’t easily rise to the top to become Prime Minister; he had to fight to get there.1 He did that fighting all the way back to the same year my mother joined the Baha’i Faith: 1953. I was only 9, then, and living in Ontario Canada.

Whitlam’s only free ride into the political arena came on the winds of social change that woke up conservative Australia and helped deliver the Australia Labor Party (ALP) victory in 1972. By then I was 28, living in the dry dog-biscuit land of northern South Australia, and teaching high school at the beginning of what became, at least for me as I look back over 70 years of living, a rich and rewarding career in the world of teaching and tutoring, lecturing and adult education.

I had arrived in Australia on 12 July 1971. In the week before my arrival Gough Whitlam, then the leader of the opposition Labor party, visited China as did Henry Kissinger. Little did I know, of course, as I was travelling from Toronto Canada to Hawaii and on to Melbourne and Adelaide. For most people, the comings-and-goings of the world's celebrities on the political stage act as a background to the intimacies of their private and family lives, their employment and various interest and activity interests.

Part 4:

I'll mention only a few details in relation to Whitlam's rise in the Labor Party after entering Parliament in 1953. He joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1959, and became Labor Leader in 1967. I joined the Baha’i Faith in '59, a non-partisan religion. I knew nothing of Whitlam. I was teaching Inuit in the Canadian Arctic when he became Labor leader. He didn’t win his first election as Leader in 1969 but he came close with a big shift to the ALP in the poles. He also came very close to not being the leader of the Labor party, and that is another story.

By 1972, his persona and policies were hitting a chord with rebellious baby-boomers who were railing against sexism and racism, and demanding peace not war, especially in Vietnam. Women and migrants also liked their suburban neighbours Gough and Margaret. At the campaign launch, TV stars, rock singers and comedians pushed the “It’s Time” jingle into every Australian lounge room and Whitlam gave Labor its first Prime Minister in 23 years.

In mid-December 1972 my first wife and I were on our way to live in South Australia's first country town, Gawler. This town was just outside the wine producing region of the Barossa Valley. In January 1973 I began work as a teacher in South Australia's first open-plan high school. It was located in a suburb of Adelaide, Para Hills South Australia. This was much less the dry-biscuit land in the north of that state and was only 9 miles from Adelaide's CBD.

Whitlam exercised his power at breakneck speed in 1973 and students, with the interest, can read about his first months as PM: he appointed his own government advisor on women’s affairs, a world first; he made reforms in child care, Aborigine policy, tertiary education, and flushing dunnies. I will leave Whitlam's massive reform agenda to readers with the interest.

One of Whitlam's reforms, though, which affected me was the abolition of university fees which took effect on 1 January 1974. Whitlam was all the rage while I was teaching in South Australia's first open plan high school in 1973. In September of that year I was hired to teach as a senior tutor in human relations in what is now the University of Tasmania beginning on 1/1/'74. I have Whitlam, in part at least, to thank for that job in an expanding tertiary education sector.

Whitlam spoke of breaking the reliance on Britain and America, and of Australia becoming more independent. He bought Jackson Pollock’s $1.348 million Blue Poles for the new National Gallery of Australia and loved the ensuing controversy. The ALP was in the news a lot of the time and, as 1973 advanced, the ALP became more and more on the nose. This period is, as I say, well-documented for readers.

I was far too busy with my 60-hour a week job, with the last and rocky-year of my first marriage, and with my responsibilities in the local Baha’i community of Gawler where I served as the chairman. My emotions and my mental-set, my time and my energies were full to overflowing. I was simply not able to keep pace with those heady-days in Australia's partisan-political world.

Most of my life that partisan-political world of the left-and-the-right, this party and that, who had the power and who did not, has been a sort of parallel universe which existed far-out on the periphery of my daily life, although that became less true when I taught politics and Australian government and legal systems in the 1990s. After I retired and went on a pension in the early years of the 21st century I was able to fill-in some of the many gaps in my knowledge-base not only in the political world but in many other disciplines and topics across the wide-wide-world of knowledge.

Part 5:

In one year, beginning in late 1973, as I was leaving my first marriage, leaving South Australia, and arriving in Tasmania, and after several months of an initial rise in ALP popularity, cracks appeared in the ALP agenda. The actions of an Arab coalition started a worldwide economic meltdown. Whitlam had assumed Australia’s economy was bulletproof, but inflation and unemployment rose steeply as I was on a role and advancing incrementally in my teaching career.

Ignoring advice, Whitlam pushed through one of his most prominent, and expensive, reforms: free university education for all. The state of the economy deteriorated further in my first months in Tasmania in 1974. Whitlam's motto was crash or crash-through, and he was doing both, little did he know at the time.

The conservatives in the Australian federal political system controlled the Senate; they tried to block government legislation, but Whitlam called their bluff by calling an election. The ALP, on 11 April 1974, won with a similar majority to its win in 1972. The Baha'i Five Year Plan, 1974-1979, began that same month. I served as a delegate to the Australian Baha'i national convention that year; I also settled into my tutoring role in a range of education studies, and a relationship with my future wife. She had two daughters ages 3 and 8 and, in 1975, they became my step-daughters.

Whitlam and the ALP enacted a free healthcare service, the forerunner of Medicare. But, as I say above, their popularity went downhill from its rich beginnings in December 1972, as the months of 1973 advanced. I was on a career-roll and, in 1974, I had another 60 hour a week job teaching and tutoring in a new list of subjects to students preparing to teach in primary and high schools as well as work in the world of art.

Part 6:

The optimism and high hopes of the initial months of the ALP in power didn’t last. The party axed Whitlam's trusted deputy Lance Barnard and a scandal erupted around the relationship between his replacement, Jim Cairns, and Cairns’ exotic chief of staff Junee Morose. The decision to sign-up the offshore loan shark Troth Hemline to help buy back Australia’s mineral wealth was like signing a death warrant for Whitlam’s administration. This is yet another story in the long saga of the demise of the Whitlam government in 1974/5.

In 1975 the Opposition voted in a strong leader in Malcolm Fraser. Blocking supply this time sparked dramatic events unprecedented in Australian history. The Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked Whitlam and on 11/11/'75 appointed Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister. It was game over.

Polls from the first week of campaigning showed a nine-point swing against Labour. Whitlam's campaign team disbelieved the results at first, but additional polling returns were clear: the electorate had turned against the ALP. The Coalition attacked Labor for economic conditions, and released television commercials including "The Three Dark Years" showing images from Whitlam government scandals.

Part 7:

The ALP campaign of October to December 1974, which had concentrated on the issue of Whitlam's dismissal, did not address the economy until its final days. By that time Fraser, confident of victory, was content to sit back, avoid specifics and make no mistakes. On election night, 13 December, the Coalition enjoyed the largest victory in Australian history, winning 91 seats to the ALP's 36, and taking a 37–25 majority in the Senate in a 6.5 percent swing against Labor.

The day before the election, on 12/12/'74, I left Tasmania, my several responsibilities, and my job as a senior tutor in human relations and education studies at the then Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. I moved to Elwood Victoria and then Kew, and yet another job in Box Hill with its 60 hours a week. I had yet another set of responsibilities in the Baha’i community. My first marriage ended, and my second began in 1975. That election in December 1974, the comings-and-goings of the ALP and the Liberal Party in 1975, as well as all that partisan-political-media-world remained where it had always been, far-far out on the periphery of what I thought about and felt from day-to-day. If I included my social and community responsibilities in the number of hours per week that occupied my time, I had an 80+ hour week with assorted nose-to-the-grindstone stuff.

Part 8:

Wallace Brown, one of the longest serving and most respected members of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, 1961-1995, was noted for his even-handed reporting of political affairs and his encouragement of young journalists. In a book about his experiences as a journalist covering Australian prime ministers he described Whitlam as follows:

“Whitlam was the most paradoxical of all prime ministers in the last half of the 20th century. A man of superb intellect, knowledge, and literacy, he yet had little ability when it came to economics. Whitlam rivalled Menzies in his passion for the House of Representatives and ability to use it as his stage, and yet his parliamentary skills were rhetorical and not tactical.”2

“He could devise a strategy and then often botch the tactics in trying to implement that strategy. Above all he was a man of grand vision with serious blind spots.”2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Whitlam: The Power And The Passion, on 26/5/’13, 2/6/’13, and 21/10/'14 on ABC1 TV; and 2Wallace Brown Award, The National Press Club of Australia Website.

Part 9:

History is mnemonic when seen in
personal terms; this is especially true
in one's recent history in which major
events of the day are background music,
often distant notes like in a great piece
of classical music which one has heard
many times but is unknown: its name, its
composer, the musical inner workings. I
quickly pass-on to a life far away from the
stage on which all that sound & fury plays
itself out in our life’s great dramaturgies, as
a famous sociologist, Irving Goffman, says
is the presentation of self in everyday life.1

There is much meaning in the affairs of men
even if they are but a show, vain and empty,
a mere nothing, bearing only the semblance
of reality. The world is like a vapour in the
desert which the thirsty dreams to be water
and strives after it with all his might, until
he finds it in the end to be a mere illusion.2

So much of a life signifies a great deal, but:
the enterprises of great pitch and moment,
their currents turn-away, lose the name of
action..…while all my sins are remembered.3

Part 10:

1 Erving Goffman(1922-982) wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). He is now arguably considered to be the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century. Goffman became a full professor in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, the same year my travelling-pioneering life began in the Canadian Baha'i community.
2 Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, Section 153, Paragraph 8.
3 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, lines 85 to 89.

Ron Price
5/6/'13 to 24/10/'14.

 

Man,
what an excellent post and a beautiful insight. Thanks mate, you made my day,
Regards

 

He was an ambitious man, but he also enacted a lot of inexcusable policies: medibank, abolition of university tuition - his was a progressive policy platform. You don't want people to die of course, but I feel no specific sympathy for Gough.

 

I think another very disturbing aspect of the Whitlam situation should demonstrate to the Australian people what little democracy & rights they really have, when a "Governor General" the people didn't elect or hire can dismiss the peoples elected prime Minister without the peoples consent or approval. That is a dictatorship, not a true democracy.

 

Your comment, m2catter, was certainly appreciated. it's comments like your which help to make writing a pleasure. Thanks.-Ron

 

I liked your quotation, Steady Pie: "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt I would add necessity is often the mother of invention, although I don't know who said this.-Ron

 

The law and constitutional issues, at the centre of the Dismissal, are little known by your average punter. Indeed, the nature of democracy has some very complex features which experts in the field of politics debate, as Everyman spends their time on sport and gardening, having fun and watching movies.-Ron

 

I actually think the so called dismissal was very democratic. The senate had no confidence, they blocked supply, the GG stood down the government and called an election. How much more democratic could it be. I don't agree that Gough was not asking for it, unfortunately it was the way he was. Hard to say if he would't have done what he did if he wasn't.

With all it's warts our system is pretty good, saying that I would like to see a new system, but more because it is time tomove on, rather then because of the faults in the old one.

 

Thanks, Dominor Vobis; I like your quotation: "When you want to fight fire with fire, remember that the professionals use water." You might enjoy Clive James and his take on parliamentary democracy which he sees as the best there is warts and all. This is not to say that changes in the system are not a good idea. And "Dominus vobiscum." -Ron

PS I studied Latin for 4 years at high school, 1960 to 1963, in Canada.

 

I don't understand how you could logically say Gough Whitlam being dismissed/sacked by the Governor General was a democratic decision made in the best interest of all Australians? Whitlam encountered a totally hostile Senate intent on blocking supply, which gave the GG that the citizens of Australia did not elect or hire the power to dismiss/sack the Australian citizens legally elected Prime Minister.

You are advocating a similar scenario to suggest that its acceptable democracy for some stranger outside my business to have more power to hire & fire "MY" employees, than what I have.

 

The literature on "The Dismissal" in November 1975 has burgeoned in the nearly 40 years since the event too place. Social scientists, political experts, the cognoscenti from many walks of life have thrown their opinions into the ring with many a learned paper to support one case or another. I recommend to those with the interest to do some reading; you will find experts to support just about every conceivable position on the issues involved.

One example is found in the 45 minutes Susan Wyndham, the literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, spent talking with Peter Carey. They talked about his new novel Amnesia, and Carey reeled off a long list of United States government conspiracies, cover-ups and interferences in other countries' internal affairs from the Philippines in the 1890s to the computer worm that destroyed an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010 and the car crash that killed American war correspondent Michael Hastings last year. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment...n-a-memory-20141020-118seh.html#ixzz3HK8KcKNh

While conspiracy theories are not part of my areas of expertise, if indeed I have any areas of expertise at all, I always enjoy listening to Carey and reading some of what he writes. He, of course, has his own take on The Dismissal.-Ron

 

Nonsense. Fraser used his majority in the Senate to hold the federal government to ransom because he wanted an election, and an unelected drunk dismissed the government and put Fraser in charge.

It was a disgusting overreach of power from the Senate, the Opposition and Kerr was pathetically weak.

Highlights some pretty dramatic flaws in our Constitution as far as democracy is concerned.

 

Only individuals with very immature and naive personalities dismiss ever conspiracy theory as being irrelevant.

With all due respect, no one really has to have the intellect of Einstein to understand and comprehend that the dismissal of Gough Whitlam was totally undemocratic to the Australian citizens.

Viewing Whitlam's political policies with a cold eye. One of his main political ambitions was to move Australia to an independent autonomous position away from the control of the USA. I believe Mr. Whitlam was a visonary, and understood that it was beneficial for the future prosperity of Australia and its people to become part of the Asia-Pacific community, which meant, Australia had to make the decision of severing many of its military and political ties with the USA, and become part of the Asia-Pacific community.

Whitlam was the first PM to ever extend his hand in friendship to China, and I believe the USA took this as a direct threat to their authority and control over Australia and its citizens, and helped instigate Whitlams removal as Australia's PM. We also know what happened to Mark Lathams career after he voiced his anti-USA sentiments.

Just recently, we saw "HOW" our Australian Government of Abbott & Bishop is controlled by the USA Government, when they publically accuse Vladimir Putin of shooting down Malaysian flight MH17 without any substantial facts or evidence, because their USA masters told them to do it. The whole incident became so internationally embarrassing for Australia being seen as US puppets, that even a Chinese communist newspaper told Julie Bishop "to pull her head in".

This is the first time in history that a high level international diplomat from another countries Government has been internationally publically berated by another country. At least Julia Bishop has her name in the history books for something. LOL

Unfortunately, any politician with decent morals and ethics being suspected with having anti-American sentiment, is instantly dismissed as being a crack-pot, and the longevity of their career is threatened.

In a way, I have some empathy for the USA, as I believe they started off with the sound philosophy of wanting to do good and to protect innocent people, but somewhere that philosophy has degraded and become rotten, and the USA have now turned into the monsters they once helped and protect innocent people against.

 

I remember there was some heavy discussion around our families dinner table about how drunk Fraser got Kerr before he signed off on the order to dismiss Gough Whitlam. I remember my dad saying Kerr being drunk when he signed the order was the reason why Gough made his famous speech: "well, may we say God save the Queen, because "nothing" will save the Governor General".

 

Well I must be an idiot then, or immature and naive. I still think, whether you agree with what happened or not, it shows democracy at work. Some of you carry on about our governments being dictators and other such things. This was (rightly or wrongly), the demonstration of a safety valve.

You are all correct, Kerr was not elected, he was appointed. The Liberals used their majority, a majority given to them by the voters, we in Australia have a habit of usually voting in one party for the upper house and the other for the lower, kind of having an "each way bet".

The legally elected senate voted to block supply, now that means all the governments money, they couldn't even pay wages. The Governor General, only stood down the government and called an election. He put the question back to the voters, who, voted overwhelmingly for the Liberals. If they were influenced by all the crap going around at the time that is one thing, but we had the opportunity to put Gough back.

Agree with the decision or not, we cannot disagree with the system, as a safety valve it worked. That's all I have to say on it.

 

The democracy you advocate DV only worked for a few dozen Federal Liberal politicians when they convinced a drunk to sack an Australian elected PM. After Whitlam was dismissed and all with the negative media propaganda, do you really think Whitlam stood a democratic snowballs chance in hell in being re-elected?

 

Didn't I say that? Like I said, agree or disagree, it's good to know there is a safety valve.

 

I guess Comrade Whitlam didn't know about the KGB agent Albert "Bert" James, federal member for Hunter.

"Mr James’s ASIO file revealed he was in regular contact with staff of the Soviet embassy in Canberra in the early 1970s."

"A dossier of Soviet intelligence matters brought to the West in 1992 by former KGB archivist and defector Vasili Mitrokhin describes the late MP – he died in 2006 – as an informant with the code name ‘‘Albert’’."

But then again, considering Whitlam's deputy PM at the time;

"Australia's former Labor Deputy Prime Minister, the late Dr James Ford (Jim) Cairns, was a high-ranking member of a communist front organisation, co-ordinated and financed by Moscow, and was a long-standing Soviet agent of influence.

First elected to the House of Representatives in 1955, Cairns became a popular leader of Australia's Left and, in 1968, almost became Labor Party leader. In the late 1960s and early '70s, he worked ceaselessly to mobilise public opposition to Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Treasurer in Gough Whitlam's Labor Government (1972-75). He died on 12 October 2003, aged 89, still a Labor icon to many."

It would seem the system worked back then, dunno about now though, the new enemy these days is economic vandalism I think.

 

Elected Federal Liberal representatives.

 

"Elected Federal Liberal representatives" representing only 30% of Australians. 30% representing the will of 70% is NOT democracy.

 

You don't seriously believe that BS do you? I wonder what lies and misinformation is contained in "your" ASIO file.

 

You know of a more fair way of electing our reps than a preferential system?

Say we have 4 parties, which we do, more actually but say 4.

Libs get 32% OF PRIMARY
Labor get 33% OF PRIMARY
Greens get 20% OF PRIMARY
Democrats get 15% OF PRIMARY

First past the post is Labor, but 67% don't want them
So what about Liberals, 68% don't want them

So what do we do, we give people a second choice, if not your first choice, then your second.

With Preferences.
Liberals 47%
Labor 53%

Still around 40+% not happy, but better.

So what should we have done? A referendum? Kind of what happened anyway, and a referendum would also have been affected by the hype. So what is the ideal if we need to sack a Prime Minister? Armed revolt, oh no, that's the USA's answer.

 

Lol, oh dear..... so let me get you straight, anything real you disagree with is misinformation, but anything you agree with which is not real is a conspiracy theory that should be believed?

Unfortunately that constellation of opinions, in all seriousness, might point to something a psychologist or psychiatrist might be able to help with... if not now, sooner or later.

 

Do you have a link, or can you provide a link that shows all the content of the ASIO file?

 

A hand full of Federal Liberal politicians in the Senate deliberately and maliciously blocked supply to a legally elected Government. Malcolm Fraser coerced a drunken Governor General, who was not hired or elected by the citizens of Australia to dismiss a democratically elected Prime Minister, and to install himself as care-taker Prime Minister; an individual that only represented 30% of the populations approval at the previous election. I'm not sure what you consider "democracy" to be, but under those terms and conditions, the citizens of Australia were denied their freedom to democracy. The peoples democracy to be represented by a Prime Minister they democratically elected was supplanted by a dozen very evil Liberal politicians in the Senate, and by a drunken fool no one hired or elected. That is not democracy!!

If an Australian Prime Minister needs to be dismissed, then it should go to a referendum. A duly elected representative of the people should not be dismissed by someone who the citizens of Australia did not hire or elect.