Yesterday was 30 years since the election of the Whitlam government. Most reporting so far has been positive, but the SMH runs two pieces, both critical Gerard Henderson briefly acknowledges Whitlam’s strengths, but points out a list of generally acknowledged poor performances, (all of which can be traced to an excessively realist view of international politics) on Timor, the Baltic States and Vietnamese refugees.

Criticising a claim that Whitlam ‘defined modern Australia’, Henderson says “The Whitlam Labor government’s impact on the social agenda is obvious. But few would maintain that Whitlamism “defined” contemporary Australia’s economy.” On the contrary, as I argue in my book Great Expectations, the shift to microeconomic reform began with the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent tariff cut and creation of the IAC, now the Productivity Commission. Most of the contradictory trends that define the economic policy debate today emerged under Whitlam.

Meanwhile on the same page, Paddy McGuinness offers a tirade so predictable and trivial it doesn’t deserve a link (you can read it after Henderson). There are no real criticisms of policy, only complaints about the number of political advisors the Whitlam government appointed and their alleged rorts. I haven’t got numbers, but I’ll bet that the number of advisors is much higher today, and certainly rorts haven’t gone away.

Moreover, while some of the steps Whitlam took promoted the trend towards politicisation of the public service, the creation of a separate class of explicitly political advisors helped to slow it down, by providing ministers with a source of advice responsible to them in a personal rather than ministerial form.

Ken Parish, Don Arthur and others blogged on this on the November 11 anniversary. My contribution is here.

note Some Blogger flaw meant this piece wasn’t published when I wrote it this morning, and now Ken Parish has already covered it, so I’m a bit behind the curve here. Ken’s comments thread has lots of interesting stuff.