I’m hoping ot write an appreciation of Gough Whitlam’s contributions to Australian society soon. But in the meantime, I’ll open this thread for general discussion. I’m happy to entertain discussion of failures as well as successes, but I don’t welcome personal attacks on the recently departed in general, and certainly not in Gough’s case, so please keep discussion respectful.
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John Quiggin 
The trigger for Whitlam’s undoing was when his then energy minister Rex Connor tried to raise funds through a dodgy financier. One purpose of the money was to pipe gas from WA to the eastern states. That was 40 years before fracking and coal seam gas unlocked new sources of methane apart from conventional vertical drilling. However it now looks as though those sources will not supply enough gas for the domestic market and LNG export from Gladstone.
Therefore it turns out Connor was right all along. There was talk of running a pipeline from Darwin to Adelaide using gas from offshore WA. If SA used WA gas that would indirectly free up supplies for Sydney. If the pipeline were built (unlikely) Connor’s dream would be materialised. Conceived about 1973 materialised say 2020. It shows there are some eternal problems that re-appear in different settings.
It’s a big call, saying anything at all about Gough amongst so much commentary from luminaries and those who knew him. What I recall best of the period was a sense of optimism when he was elected and the utter devastation that followed the sacking. After that I turned to what some would call the “hard left”, disenfranchised from the traditions of Australian democracy by a brutal Australian ruling class which has not improved one whit in the intervening years.
I’m taking my kids to the state funeral, when the day is set, because they will never see another funeral or commemoration like it in this country.
He was possibly the best opposition leader of all time prior to 1972. He was a mediocre PM and after the 1975 election a political has been.
I liked the way he was influenced by the Vernon committee and was a Rattigan man.
He had a lot to do and tried to do it too quickly.
He did not possess the people management skills to be a successful PM.
He did possess a magnificent wit!
I doubt I would have made it to uni if the fee system had still been intact at the time. I know several people from quite remote places who wouldn’t have had a tertiary education, but for TEAS support and the free system of the time. I dips me lid to E.G. Whitlam and company for having the conviction to open up universities as they did. [Pity Labor capitulated and reverted to a fees based system, whether up-front or deferred. Brickbats to Dawkins for handing out that sh*t sandwich.]
A good life lived: who can ask for more of someone?
@jungney
Speaking as someone who was just 14 when Gough was elected that’s how I recall it, and like you, the sacking propelled me to the hard left, as I saw the very real limits of parliamentary democracy. I was inconsolable once I realised that not only had, what to my mind at the time was a government of intelligent, progressive friends of the working people been struck out for the second time in 18 months, but that there would be no effective resistance from the ALP side.
I thought a lot about Chile and Allende even though what happened there was far more brutal. By 1977 I had decided that I would never again support the ALP or have my trust so sorely abused again. I haven’t cast a formal Federal vote since (unless some of my votes passed the Langer standard.
Now, teaching the period as History, I still marvel at what was achieved in such a short time, but rue their obvious rookie errors. Appointing Justice Murphy to the HCA when the Senate was so tight was regrettable, though they probably couldn’t have anticipated Bert Milner’s death and the bizarre abandonment of convention with casual vacancies in NSW and QLD.
They were unlucky with the oil shock and price push inflation, and their rather wanton disregard of procedure re the Loan Council was lamentable. And East Timor? Oh dear …
I still regard Gough Whitlam as the greatest of all our PMs. Someone pointed out to me that as he was born in 1916, every Australian PM has been alive at the same time as him. Apparently Billy Hughes held him in his arms when he was two. Interesting.
Given Gough’s deification, I expect a headline in tomorrows papers to read, “Gough Still Dead”.
But seriously, one really big change he brought in was income for sole parents. Up until this happened, there were several thousand “forced” adoptions every year, as financial and social pressure resulted in single mothers giving up their babies. Within a very short time, adoptions became rare. No doubt there are many conservatives who consider this a bad thing.
Anyway, I remember how exciting 1972 was, how sad 1975 was, and how Gough was vilified for many, many years afterwards. I have an abiding distrust of conservatives when they are in opposition – they truly will do anything to reimpose their “right to rule”.
@Fran Barlow
Not to detract from the many good things, but, yes: East Timor.
One of the things with which the ALP was then closely identified was ‘buying back the farm’ — a metaphor for reclaiming local control of natural resources — especially the country’s mineral wealth. This was very much a Rex Connor thing and something populists of both the right and the left ought in theory to support.
That idea died over the next decade as what we now call neoliberalism became the fashion with the result that much of the wealth associated with extractive industry went into the pockets of the 0.1%.
It would be an interesting exercise to compare the net losses from these privatised assets with the ‘deficits’ and ‘public debts’ which so preoccupy our current surplus fetishists. Imagine if, in 1975, the regime had been returned and all existing mining company assets became (through purchase on just terms) the property of the Commonwealth, and that thereafter all exploitation rights were also at the pleasure of the Commonwealth.
@Fran Barlow
Fran, I was eighteen in ’72 and would have had to face the ballot for conscription in coming years had Labor not been elected. A good childhood friend, a neighbour with whom I rebuilt a Morris 1000, had already been killed in the war. That tended to focus the mind.
After the sacking, I went to my local ALP branch meeting, where factional layabouts dozed on and offered nothing. By contrast, the CPA was producing a daily paper, distributed nationally, which addressed the real issues of what they properly called a constitutional crisis. There was no choice, really, if you had blood in your veins.
I share your skepticism about parliamentarism. It seems to me that the parliamentary “left”, defined either narrowly or broadly, can only be as strong as the extra-parliamentary left allows it to be. Although defining the current ALP as in any way left is a long bow to draw. I’m of the view that when we talk of “the right” we ought to count in many sitting Federal and State ALP members as of the broad right rather than the opposite.
The movement is always bigger than its representatives and, following on from the sacking, the movement in its various manifestations, got on with the job of agitating and arguing for change in the absence of leadership from the ALP and in the absence of much faith at all in elected government. Indeed, by my reckoning, the environment movement is in better hands with Greenpeace and the Lock the Gate mob providing leadership and cadre training than it ever could be if ALP hacks were involved.
For a long time I was so disgusted that I also did not register to vote. I did eventually after being chided by the local branch secretary about using democratic rights lest they whither.
Apropos of which, in the election that Fraser lost to Hawke, I was working as an RN at the local hospital. I wheeled an aged patient down to the polling booth in the foyer where she demanded that I mark her ballot for her, bad eyesight and all; she requested that I vote for “that nice Mr Fraser” but, for the first and only time in her life, registered a vote for the communists. A week later it was noted that we had received three rather than the customary two votes from the local hospital booth 🙂
These days I go Green.
Vale Gough. I saw your vision splendid live only once – in the rear vision mirror driving home one afternoon – but it has stuck with me since.
————————————
What to say more.
Gough showed us a way to a more humane intelligent society. Even despite his reification he remained an enlightened democrat with a sense of humor and provided the only decent painting in Parliament House’s PM collection.
But collectively have we now failed him?
Back in 2007 hopes were raised of a repeat ‘crash or crash though with vision’ with Kevin 07.
Around the same time ‘Keating the Musical’ had presented a sympathetic interpretation of two other leaders’ contribution. Subsequently in Washington (Jan 2009) a friend dragged me off to a free concert I had no knowledge about – to see the Obama election celebration with my biggest crowd since a 400k CND march in the UK.
Each time hope was again rekindled.
But then Rudd gave reason for serious concern with little hints like – when questioned about his commitment to climate change mitigation when he and his wife drove matching SUVs he proposed changing to a Camry hybrid….leading up to his problematic claim that the Australian people had elected HIM not the Labor Party who to judge by their conferences were comparable to the cheerleaders at a football match. L’ etat, C’est Moi.
Hawke/Keating? Hawke reckons he needed to give Gough a history lesson. But in light of 2008, still going after all these years, the wake up calls of the 1970s, renewed racism and pettiness, more oil shocks and limits to resource exploitation and environmental limits (Pig farms anyone?), Labor lying becalmed lacking as it does a philosophical rudder having jettisoned state intervention etc. – you have to ask who really needed a talking to.
Obama? – This says it all http://www.salon.com/2014/08/24/cornel_west_he_posed_as_a_progressive_and_turned_out_to_be_counterfeit_we_ended_up_with_a_wall_street_presidency_a_drone_presidency/
Some used to suggest Gough was to blame for introducing the demagogic leader into Australian politics. But in hindsight and consideration he was something very different – a reflection of Australia’s better sides which without him we might never have known we had them, and which we are in danger of losing if the current lot continues to get its merry way – irrespective of their political coloration.
It is to his great credit in his retirement he didnt stop making a joke of people trying to put him on a pillar. Unfortunately we didnt understand him and still seem to be relying on the emergence of a new Dear Leader/Godot. It all feels a bit like Monty Python’s Brian screaming to the following crowd ‘yes we are all individuals’. To which they reply the same in drone/clone fashion.
@Newtownian
I read Jenny Hocking’s bio of Gough. We shouldn’t underestimate Gough’s war service in the making of him and nor indeed the importance of that generation of diggers. They are passing, those who fought fascism and won, to their eternal credit, and with them goes a tradition of civility, respect and the sort of insouciance for which the diggers were infamous.
Gough gave a very funny speech at the Economics Society in Canberra in the late 80s.
He also did a very good business giving eulogies to fallen comrades. As he lived to 98, he must have outlived most of them.
He was also funny back when it was safe for politicians to be funny.
his famous retort at a public meeting to a heckler on abortion was ”yes, I believe in abortion, and in your case, it should be retrospective”. It was a great put-down and got him out of a tight spot back when politicians are expected to give as good as they got at public meetings.
@jungney
My thoughts to. Though the war was undoubtably hell for them it seems to have left them much more conscious about the value of life, the futility of war, hating of lies and dogmatic ideology and the need to structure society in a form that will prevent horrors like those which emerged in Germany in the 1920s and led ultimately to a very civilized society turning to darkness.
Sadly such experience is not passed on genetically and subsequent generations including ours have not in my opinion taken on board their passions or the intelligent analysis that seems to have underpinned that generation of politicians on both sides to give the liberal Liberals of the time their due also.
In defense of his PM being more than mediocre – I am unclear how you reach that conclusion given his social legacy – ending conscription, tertiary education, Medicare/medibank, no fault divorce, aboriginal rights, initiating equal pay for women etc. . We are still living on what took him a mere 2 years, the remaining time being taken up with the effects of destabilising forces. Were that there was so much to show from the 6 years of the last Labor government.
Regarding his government’s economic problems there are three issues which need consideration here but typically arent raised for obvious reasons:
– the oil shock and US war spending sent inflation crazy globally which impacted Labor too. It didnt destabilise just us.
– inflation while a problem in some respects also in effect transferred wealth from the rich to the poor – a bit like debt forgiveness – which the rich have been working to claw back since.
– what replaced the old Keynesian stuff has proved to be equally unstable with the West entering a stagnation period of the kind which started much longer ago in Japan and still persists.
Truth be told its easily arguable that Gough’s so called ‘economically responsible’ successors only achieved what they did through a combination of philosophical and media hegemony (e.g. Murdoch, death of the old soviet system), luck (UK oil and our resources booms), selling off the family silver (aka privatization allowing governments to temporarily balance books and bribe voters), lack of critical analysis (e.g. the total failure of the economic and political establishment to recognise/admit we have yet to leave the 2008 doldrums) etc.
With our modern understanding of the mess Gough’s successors have left us perhaps its time put the tumult of his times into a more balanced perspective.
He made mistakes but we have been living off his social credit side ever since.
@Jim Rose
My favourite quote from the amazingly sharp witted and highly confident Gough: (when he set off the security machines at the airport) “I think you’ll find, it’s my aura.”
@Newtownian
I listened to a few excellent critiques of his time as PM last night on the ABC PM program. All those points were raised as important valid issues that hampered their time in government, however, there appeared to be universal acceptance (including those who served on his cabinet) that economics wasn’t his strong suit.
On “Gough’s so called ‘economically responsible’ successors” it was interesting Hawke criticized Whitlam’s economics on tv last night, but he also recounted visiting Reagan. Apparently Reagan used to carry cards with him to aid his memory on topics (is this accurate?) , Hawke asked him an economics question, Reagan looked at his card answered then referred Hawke to Reagan’s economic official for detail. So Hawke listened to the official, he spoke to someone about it later, saying wouldn’t you rather hear from someone knowledgable (like the official) than some one who is less knowledgeable (like Reagan). But Reagan was on the opposite side of politics to Hawke – and this is actually a particular technique you get taught – to have an ‘independent” third party deliver information to X for you, so then you and X can both consider the information and X feels like they have an independent source and you don’t have to be too committed to the information.
So maybe this was Reagan’s technique and it shows one way of how neo-liberalism became accepted by and pursued by the Australian Labor Party, beforehand not a party in favour of economic liberalism? This is just surmising…
I have a comment in moderation, I guess because there was a swear word in it (integral to the story). So I’ve reproduced it below, with dashes!
I remember a Leunig cartoon after the Fraser government was elected, showing someone standing near a fireplace, with a caption like “Australia, a country that wouldn’t know if its bum was on fire”. It resonated so much with me. I’d been living overseas and come back to Australia in late 1974 to find that in this stupid parochial country, the problems of oil prices and inflation that were besetting the world were somehow all the ALP’s fault.
My sister married not long after. It was a hippy type wedding – registry office, party in the garden. I remember my mother, who’d had a few drinks, announcing loudly apropros of some conversation: “Malcolm Fraser’s a S–T!” Of course we sort of forgave him in later years, like Gough did.
My parents, like Gough, were of that generation that were caught up in the war (my mother lived through the blitz in London and lost her first husband). I agree they were different. There was something generous, large hearted, about them. We have lost something somehow. Gough dying was like part of my youth died.
Listening to PA and Barry Jones on LNL; Gough was a macro man and his detractors clearly are micro. For instance Barry Jones says that Goughs greatest legacy was to un demonise foreign affairs; SE Asia (Vietnam) wasn’t really full of dominoes and China was not a yellow peril. The armchair economists say that Gough was the worst when in fact he was the one to push Australia into the global market by reducing or abolishing protection. It was the Libs who supported the protection rackets.
Gough broke the hold of the establishment on society and his legacy is to remind us of how little the establishment has to offer.
I don’t think funny quotes is an appropriate way to remember Gough. He was an extremely clever and gifted man who pushed through major reforms that resonate today.
He was our coming out PM.
He was ousted by a person of little regard (John Kerr) and his later reconciliation and friendship with Malcolm Fraser is a testament to both their characters.
Unfortunately we are now saddled with a govt that now wants to turn the clock back.
Nominating John Kerr to be Governor-General was a terrible mistake.
So a few of us had a discussion this morning, pondering whether Malcolm Fraser really felt that the world would end if we had 18 months more of Gough, or whether it was faux alarm of the Tony and Joe “budget emergency” variety.
Any thoughts on whether Mal really thought he was saving the country, or was just being a typical conservative who can’t face a day without ruling?
rog:
I’ve been a bit immersed in the media coverage and just say – right effin’ on mate! Perfect. That’s it. Right there is the missing link which goes directly to the mass affective consequences of having, what was at the time and in retrospect, a government of liberation. Ordinary citizens, of all sorts, and of course the sons and daughters of the working classes, stepped up and filled roles that had previously been populated with the inbred children of the establishment. They still have so little to offer.
There’s Gough’s real legacy, as I’ve read elsewhere, the establishment is still on the run today; we are still living on the Whitlam government’s social credit. The so called “culture wars” are nothing more than a long argument with Gough. Howard is still losing.
In the conversations I read today the one that resonated was “here’s what Gough did for me” followed other examples of how a deeply humanist state improved the lives of the marginalized. In my life, I now realize, how much that government did for me: TAFE, free tertiary education, thirty years of employment in the health sector. And that’s at first glance.
But thanks for that, Rog. Gough’s death is a time to mourn and a time to celebrate that the best of what it is to be Australian is still well alive.
@John Brookes
Speak nonsense for long enough and you become invested in it. It’s much less cognitive work than compartmentalising. Maybe they did at some level believe it, which doesn’t entail saying that they didn’t know it was bogus at some earlier point. You will recall they forced a DD in 1974.
I perceived them then as people who just couldn’t believe that after 23 years of Liberal Country Party rule, that an ALP victory could be other than an anomaly, so they kept trying to nuke the game. That they got away with it, predictably with Murdoch’s help, was thematic for the next 40 years. When the ALP did their deal with Murdoch in the 1980s, allowing him a new monopoly, I was again scandalised.
@Fran Barlow
But it was Bunyip Capitalism being pushed as I recall, outside pipelines there was no role for the State, but local sharks like Qld White Shoe brigade, land developers like Keating’s mate John Roberts (Multiplex), Bond, Lang Walker, Lang Hancock, Singleton (Hawkey’s mate), Laurie Connell, later on Gerry Harvey, Rod Carnegie, Abeles, Fox, nowadays we have Palmer, Rinehart, Tinkler. UGH!!! A fine league of gentlemen.
It might be said that populism is a cross-class demagogic ideology with dangerous implications (eg Inky Stephensen and the Jindyworobaks.)
@John Brookes
I’m minded to have a go: it would be churlish to ignore Mal’s substantive moves to the left in orthodox Oz politics. He’s apologised many times over for what he did. My guess is that he was manipulated into complying with the establishment’s best interests which was to do exactly what the US shadow government was telling it to do. Kerr is the lynchpin, along with Anthony Mason, CJ of the high court at the time.
For mine, Pilger’s account, rings true to my memory of how the covert story broke, over the years; a documentary here, a book there, a gaol sentence or two, some excellent documentary research.
His account is not comprehensive but it at least tells the covert side of the story.
So, I think Malcolm was a dupe and he has been saying sorry for a long time now. He’s already well in from the cold in my regard.
@John Brookes
Nobody can have believed that another eighteen months of the Whitlam government would have meant, in sober actuality, the end of the world; what you mean by ‘the end of the world’ can’t be the literal factual end of the world. But what then? Could Fraser have believed that another eighteen months of the Whitlam government would mean the death of the entire population of Australia? Not that? Reduction to slavery or destitution? No?
What it boils down to, avoiding hyperbole and other rhetorical flourishes, is this: Fraser could have believed — indeed, we can be sure he did — that if the Whitlam government stayed in office for another eighteen months, bad things would happen. If you prefer slightly more elevated language, we can call them negative consequences. But you’d find the same thing all the time: opposition leaders — and lots of other people too — believing that another eighteen months in office for the government will produce negative consequences. But how bad could the consequences Fraser feared have been? How bad would they have to be (even just in his belief) before they carry any weight in exculpating his conduct?
Not an unambiguous supporter of the Whitlam Government but a strong supporter of Gough. The most intelligent PM I have come across, bold, urbane and sharp in intellect and wit. A great PM on balance? He modernised Australia and woke the nation up. We needed Gough.
Eva Cox said something on the news this evening that resonated with me. It went something like this;
“The current ALP hypocrites need to stop eulogising Gough Whitlam and start acting like him.”
And let us not forget te CIA role in Whitlam’s dismissal.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56105
@rog
The trouble with nostalgia is it feels so good, and it’s easy for outsiders (who don’t get the passion) to rewrite history and forget why it mattered for those who tried to “hold the line” against the modernisation of the ALP into the
wonderfulwondering organisation it is today.The “great man” story is a cheap shortcut: not many bother to understand the late 60s-early 70s struggle for working class leadership between the Left: Ken Carr, Wally Curran leading the 26 rebel unions (the Trade Union Defence Committee), with the Socialist Left led by Hogg and Hartley (“cankers” on the ALP as Hawke called them), against the “modernisers” who rejected socialism and embraced managerialist capitalism (Gough and the rightwing Participants (Button, Xavier Connor, Barry Jones etc.). This was a local parallel to the Foot/Blair battle for the soul of the British Labour Party.
Call me suspicious (oh, someone already has, thanks for the compliment) but early on I thought Gough was a clever bugger and the emphasis on “the program, comrades!” was a ruse to disarm the Left criticism that he was a betrayer, by conceding on the symbolic issues (he was weak on opposition to the litmus test of Vietnam, but fortunately it was virtually over when he became PM) so he could force through the strategic reforms. Some of us in Young Labor were so anti-Gough that we wouldn’t even campaign for the ALP, except for draft-resister-on-the-run Barry Johnston in Hotham, whose candidature Gough unsuccessfully tried to nobble. (Barry died tragically in the 2009 Victorian bushfires at Kilmore.) When me and some mates, after partying all night at Jean McLean’s place, went at 7 am on Sunday morning Dec 3 to bang on the walls of Pentridge Prison, demanding that draft resisters Ken McClelland and Bob Scates should be released, and they came out on Tuesday, Gough got brownie points from the Left to do the more contentious economics stuff.
But Whitlam personified what we saw as a decline, in a process which resonated historically: Robert Michels in 1903 talking of “the iron law of oligarchy” (social democratic parties being inevitably taken over by their parliamentary leaders), our own V Gordon Childe in 1925 confirming Australian Labor’s emasculation in a parliamentary system, Lenin talking of the ALP as a liberal bourgeois party (I may have the exact words wrong here.) No more room for train drivers or worker-leaders here – from the vanguard to the guard van in fact. Inevitable or not? I don’t know but Calwell was the troglodyte loser, Whitlam was the modernising silvertail, a transition was in place.
@kevin1
Now, there is a voice from the depths of protestant moralism and the deep past. Kudos, comrade, for giving voice to old Australia. Of course Whitlam was a decline but he knew how to keep alive what was of value from the prior times.
@jungney
Pls note we both have something to learn from your comment – I am of DLP and Catholic stock, no protestant moralism here (don’t apologise, I have left my past.)
Leaders are too much closely examined for their personal history and traits, rather than seen as fate’s representatives in a much bigger drama.
@kevin1 Gough said that you need to be relevant to contemporary society; you don’t move forward by clinging to the past.
On East Timor; he had a blind spot there. Perhaps it was because East Timor was/is tiny and therefore unsustainable (until they discovered resources). His grand scheme of things became unsustainable over the killing fields of East Timor.
@rog
On East Timor, the “blind spot” idea suggests a personal foible or omission. This is a view which is inconsistent with 100% of professional historians (note the Big Statement I am making here). Any detached examination of the East Timor history would confirm that it was never part of the Dutch East Indies state, but a Portuguese colony.
The alternative view is that diplomacy is often or usually about utterly cynical behaviour based on the precept that the rights of the individual (or groups of them) are secondary to the perceived interests of the country.
Paul Keating also was of similar views. For a while (until the East Timorese obtained sufficient international support) this looked viable, but it eventually was shown as facetious self-interest, and eventually reflected badly on both Australia and Indonesia. There’s a lesson there.
As always, “wikileaks.org” has so much to offer in the “plusd” cables.
A search for “Whitlam” throws up 1,738 results. Of course, it isn’t necessarily factually correct but it does show what the US is hearing and telling itself. Direct quotes from informants and ‘protected’ sources such as Shorten etc.. are probably factual.
There is one from November 11 1975 I’ve quoted previously:
Good old US stooge Hawke!
And I also recall what Laurie Oakes knew at the time (according to his book) but chose not to share with mere Australians – what a good “journalist” he is.
According to Laurie Oakes (in his 2008 book) CIA and MI5 people working here at the time asked him at a Canberra dinner party what would happen if Whitlam held out against the Libs. He says he told them the Governor General would dismiss the government.
@kevin1
I don’t recall the quotations, but Bismarck and Realpolitik comes to mind; maybe Dr Google can provide more info. Suharto’s thuggish dominance over his own country was admirable to political professionals like Keating and Whitlam, who would certainly know of the extra-judicial killings of street thugs which Suharto (surprisingly) owned up to in his biography. The Canberra “Jakarta lobby” especially Dick Woolcott who advised Whitlam, are eternally stained by their deceitful dissembling about the Balibo 5 and classic diplomatic double-talk. Anyone who thinks East Timor is a Labor cause needs to get educated: Gareth Evans as well as the above people are hated by most people who fought to defend the East Timorese from brutal attacks and killings during the Indonesian reign.
There is still huge anger in Indonesia about the looting of the state Treasury by the Suharto family. The respected body Transparency International estimates an alleged misappropriation of between US $15–35 billion during his 32-year presidency.
@Megan
Gee, “the establishment” is in quotes, as if it is a bit of mental imagery, to be ridiculed.
Next big thing to be resisted as far as American world domination is the TPP; I note Pat Ranald has a recent article at the Conversation about it; a long running saga coming to finality; would be good if our host would open a thread about it.
Another take on Whitlam, Population, Energy Resources, and the Khemlani loan scandal
by Sheila Newman, 21 Oct 2014
Initial Reaction in Australia to the First Oil-Shock
With regard to population policy, the will to population stabilisation was present at the level of ALP party politics and at a popular level as well in the early 1970s. 1 ALP policy was heading towards one of population stabilisation before the Whitlam government was elected. The strategy of reducing immigration in order to alleviate the pressure of population growth in the cities was debated and adopted at the ALP’s June 1971 policy conference in Launceston. On 13 October 1972, Tom Uren, who was to become the Minister for Urban and Regional Development, referred to the role of immigration in affecting urban population pressures. In a policy speech opening the 1973 election campaign Whitlam also referred to the changes to immigration policy.
Contrary to suggestions that ALP policy to reduce immigration was not in response to international economic considerations, I would argue that the beginnings of the oil-shock may be dated to well before the time of the ALP conference in Launceston, in mid 1970. 7 In fact, the evidence suggests that ALP energy policy was formed as the situation that culminated in what is known as the 1973 oil-shock evolved. This was due mainly to the influence on ALP energy policy of the extraordinary Rex Connor, who was to become Whitlam’s minister for Minerals and Energy. Connor was unusually attuned to global and local mining and energy economics and is said to have anticipated the oil-shock. In fact Connor claimed this feat himself on behalf of the ALP:
…
On the day of Whitlam’s death Hawke made a point of having a dig.
There really is an element in the ALP that is very nasty, always was. And it seems to have something to do with a certain recently invented country in the middle east.
Some insight (from a November 26 1973 cable):
Emphasis added.
There was obviously an awful lot going on behind the scenes – just like these days – and most of it isn’t very nice or for the betterment of humanity, but rather for base purposes like greed, power and hegemony.
Looks like Whitlam was herding cats! This one is from 28 November 1973:
New respect for Whitlam and newer depths of existing disrespect for Hawke and all his progeny – Rudd, Gillard & Shorten.
“Where have you gone E. Gough Whitlam? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
It’s all about leadership and its sad lack in today’s body politic – that feeling of emptiness.
Obviously the Liberals were thinking of blocking supply for ages.
This one is from December 10 1973:
Hence, perhaps, the “economic mismanagement” myth? That probably also answers the “why wouldn’t Fraser wait 18 months?” question too.
I note the US was also getting anxious about Whitlam dragging his heels on some missile deal for Woomera called project Hi Star South – ostensibly to do with atmospheric measurements, yeah right.
And, he was also guilty of seeing no threat to national security and cutting defence spending to something scandalous like 2.8% of GNP.
It’s a wonder he lasted 3 years. And it’s also no wonder the establishment hates him so passionately.
Gough did a lot of things but the hagiography of him by the left (who have a bizarre “great man” theory of political leadership) is vomit-inducting.
Gough implemented massive reforms many of which are still with us today. One of them is structurally higher government spending as a % of GDP (amongst medicare, medibank, education reforms etc).
However his government was incompetent and in 1975 suffered a massive defeat at the hands of the electorate. His greatest gift to Australia is getting a Hawke Labor party who married economic reform with competence.
@Ikonoclast
John Pilger reports a deputy director of the CIA as saying ‘Kerr did what he was told to do’. Well, there you are then! a deputy director of the CIA! Could a deputy director of the CIA possibly utter untruths on such a subject? can we really question his word?
I expect it flatters the vanity of the CIA to imagine that nothing important can happen in the world without their having a hand in it, and it’s also going to suit their book to have everybody imagining that they’re more powerful than they really are. But Kerr was arrogant and venal enough to dismiss Whitlam without anybody’s instructions, and to suppose him merely a CIA catspaw is to minimise his personal guilt.
@kevin1
Thanks for posting this Kevin. This is a piece of history about which I know very little of significance. I must read up on it some time.
@faust
And which gave us the appalling governance we have today. People complain about Howard, Rudd, Gillard and now Abbott, but they are the logical consequents of Hawke’s regime.
@J-D
Being a catspaw for the US/CIA increases his personal guilt many times over. He was not just venal but a traitor to the Australian people (except the filthy rich elites of course).
Does the extensive spying Whitlam found against himself, his government and his country by the US and UK sound implausible after the relatively recent imbroglio of the US spying against allies. Angela Merkel and so on? Of course it does not.
Next step in the reasoning, why are they gathering this intel if not to take action when Australian domestic events do not suit their purposes? Pilger and others paint a conistent picture, consistent both with events at the time and consistent with what we have learnt about US CIA and security apparatus operations over the long term and more recently from Wikileaks and Snowden’s leaks.
There is plenty of circumstantial evidence implicating the CIA in this plot. There is no smoking gun evidence that I am aware of. There does not appear to be enough evidence to hold up in a conventional court of law were it a conventional crime. But when we look at the tide of CIA action over the world for many decades we have to ask ourselves this. Do we believe the tide comes in everywhere else but not here? Such a belief is the standard naive response of those who comprehend nothing about Realpolitik.
I’m reminded of Isiaih Berlin’s description of Winston Churchill: “the largest human being of his time”.
Gough was the largest Australian of his time, by quite some distance I think. His reputation will continue to rise as the years go by.