Yeah, yeah, I know I said I was sick of Boomer lefties whining about Gough Whitlam and the Dismissal. But the sheer avalanche of fawning bullshit about Whitlam over the last 50 years merits at least some correctives. Call it a personal mea culpa, too. Having been brought up in a rusted-on Labor household where Whitlam was a demigod, it took me far too long to remove the scales.
Whitlamites always bang on that ‘Whitlam modernised Australia’. What a steaming pile of dingo-bollocks. Australia had been plenty modernised before 1972. Most of the signature ‘achievements’ of Whitlam had already been made by coalition.
Bringing troops home from Vietnam? Billy McMahon ended Australia’s combat role in 1971, bringing home the 4th Battalion RAR for Christmas that year. All that remained when Whitlam came to power was a platoon guarding the Australian embassy.
The Australian film industry? The renaissance began in 1970, with John Gorton’s Australian Film Development Corporation.
Ending the White Australia policy? Harold Holt, in 1966, with the Migration Act, and the announcement that Australia no longer had a White Australia policy.
But what about free university? Under the Menzies government, which massively expanded the Australian university sector, over 80 per cent of places were fully funded by government scholarships, but those were dependent on academic merit. All Whitlam did was abolish the academic requirement. Contrary to myth, working-class kids didn’t flock to university: the demographics remained solidly middle-class. All Whitlam did was give a free pass to middle-class dullards.
Oh, but the statesmanship. Spare me. Whitlam had presence, sure, but in the end he was just another slimy politician.
The Whitlam government made many changes, but the number which could really be classified as true improvements is minimal. Apart from the Trade Practices Act, it is difficult to think of a real reform.
Making something free, that is requiring some taxpayers to pay for someone else’s advantage, is not in itself a reform.
In foreign policy, lending moral support to a debauched government responsible for the deaths of millions of its own citizens through starvation and murder is not a great achievement.
This is a reference to Whitlam, then still in opposition, trying to boost his profile by scurrying to pay homage to the Mao regime, long before any other Western leader. That China was smack in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, which murdered some 25 million Chinese and destroyed some three-quarters of its cultural heritage, didn’t bother Whitlam one jot.
It also didn’t bother him one jot when he acted with complete hypocrisy.
The prime example of that was when he ensured Labor would regularly vote against a government money bill in the Senate. He was so proud of this strategy that on the 170th occasion he had Senator Lionel Murphy table in the Senate a list of the preceding 169 occasions. The purpose always, Whitlam declared, was to destroy the government. An election must follow.
And then it happened to him. Suddenly, it was the most outrageous threat to democracy in the history of Australia.
What the legacy media never report, as it happens, is what Sir John Kerr cited as one of his major motives for the Dismissal, and ending the government shutdown caused by the blocking of supply. Unlike either Whitlam (from the Melbourne old money suburb of Kew) or Malcolm Fraser (the scion of the squattocracy), Kerr actually knew what it was like to grow up in poverty as a working-class boy in the hardscrabble early 20th century. Kerr was deeply concerned that a continued government shutdown would punish the poor most of all.
Meanwhile, Whitlam informed the parliament that the extraordinary proposal to take over all of Australia’s mining and energy projects by buying them back through massive loans negotiated through a Pakistani commodities broker, Tirath Khemlani, authorised behind the back of the governor-general and although obviously long-term, designated short-term to avoid the need for long-term approval, had been abandoned.
When it was demonstrated the loans were still being sought, and although Whitlam denied knowledge of this, Fraser declared this to constitute the reprehensible circumstances which would justify the withholding of supply until an election was called.
What Whitlam did then was certainly reprehensible.
Knowing that he had no constitutional alternative but to advise a general election, he tried everything improper, devious and unconstitutional to cling to power.
Indeed, it was only the generosity of Fraser, determined to try and heal the wounds of the Dismissal, which kept Whitlam out of an almost-certain prison term.
If a prime minister again tries to cling unconstitutionally to power, let us hope the then governor-general has the same sense of duty and courage to do what Kerr did.
Does anyone expect an elected president to have the same independence of mind? Rather than make the case for a republic, the Dismissal is an object lesson of why we need to keep the present system.
