Oh, dear, it’s that time of year again: while the normal people are trying to quietly remember the fallen, that deafening noise is the Boomer left still yammering about the Dismissal. Well, allow me to give my GenX perspective: Sir John Kerr did the right thing and saved Australia.
In case any Good Oil readers are blessed enough to not know what this is about, allow me to briefly explain. On 11 November 1975, the Australian Governor-General exercised his reserve powers and dismissed the Whitlam government. At the subsequent election, voters overwhelmingly backed the decision, endorsing the caretaker Fraser government by a landslide.
The left, of course, have never accepted the verdict of the people. They’re still stamping their little feets and holding their little bweafs, even after 50 years.
Anthony Albanese has attacked the removal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government as an illegitimate “partisan political ambush” hatched by conservative forces, in a history wars intervention on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal.
Except that it wasn’t. It was a perfectly legitimate exercise of the rules of Westminster democracy. Even Albanese’s creature, current Governor-General Sam Mostyn, agrees that the “the holder of this office is there to protect the Australian public against the potential of irresponsible government”. While Mostyn shied away from endorsing Kerr’s ultimate action, it remains a fact that such action is within the Governor-General’s remit, just as it is within the Monarch’s.
Mostyn has also infuriated chattering elite by refusing to define in black-letter what ‘irresponsible government’ is. But, as she says, the Australian people know an irresponsible government when they see it. And the Whitlam government was very, very irresponsible.
Indeed, it’s hard to choose just which of Whitlam’s actions were the most mind-bogglingly irresponsible. But appointing a literal Marxist as Treasurer or trying to secretly (and in violation of the Constitution) borrow billions of dollars from a Pakistani loan shark, under crippling terms which would have had Australians still paying off the debt.
If those aren’t enough to convince you of Whitlam’s staggering irresponsibility, consider, too, that he secretly tried to get Saddam Hussein – yes, that Saddam Hussein – to bankroll his post-Dismissal election campaign.
So, stamp your feet all you like, Albanese, you Boomer twerp, but Whitlam had to go.
“Behind all the various schemes and subplots that will be unpacked and revisited tomorrow lies an overt refusal to respect the mandate or even acknowledge the legitimacy of a Labor government that had secured a majority in two consecutive federal elections inside three years.”
Note that: inside three years. Whitlam never even served a full normal term. After winning a very small majority in 1972, an emergency election in 1974 saw the government reduced to near-minority status.
At the post-Dismissal election, Fraser achieved the second biggest two-party-preferred vote in post-war history in 1975, which may explain some of Albanese’s vitriol: voters backed the Dismissal by a bigger margin than he’s ever won.
But, as I said, allow me to give a GenX corrective to Albanese’s uber-Boomer whining. I remember the Dismissal perfectly well, too: I was home sick from primary school that day, so I saw the news break on the telly as I was lying on the couch. Now, Whitlam was a demigod in our house, so I ran out to the yard where Mum was hanging out the washing, shouting, “Mum! Mum! They sacked Gough!”
Ah, the cluelessness of callow youth. But, unlike Albanese, I grew out of my infantile leftism. Growing older, and occasionally just a bit wiser, I came to conclude that the Dismissal was not only justified, but entirely proper within our Westminster democracy. Even better, it hangs over the heads of subsequent governments like the “long winding-sheet” of candle-wax dripping down upon Charles Darnay. Any hubristic politician must always reckon with the fact that there is a higher power.
That, again, possibly explains much of Albanese’s temper-tantrum indignation.
But Albanese is not just a Boomer, he’s a Boomer leftist, possibly the most insufferable combination after Harry and Meghan. So naturally he not only refuses to accept the people’s verdict, he’s determined to give them the middle finger.
Mr Albanese told the audience at the Museum of Australian Democracy event that the government had commissioned a statue of Whitlam that would stand alongside others in Canberra, including “Barton, Menzies, Curtin and Chifley, Lyons and Tangney, McEwen, Gorton and Bonner”.
That is standard leftist operating procedure: whenever they’re resoundingly spanked by the Australian people, they scream and throw tantrums, then go right back to what they were doing.
You can bet that they’ll still be whining about losing the Voice referendum in 50 years, too.
