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AUSTRALIAN HISTORY - Obit for Gough |
| Rumours exaggerated: an obit for Gough
The Bulletin commissioned and
paid for this obituary in 2,000. The magazine has since died and the subject
might yet outlive the author. Federal Treasurer Peter Costello
boasts that he has lead the economy to recovery from “the damage [that] began
in 1972 with the Whitlam Government” Costello had reacted to the debauching of
Australia’s credit rating by the Whitlam ministry’s attempt to borrow billions
from unlovely vendors. Minerals and Energy Minister, Rex Connor, defended those
deals to buy back the farm with a line of verse: “Give me men to match my
vision”. Whitlam had restored vision to public
life after the decline of Menzies cabinets into domestic and international
senescence, followed by muddles and false starts under Holt, Gorton and
McMahon. For good or ill, twenty-[???] years after Whitlam resigned from
parliament, his name is linked to initiatives in every area of administration.
The currency of terms such as “agenda setting” and “the mandate” testify to his
energies. Typical of this activism, his major publication, The Whitlam Government, 1972-1975 (1985), was not a volume of
memoirs, but a thematic analysis under nineteen policy headings. Because
the Whitlam legacy has been blurred on every side by false attributions and by
forgetting, the measure
of the man must be plumbed through a survey of his initiatives in those domains. Economy “A
principal part of my duty”, he wrote, has been “to place issues of importance …
on the agenda of my Party and the agenda of this nation”. Along with R. J. Hawke as ACTU
advocate and D. A. Dunstan as attorney-general in South Australia, Whitlam
represented the generation of graduates who turned the labour movement from its
rural and manufacturing origins towards the tertiary sector. A determination “to crash through”
derived from impatience at the logjam of reforms after 23 years in opposition.
“The program” that Whitlam delivered in the Blacktown Civic Centre on 13
November 1972 would have been more secure had he won in 1969. Instead, his
reputation as a economic manager is abysmal, bearing the opprobrium of
grappling with world recession from 1974, after oil prices skyrocketed in
October 1973. Its warning signs had flashed from the late 1960s when the
international monetary system had ceased to function before. The Coalition
government had made the situation here worse by failing to revalue our dollar.
To suppose that the economy would have had no problems had William McMahon won
in 1972 is to deny the domestic and international forces that erupted after
1973. In opposition, Whitlam had assumed
that the post-war boom would continue, allowing him to fund the program without
raising tax rates. In this expectation, he was not following Keynes who had
favoured additional government spending to counter contractions by corporate
investors. In as much as Whitlam had thought about these matters, he was among
the multitude who extrapolated Keynes’s tactic into a licence to spend on good
causes, irrespective of the pace of economic activity. Australia
did not face a low level of investments so much as their misdirection. A
1974-75 inquiry into manufacturing documented how chronic inefficiencies from
fragmented plants, punitive taxes and inappropriate accounting had left firms
vulnerable to the Coalition’s fuelling of inflation during 1971-72, well before
the oil price hikes. Whitlam’s tome ignored those findings because he had
little interest in manufacturing and because they ran counter to his conversion
to tariff cuts as a panacea. No one explained to him that an appreciating
dollar was stripping factories of that protection. This
economic illiteracy confirms the accusation by his advisor, Dr H. C. Coombs,
that he suffered from the lawyer’s belief that the enactment of legislation
altered the real world. Yet as prime minister, Whitlam recognised that Acts of
Parliament could be frustrated by a hostile or dispirited bureaucracy. The
Labor government inherited a public service divided in its prejudices and enthusiasms.
Although he categorised the Department of Immigration as irretrievably racist,
he never lost his trust in the neutrality of the civil service on the model of
his father who had been Commonwealth solicitor-general. By April 1974, Coombs had convinced
Whitlam to set up a Royal Commission on Government Administration to cope with
the fiscal crisis confronting welfare states. If greater efficiency could be
won from public services despite static real expenditures, welfare objectives
might be sustained. Since 1975, that prospect has lost out, first to razor
gangs and then to outsourcing and privatisation as Whitlam’s ALP successors
dissociated themselves from his largesse. R. J. Hawke got Gough out of the way
in 1983 by dispatching him to Paris as ambassador to UNESCO. On that eunuch’s
couch, he could not generate invidious comparisons. This
switch on economic policy is clear from the altered meaning of the word
“reform”. Under Whitlam, “reform” required governmental involvement to advance
social equality for gender, generations and regions, as well as class. Under
Hawke and Keating, ‘reform’ meant economic rationalism with the sell-off of
government instrumentalities, de-regulation of the financial sector,
self-regulation for corporations, the slackening of controls on overseas
ownership and a diminution of workplace safeguards. The slashing of tariffs was
the one area where Hawke and Keating were faithful to a Whitlam initiative. Comparable Countries Typically, he opened The Whitlam Government with an account
of International Affairs, which occupied a fifth of the volume, more than twice
the next longest chapter, no less tellingly devoted to The Law. Those domains
were linked because he deployed the foreign affairs power in the constitution
to expand Commonwealth activity. Moreover, international relations was the
domain where he could act without passing a law through a hostile Senate. Like
Dr Evatt, Whitlam might have been more successful as joint Foreign Minister and
Attorney-General than as prime minister. In that case, and again like Evatt, he
would have been vigorous in endeavouring to subvert his leader. Whitlam formed his foreign policies
during a time when Australia’s security partnership was the South-East Asian
Treaty Organisation, a ramshackle of colonial powers and regional
dictatorships. His reappraisal coincided with the Nixon-Kissinger redirection
of US containment in Asia, notably the decision to recognise Maotse-tung’s
“bandits” as the government of China. The White House was less pleased with
Whitlam’s willingness to consider the Soviet Union as just another state with
legitimate interests around the globe. Whitlam’s view of the world was remote
from the skepticism voiced by anti-Vietnam activists about Washington’s virtue,
or reliability as an ally. After he won the Labor leadership following the
electoral debacle of 1966, he argued that Australian regulars had to stay in
Vietnam in order to help the US extricate itself from that quagmire. He is
often credited with withdrawing the conscripts, yet all but a handful of
professional advisors had been back since 1971. Whitlam did not disturb the US
spy bases here until the weeks leading up to his dismissal when he outed a CIA
controller at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. From
the 1940s, Whitlam’s support for nationalist revolutions had committed him to
Indonesia, first against the Dutch over West Irian, and later in Portuguese
Timor. That second decision remains the canker for those most anxious to admire
him. Typically, he has never apologised.
His masterly inactivity in regard to Timor contrasted with his drive not to be
beaten by Portugal into the dishonour of being the world’s last colonial
overlord. “If history were to obliterate the whole of my public career”,
Whitlam wrote, “save my contribution to the independence of a democratic PNG, I
should rest content”. Suburbia
On the domestic front, none of
Whitlam’s redirections of policy had more potential for transforming the
Australian way of life than his integration of policies for cities, housing and
transport. To that end he created the Department of Urban and Regional
Development (DURD), which rivaled Treasury as a source of advice on investment
and employment. In similar vein, he later merged Immigration with Labour, tying
population with employment. Elected
in 1952 for Werriwa in Sydney’s south-west, Whitlam had lived with the hardship
of suburbs short on basic services. Daily life at 32 Albert street, Cabramatta,
stiffened his suspicion that an affluent society could be equitable only through
public utilities, whether libraries or sewerage. Those experiences stimulated
his preference for Local over State government, twisting a new strand into
Labor’s tilting the federal compact towards Canberra. Paralleling Whitlam’s emphasis on the
suburbs was his attempt to relieve pressure on the capital cities by
decentralisation. Albury-Wodonga became the first regional growth centre.
Location has kept those twin cities expanding, but with fewer of the amenities
envisaged in 1973. Whitlam’s urban consciousness lingers in the 2001 agreement
between the State governments to install a single local government across the
border. He had lost enthusiasm for developing the North until his neglect
immediately after Cyclone Tracy made him over-compensate by blundering into the
reconstruction of Darwin. Although
Cabramatta has become “Little Saigon”, multi-culturalism
appeared in The Whitlam Government
only where a Liberal minister for Immigration, Billie Snedden, had opposed its
assumptions in 1969. When Whitlam’s first Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby,
proposed a “new slogan for Australia” it was the cumbersome phrase “unity in
diversity”. The association of Grassby with multi-culturalism came during the
five years he served as Community Relations Commissioner under Fraser who used
the tag to attract the ethnic vote, just as Whitlam boasted he had done. The Arts Earlier Labor leaders, notably Dr
Evatt, had personal commitments to the arts, yet culture had remained an
electoral asset for the Liberals until Whitlam. Menzies associated the middle
class – his “forgotten people” - with the life of the mind “which marks us off
from the beast”. In 1975, the 85-year old Sydney North Shore painter Grace
Crowley told a journalist: “We were all too superior for Labor, but Labor I
vote for now”. The swing within the arts community came with a fresh wave of
practitioners as well from an enlarged audience, both dramatised in David
Williamson’s Don’s Party (1971).
Establishment of the Australia Council with what now looks like lavish funding,
and the 1973 purchase of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles”, consolidated that
enthusiasm. In retirement, the Whitlams became opening-night fixtures. Equality
Whitlam’s pouring of earth into
the hands of Gurindji elder, Vincent Lingari, inscribed land rights as a
distinguishing mark of his administration. Yet his government did not override
Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen on Aboriginal matters, a sign of the ALP’s
continuing reluctance to use the powers authorised by the 1967 referendum to
make special laws. Medibank-cum-Medicare
remains the most approved of the Whitlam legacies, one which has been tampered
with but which would be electoral suicide to abolish in favour of the voluntary
schemes and charity so beloved by Howard. Three aspects of Whitlam’s
initiative, however, are nowadays overlooked. First, the Commonwealth takeover
of hospital funding is a dead letter. Secondly, Medibank marginalised the
community health centres proposed by the caucus committee of medicos who
thought public and preventive approaches more beneficial than the guaranteeing
of doctors’ incomes. Thirdly, the levy was a flat-rate impost on income taxes,
which are themselves calculated after deducting expenses and other dodges. The
levy has become part of the drift away from policies based on “needs”. In another unintended retreat from
equality, Whitlam abolished tertiary education fees, against the advice of his
Minister for Education, Kim Beazley senior, who had benefited from the West
Australian system that Whitlam cited as his model. This contradiction of
Labor’s “needs” program sparked little criticism because, according to Beazley,
“the beneficiaries were the most articulate and influential sectors”. Beazley
snr had wanted more Commonwealth scholarships for lower income groups. That
removal of fees brought little change to the class composition of tertiary
enrollments, though it helped older women to graduate. The fee abolition also
cleared the way under Hawke’s rationalism to HECS charges. Whitlam displayed a Menziesian attachment to
middle-class presumptions when he illustrated his vision of equality: “I want
every kid to have a desk, with a lamp, and his own room to study”. Trained to
value equality before the law, as in one vote one value, he pursued equality of
opportunities more than of outcomes. Hence, the need for affirmative action for
women to redress the social circumstances that lie beneath injustices surprised
him. His socialism required a larger public sector, never a reallocation of
wealth. Constitutionalist Reacting
against the defeat of the 1944 referendum to extend Commonwealth powers, RAAF
navigator Whitlam had projected a career in politics. In opposition, he campaigned to modernise the
Constitution. He brought himself to nation-wide prominence within the Labor
movement through his 1957 Chifley Memorial Lecture, The Constitution versus Labor. He argued that for as long as the
courts ruled nationalisation to be unconstitutional, the ALP’s Socialist
Objective could form no part of its electoral program. The ALP has since moved
so far from even the watered-down Democratic Socialism adopted in 1957 that the
Party’s fixation throughout the 1950s on Court rulings against nationalisation
(Section 92) now seems pre-Copernican. Yet in the late 1980s, the High Court restored the words
“trade and commerce between the States shall be absolutely free” to the
founders’ limited intent of banning imposts on inter-State tariffs. One bar to
nationalisation was thus being lowered while the ALP was moving towards the
sell-off of people’s bank. In place of nationalisation, Whitlam
breathed life into governmental enterprises through tied grants to the States
(Section 96). He also reinstated the Inter-State Commission (Section 101), to
adjudicate and administer trade and commerce – as it could now do over
competition policy, through it is part of no party’s agenda. Republicanism is one area where there
has been no retreat from “The Program” because, as Whitlam confessed, he “did
not become committed to the Australian republic” until the reserve powers of
the crown injured his own prospects. Instead, he had prided himself on his
punctiliousness in regard to Royal Style and Titles, treating the Windsors “as
if they were his equals”. How paradoxical then that a parliamentarian so respectful
of procedural niceties should be laid low by a big-C Conservative disregard for
constitutional conventions. The
dismissal on 11 November 1975 initiated the Citizens for Democracy on their
campaign to rewrite the Constitution. At the 1999 referendum, both
minimalists and direct-electionists overlooked the need to deprive the Senate
of its power to block supply and to remove the reserve powers of the head of
state, whether as president or governor-general. Whitlam
quoted Machiavelli to disparage those of his followers who were lukewarm in
defending “a new order of things”. That charge could never be made against his
leadership. In defeat and
disgrace, Whitlam remained an interventionist. Trying to lead the opposition
again between 1975 and 1977, he
proposed reforms which would not require huge outlays. In 1985, he foresaw that
if Labor were not the “great party of Australian reform” it would be a nothing. |
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See also: Labour History |