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AUSTRALIAN HISTORY - A Whitlam Trifecta |
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A Whitlam trifecta By Humphrey
McQueen Following are
three pieces for the Bulletin in 1999-2000. 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. “More matter, less art” Whitlam told his
speechwriters. Had he drafted those addresses himself, the texts would have
been as distinguished, if not more so. The arts of oratory were essential to
his legacy. Times have been achanging. In the early 1970s, journalists were
aspiring enough to revel in Whitlam’s historical analogies – “Tiberius with a
telephone” for McMahon’s conniving - and an arcane vocabulary – “balletomaniac”
for Jim Killen’s alarm about KGB agents pirouetting among the touring Bolshoi
dancers. The Whitlam legacy will continue to shrink as fewer get his jokes. 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. Omnium consensu
capax imperii nisi imperasset. Much as Edward Gough Whitlam would have prided
himself on being able to translate Tacitus's remark that everyone had thought
Servius Sulpicius Galba (c.3BC-69AD) possessed the makings of an emperor until
he ascended the throne, the Whitlam vanity would have been affronted by any
suggestion that the same judgement applied to him. Success at parliamentary
politics requires an immunity to self-reflection. The Whitlam wit could be
self-mocking, never self-deprecating. Hauteur outdistanced grandeur. Among true
believers, the Whitlam reputation was secured by his dismissal on 11 November
1975, to survive even his involvement with a scheme to finance the ALP's 1975 campaign
by borrowing from the Iraqis. Thereafter - apart from East Timor - Whitlam kept
to the high ground so successfully that by the mid-1980s his arrival at
operas-in-the-park would be greeted by a standing ovation. The Whitlam
conviction that he was "destined to lead' was not shaken by three failed
attempts to be elected to public office before winning a federal seat in 1952.
His advancement came through the numbers game. Hence, evaluation of his career
must attend to his wheeler-dealing as well as to the afflatus. In 1968, the
Whitlam arrogance crossed the auguries of his increasing eminence. By
supporting Brian Harradine, now senator, as a Tasmanian delegate to the ALP's
Federal executive, Whitlam provoked a leadership spill during which several of
his votaries in caucus switched to Jim Cairns to remind Gough that the Labor
party was not his fiefdom. In 1970, he allied himself with erstwhile enemies to
dislodge the ALP's Victorian Central Executive. At the polling
booths, Whitlam's triumph was to gain seventeen-seats in 1969. Far from
demolishing the hapless Billy McMahon in 1972, Whitlam fell just short of a
majority of the primary votes. His government was returned in 1974 with a
reduced majority and no improvement in its Senate numbers, despite buying off
one senator with an ambassadorship. Vanquished in 1975, he mounted another
verbally coruscating campaign in 1977, to achieve Labor's lowest percentage of
the primary vote since 1931. Stepping aside as leader, he took another world
tour before retiring from the parliament. When Whitlam
had canvassed for the deputy-leadership of the parliamentary Labor Party in
early 1960, his caucus critics mocked him as "the young brolga", or
as "white-tie-and-tails". The characteristics that offended the old
guard on the right and left were making Whitlam the hope of younger activists,
those offspring of the working class who had embarked on higher education and
were seeking a Labor leader to express their professionalism in a tone of voice
flattering to their aspirations, matching the Menzies vowels and cadences. Whitllam did
not take the lead against White Australia, where the left-wing Victorian
front-bencher Dr Jim Cairns risked expulsion from the Labor Party in 1960 by
associating with the then explosive proposal for annual quotas of a few hundred
non-European immigrants. Whitlam,
however, did chance his leadership by supporting state aid to church schools.
He sought an end to the sectarianism that had soiled our public life for more
than a century, and, as an agnostic, hoped to rescue the poor from a
cash-strapped Catholic system which, by providing a third-rate education, was
piling ignorance on superstition. He bent some rules to get there and, on
technical grounds, merited the March 1966 motion to expel him. Later in 1966,
Whitlam spiked the guns of his leader, Arthur Calwell, who was calling for the
"immediate and unconditional withdrawal" of Australian forces from
Vietnam. Whitlam doubted the timing, a malleability which the media magnified
to deepen Labor's defeat. Once elected leader himself in 1967, Whitlam favoured
the presence of Australian troops in order to draw Washington towards a
negotiated settlement. Despite this temporising, Whitlam would collect the
credit for the withdrawal although by the time he came to office in December
1972 only a handful of advisers remained. The last conscript had come home
fourteen months before. Yet, the
indulgences granted to Whitlam during the autumn of his life were not just
another case of our not knowing what a good thing he had been until we saw
those who came after. He merited praise for carrying his vision of a modern
Australia into practice. Indeed, the most widespread complaint about the
Whitlam governments was their doing too much too quickly. He came to office three
years too late. That delay intensified his determination to make up for the
time lost by the Coalition, whether through Country Party sectionalism in the
economy, or under DLP blackmail, via its allocation of second preferences, over
foreign policy and social issues. Once in office,
Whitlam recognised that the mainland of China had been governed by the
Communists since 1949. He accelerated the Liberals' belated endorsement of the
de-colonisation of Papua New Guinea. He had escaped from the national delusion
about "developing the North" into an innovatory focus on urban
development, spurred by his representing an unsewered and unsealed electorate
in Sydney's western. He welcomed the women's movement, supporting the equal pay
case and placing the Office of the Status of Women under his direction.
Establishment of the Australia Council rescued promotion of the arts from the
hydra-headed planning that the Coalition had applied in setting up a Department
of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts. Under his government, each had its
own ministry, and - for a time - were not disparaged as bush, boongs and
bludgers. In granting
Land Rights to the Gurindji in 1975, he poured soil into the hands of Vincent
Lingari but let the application of comparable laws to Queensland slip through
his fingers by not daring to use the constitutional powers gained at the 1967
referendum to override premier Bjelke-Peterson. The funding of
social reforms from bracket creep in the income tax rates had been possible
before the first oil price shock in 1973 exposed a fiscal crisis in the welfare
state. An era of feckless spending had closed around the world. Whitlam again
lost followers in caucus. In addition, his failure to return from overseas
after the Darwin cyclone on Christmas Eve 1974 contrasted with the warmth
displayed there by deputy prime minister Cairns. After an ore carrier knocked
down Hobart's main bridge in January 1975, Whitlam declared that there could be
no protection against incompetent masters. Cartoonists depicted the prime
minister on the bridge of his own floundering ship of state. When the editor
and economist T. M. Fitzgerald delivered the 1977 John Curtin Memorial Lecture,
he identified two qualities essential in a successful Labor leader. One is
fellowship; the other an appreciation that, once the economy goes awry, little
else can be put to rights. Whitlam, he implied, possessed neither attribute. Whitlam never
comprehended the economy as a system, though he presumably knew that BHP made
steel. He was not alone in his incompetence. He accepted the 25 per cent
across-the-board reduction in tariffs in mid-1973 on the advice of academics
who had not recognised that an appreciating Australian dollar was making a cut
of that size. Stung by attacks on his economic illiteracy, he defended himself
by pointing out that he had developed Section 96 of the Constitution so that he
could spend even more. This boast confirmed Dr Coombs's view that Whitlam
suffered from the lawyer's disease that "you pass a law and you make the
world different". Whitlam's
parliamentary skills were rhetorical more than tactical. A nincompoop such as
Fred Daly could make the running around the House. The Whitlam delight in
flaying Malcolm Fraser at question time in the weeks during which the Coalition
blocked supply in October-November 1975 stimulated the Whitlam faith in the
transforming power of his eloquence. The Whitlam conviction that his opponents,
in both the ALP and the Coalition, were small-minded or troglodyte, fed his
hubris. As he drove to Yarralumla around noon on Tuesday, 11 November, he knew
that he had Fraser beat. Whitlam then
neglected to alert Labor's Senate leaders to his sacking, so that they
unwittingly voted supply for Fraser's caretaker administration. Instead of
warning his ministers, he sped home to consume a huge steak. One source of this
confusion of appetites was that, from the mid-1960s, Whitlam had competed for
attention with Labor's Senate leader, Lionel Murphy. Whitlam's blind spot over
Senate powers on that crucial afternoon came after he had blinded himself with
envy. Later that day
he called on his followers to maintain a rage that he had not himself
demonstrated at the moment of his dismissal. That restraint must have puzzled
the jjournalist who had observed that Whitlam "did not become angry unless
he was hurt personally". Why, then, did he not swear at Kerr, or even
raise his voice, let alone punch him on the nose? He had, after all, thrown a
glass of water over the Minister for External Affairs, Paul Hasluck, in the
House of Representatives a decade earlier. How many other powerful men would be
so docile upon being sacked by someone to whom they had given a sinecure? In
pondering Whitlam's personality and politics, that non-blow is as elemental a
clue as any cur that did not yelp. Shock and grief set in soon after, leaving
him sleepless until the weekend of the 15-16th November. Meanwhile, his
platform speeches went over and over the minutiae of the eleventh as if seeking
a way to talk himself out of reality. Marks of depression manifested themselves
throughout 1976. An Athenian
would have seen the Whitlam sacking as the gods' retribution for his sacrifice
of the Timorese, an impiety which forever blighted his rehabilitation. Yet, in
the sweep of his fifty-five years in public life, his support for Jakarta's
oppression was just one more area in which he failed to keep up with events.
From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, he had supported Indonesia's
struggles against Dutch colonialism, picturing himself as progressive in
contrast to Calwell's stirring the racist possum against Indonesian ambitions.
In 1974, when East Timorese claimed independence from Portugal, Whitlam
continued to view Indonesia through the prism of his own anti-colonialist past
rather than through Jakarta's militarised present. The impatience
of a colossus with the scraps of a once mighty kingdom contributed to his
support for the takeover of East Timor by its much larger neighbour was. His
prejudice about size had led him into the electorally dumb recognition of the
Soviet incorporation of the three Baltic states. This passion to
tidy up the world parallelled a centralist mentality in domestic politics. The
Whitlam identification of social equality with growth in Canberra's bureaucracy
is the least attractive part of his legacy. He pushed for a centralised
Medibank in preference to community health centres, the option favoured by the
five medical practitioners in caucus. That the small may be beautiful formed no
part of his make-up. Whitlam
improved the draft speeches prepared for him, adding both art and matter.
Reporting his public addresses and asides allowed journalists to feel as clever
as he, as well stocked with Latin tags or historical analogies, and as
encompassing in their minds as this talking encyclopaedia. Age wearied his
audiences as he grew to resemble the disgraced English politician Sir Charles
Dilke, of whom an earlier Australian prime minister, Alfred Deakin, had
quipped: "Knowledge was his forte and omniscience his foible." To
celebrate the centenary of the foundation of the Labor Party in 1891, Whitlam
bemused his Balmain listeners by lecturing them for over an hour on the joys of
standardising rail gauges. Hawke's
dispatch of Whitlam to Paris as ambassador to UNESCO elevated him to an office
commensurate with his talents, and provided the retraining scheme needed for
his final career as a guide through antique lands. Bulletin,
November 2000 That other lot were the Liberal and
Country Parties. What my friend feared was that, in a poll held four days
earlier, the Coalition had defeated the first Labor government in twenty-three
years, though the outcome would remain unclear for the worst part of that week. The ALP was returned, but with a
slight drop in its support and with a majority in the House of five, down from
nine. Among the casualties was Immigration Minister Al Grassby who had been
defeated by issues that festered until One Nation. Control of the Senate eluded both
sides, which was fair enough since a scheme to deliver a majority to Labor had
been the trigger for a double dissolution instead of only the half Senate poll
that was due. Queensland DLP Senator Vince Gair was unhappy that his party had
removed him as leader. Gough Whitlam took pity on this Labor rat and appointed
him Ambassador to Eire. Gair’s resignation meant that Queensland would have to
elect six Senators, and not five, making it easier for Labor to gain an extra
seat there. Or so it seemed until that
‘Bible-bashing bastard’ Bjelke-Petersen issued the writs for the half-Senate
election before the spherical Senator Gair could roll himself out of a
Coalition beer-and-prawn night along the corridor to the Senate President’s
suite to tender his resignation. Labor lost both credibility and the chance to
pick up that extra place. The Coalition seized on ‘bribery and corruption’ to
block supply. Whitlam crashed through by securing a double dissolution. Gair’s
party lost all its Senate places and, after twenty years, disappeared as a
political force. The only person who did not accept
that he had lost anything was opposition leader Bill Snedden who declared ‘we
were not defeated’, prompting the wits to remark that he just come second. No
mockers appeared on the Labor side where May 18 was another famous victory, not
as memorable as 2 December 1972 yet confirmation that the Whitlam government
possessed ‘a certain grandeur’. Or so it also seemed. Before another
fifteen months had passed, more calamities than enough had befallen the party,
the government and the people to prompt commentators to wonder whether Labor
might have done better to have run second. ‘What if?’ is not idle when
speculation illuminates the significance of what did happen. Federal politics
has its crop of occasions about which to propose ‘what if?’. What if the ALP
candidate for Moreton in 1961 had been called Donnell instead of O’Donnell and
so had garnered the donkey votes to topple Menzies? How would the Ming Dynasty
appear today? And would prime minister Calwell have sent regulars into Vietnam? The closest parallel to May 1974 was
the landslide to Labor in the 1929 snap poll. What if the non-Labor government
had run its full term to 1931? The Tories would have carried the opprobrium
from the Great Depression, bringing Labor to office in 1931 as the cure, not scourging
it in the wilderness as a scapegoat. When we ask ‘what if Whitlam had lost
in ’74?’, we know for certain that several things would not have happened. At
the level of personalities, we can be pretty sure that Snedden would not have
appointed John Kerr Governor-General, and positive that Lionel Murphy would not
have gone onto the High Court. Jim Cairns might not have employed Juni Morosi
and R. J. Hawke would have sought another route to the Lodge. And, of course,
Ambassador Gair would have had his credentials withdrawn and thus not been able
to make so many impressions on the bottoms of colleens, as complained of in a
confidential report to Foreign Affairs. Another
clear casualty of a Coalition victory would have been passage at the Joint
Sitting of both Houses in July of the Bills that Whitlam had used to secure a
double dissolution. Medibank would have been still-born. Above all, Labor would not have
presided over the end of full employment. The Loans Affair would not have
clear-felled the cabinet before culminating in the ‘reprehensible
circumstances’ that Malcolm Fraser went looking for to justify blocking Supply
again in October 1975. Stretching the scenario further, it
is reasonable to assume that the electorate would then have blamed the Coalition
government for the death of the lucky country during 1975 and swung back to the
ALP at elections late in 1976 or early 1977. That interregnum should have let
Whitlam hone the managerial skills of his shadow ministers, in particular,
cutting the cabinet back from twenty-seven to a dozen. Caucus would meanwhile
have absorbed the idea of a fiscal crisis of the state, learned to tailor
reform to an era of economic restraint and no longer expected that the income
growth to supply tax revenues for big-spending programs. Instead, Labor
leaders had to learn from their 1974-75 debacle, returning to office in 1983
determined to target welfare expenditures and to lower taxes. Whitlam’s return as prime minister in
1977 would have left him with the reputation of just another technocrat guiding
capitalism, not as the betrayed hero. In 1979, the party might have shamed him
out of recognising Indonesia’s incorporation of East Timor. Without Kerr’s Coup, when would a
Republican movement have got going? The effects on the Liberal-Country
Party of not coming second would have been as petty and profound as those in
Labor’s ranks. Even with the authority of the prime
ministership, Snedden was never going to best Whitlam in the parliament or
Malcolm Fraser in the cabinet and party rooms. The leadership contests that had
bedevilled the Liberals since before Holt was lost at sea would have erupted as
Snedden tried to steer a derailing economy, with Fraser and Andrew Peacock
scheming against him and each other. Without a Whitlam administration to beat
up, Bjelke-Petersen might never have fancied himself as prime minister. The Liberals would also have had to
cope with Country Party demands over the value of the currency. In those days,
the government set the exchange rate within the parameters of the balance of
payments. The last years of the Coalition had been torn by brawls over
revaluation. Too high a dollar made farm exports less competitive. When I
bought travellers cheques for Mexico in April 1974, the Australian dollar was at
its all time high against the US dollar. Two of ours would buy three of theirs,
the inverse of today’s rates. A Coalition cabinet might have split at once over
the pace and extent of devaluation. Most significantly, the Coalition
government would not have been burdened with what John Howard identified as
‘the extent to which the pre-election trauma of 1975 imposed a sense of unease,
illegitimacy and hesitancy on a government election with a record majority’.
Whether the Coalition would have used its clear conscience to deregulate the
banks, float the dollar, end central wage-fixing, privatise Telecom and slash
protection between 1974 and 1977 is unlikely. The Coalition and our country have
paid a price for blaming the economic collapse on Whitlam, socialism, scandals
and incompetence. No matter how ignorant or ill-conceived were Labor’s economic
policies, they merely compounded the problems; they could not cause them. Billy
McMahon’s retaining the prime ministership in 1972 would not have rescued the
world’s monetary regime or averted the oil price shock. For as long as the Dow Jones glides
towards infinity and the Japanese keep hiding their losses, John Howard will
not wish that he had come second.
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