Harnessing the power of the state in the dogged pursuit of public ideals may seem like an anachronistic notion nowadays in most western democracies, but it was something of a novelty for Australians when, back in December 1972, they voted in their first Labor government in nearly a quarter of a century.
The new prime minister, who both literally and figuratively towered above his contemporaries, was a man in a hurry. He couldn’t have known then that his government, despite a second electoral victory in 1974, would last for less than three years. He somehow realized that there was no time to waste.
Gough Whitlam and the party’s deputy leader, Lance Bernard, were sworn in as a two-man government, with 27 portfolios between them, and immediately began implementing the platform that had won them a small but clear parliamentary majority.
This platform included an end to military conscription, a thorough disengagement with the war effort in Vietnam, equal rights and opportunities for women, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, free higher education, health insurance for all, land rights for Aborigines, funding for the arts, an immigration policy wherein skin color was no longer a consideration, and a broadly independent foreign policy that broke with the custom of blindly following the trajectory set out by the Foreign Office in London or the State Department in Washington.
A key step in the latter respect was formal recognition of what was back then still referred to as Red China. As opposition leader, Whitlam had visited Beijing in 1971, and been pilloried for doing so by the conservative government. That line of attack inevitably invited ridicule when it turned out that a concurrent, albeit secret, visitor to the Chinese capital was none other than Henry Kissinger, and the profoundly anti-communist US president Richard Nixon followed shortly afterwards.
On a subsequent visit to China as prime minister, Whitlam was tickled when he asked Mao Zedong what he thought would have happened had Nikita Khrushchev been assassinated rather than John F. Kennedy, and the chairman responded that he was sure of only one thing: Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs. Khrushchev.
By the time Whitlam entered his 90s, he was widely regarded as more than a national treasure. Folk hero would be a more accurate description.
This stature had much to do with Whitlam’s political martyrdom. On Nov. 11, 1975, a governor-general Whitlam had appointed, Sir. John Kerr, dismissed his government. The ostensible excuse was that the Senate where the Labor Party did not have a majority was blocking the supply of funds required to keep the country running.
Kerr, notorious not just for his predilection for drink but also for his close connections with the intelligence community — and, at least by proxy, their British and American counterparts — swore in opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as prime minister, and the latter put his signature to documents seeking a fresh election before clear-cut votes of no-confidence and censure in the House of Representatives, where Labor had a clear majority.
The conspiracy wasn’t restricted to Fraser and Kerr, but involved the chief justice of the High Court and at least one of his colleagues on the bench. Even more disturbingly, there is substantial circumstantial evidence that the CIA was a party to what was effectively a coup — even though, unlike Chile two years earlier and Pakistan less than two years later, the military was not directly involved.
This aspect of the dismissal tends to be summarily dismissed by most commentators in Australia, and Whitlam himself was apparently unconvinced, despite being well aware of substantial CIA involvement in Australian politics in the 1970s — and despite a telling encounter with newly inducted US Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher in mid-1977, in which the latter passed on a message from President Jimmy Carter to the effect that “the US administration would never again interfere in the domestic political processes of Australia.”
Expatriate journalist John Pilger makes a compelling case in this relation in a chapter titled The Coup in his 1989 book The Secret Country, suggesting that the urgency in getting rid of Whitlam — at a time when other ostensible allies such as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt were also being destabilized — related to the fear that he would call time on the arrangement that allowed the US to maintain a crucial listening post at its Pine Gap base in northern Australia. He cites old CIA hands such as Victor Marchetti as admitting that a much subtler process than in Chile was involved in overturning the elected order in Australia.
Some of the Whitlam government’s achievements were subsequently reversed, not so much by the Fraser government, as by the next Labor administration under the neoliberalism-inclined Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. But several have endured, reinforcing the impression that, rather than an aberration, the advent of Whitlam signaled the birth of an era. It has been likened by some to a Technicolor figure confidently striding into a black-and-white scenario, and by others to Australia being dragged — kicking and screaming at one level, elated at another — into the 60s at the start of the 70s.
The best verdict on Australia’s most erudite head of government, meanwhile, came from a literary acquaintance. “It was an unusual experiment for Australia to choose as its prime minister its most intelligent man,” noted the American novelist Gore Vidal. “It will not, I fear, be repeated.” Sadly, he was, as usual, on the ball.
