Chapter 19
Taking Things Apart in the 1960s and 1970s
In This Chapter
Letting go of Britain as economic and strategic security blanket — reluctantly!
Watching as the baby boomer tidal wave hits
Bringing in sweeping changes with Whitlam
The long boom and widespread prosperity in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s brought a whole new series of challenges. Throughout this period, it became increasingly clear that Australia’s traditional protector and economic partner of the previous 170 years, Britain, was no longer willing or able to play the same roles. New economic growth and trade with previous mortal war enemy Japan and with ally America became the new focus.
The other big drama of the 1960s and 1970s was essentially the conflict between the old guard and the young challengers. On the side of the established power were Prime Minister Menzies, Labor opposition leader, Arthur Calwell, and even the entrenched members of the public service. On the side of the challengers were the baby boomers. This new generation was predominantly middle-class and better educated than their parents’ generation. They were the first generation to watch television, to go to university, and to begin their careers in a period of full employment and continued rapid economic expansion. They pursued a libertarian lifestyle that rejected many of the social models and mores of their parents. They protested against conscription and marched to end Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. While the earlier problems of ensuring prosperity and stability seemed to be resolved, new issues of social justice for Indigenous Australians and women came to the fore.
The first prime minister to harness some this mood for change was Harold Holt, who took over after Menzies retired in 1966; unfortunately, Holt drowned the following year. The next was Gough Whitlam. He led the Labor Party back into power after 23 long years in the political wilderness, and then devoted much of his brief period in government to implementing a generation’s worth of change. Unsurprisingly, many people found this to be too much too soon. Simultaneously, the economic goal posts were shifting. The long boom had been going for so long that politicians, voters and social planners all tended to take it for granted. Under Whitlam’s rule (and due to various global factors largely beyond his control) the music stopped, but Gough kept dancing — until the Governor-General turned out the lights.
In this chapter, I look at how postwar Australia grappled with the big question of how to proceed in the world when two of the overarching certainties and influences on life in the first half of the 20th century — British economic and military power, and the vicissitudes of world war and depression — had been demolished.
Moving On from Empire
In the 1950s and 1960s, Australians still predominantly thought of themselves as British. Part of what they thought made Australia so good was its continuance and improvement of the ‘British way of life’, with its institutions, legal code, language and cultural practices that had arrived in Australia through the previous 150 years.
Yet, as the two countries changed, people began to question whether their relationship should change as well. Britain made the decision for Australia and ended the close association when it chose to enter the European trading market in the 1960s. Australia felt abandoned, and had no choice but to turn to other arrangements with other nations. Oddly, one of the most important new relationships was with Japan, the nation Australia had recently been locked in a terrible war with. Another nation was less odd — America, the country that had been called on for help during the invasion crisis of 1942. And when America asked for help in South-East Asia, Australia moved quickly to comply.
Still loving Britain
Britain was embedded in the political, social and cultural fabric of postwar Australia even as the two countries were drifting apart economically. This led to a desire to maintain the deep political roots that connected Britain with Australian democracy.
War hero Field Marshal Sir William Slim was appointed the new Governor-General in 1953, and was a wildly popular choice, chiefly because he was British. Having Slim around reminded people of Britain’s ‘finest hour’ of the modern age, when Britain had stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany in the early years of World War II.
In the 1950s, the British House of Commons presented the Australian House of Representatives with the gift of a new mace. The mace was a close copy of the original held in Westminster, and was, said the presenting British MP, ‘the symbol of the Crown which unites our two parliaments and our two peoples’. At the same time, the National Library of Canberra purchased and put on permanent display one of the original surviving copies of the Magna Carta, the 13th-century agreement between King John and the nobles guaranteeing rights and liberties, and considered one of the foundation documents of parliamentary democracy.
Queen Elizabeth II toured Australia in 1954, the first reigning monarch to do so, and everyone went nuts in a paroxysm of imperial loyalty. As part of her six-month Coronation Tour of 12 Commonwealth countries, the Queen spent eight weeks touring Australia, visiting every capital city except Darwin and taking in some 70 country towns at a hectic rate of five engagements per day.
The Queen’s visit was the last major public event in Australia before the arrival of television (in 1956, just in time for the Melbourne Olympics), and so people who wanted to see her had to line the streets as she went by. Practically the entire nation wanted to see her — a staggering 75 per cent of Australia’s then population (between 6 and 7 million from a total of 9 million people) came out in person to wave hello to the Queen.
Losing Britain all the same
At the same time as Australia was declaring its love for Britain politically and culturally, Britain was becoming less important as a trading partner. Although the Imperial Preference system was renegotiated in Australia’s favour in 1956, in 1961 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced that Britain would be seeking full membership of the European Economic Community (EEC, a precursor to the European Union).
For Britain, this move was a no-brainer — trade with the rest of the Commonwealth was declining, and Europe was expanding rapidly into an economic powerhouse — but in Australia, the reaction was deep shock. The Country Party leader, John McEwen, was one of the most shocked, because Britain entering the EEC would mean Britain accepting barriers against Australia’s primary produce — wheat, wool and dried fruits. ‘We were left without a friend in the world’, McEwen said. The Australian Financial Review thought differently, arguing, ‘We may have to stop thinking about Britain as “Home” and start thinking urgently about getting to know very much more of our Asian neighbours’ needs’. This was a novel idea, especially for a country that still maintained an anti-Asian immigration policy.
Yet, the times were undeniably changing. In 1967, for the first time in its history, Australia decided not to follow Britain’s devaluation of the pound, and Britain slipped to seventh on the ladder of Australian export markets. In February 1973, the UK–Australia trade pact came to an end as Britain entered the EEC. All previous preferential trade agreements between the two countries were now off.
Looking to Japan and America
With economic ties to Britain lessening, Australia had to look elsewhere. In a great irony, the enemy of less than 20 years earlier, Japan, was now one of the strongest options economically.
In 1957, an Australian–Japanese Commerce Agreement was struck. For the Australian public, who still had images of POWs and World War II uppermost in their minds when they thought about Japan, this agreement proved a hard sell. But after Britain went after membership of the European community in 1961 (see preceding section), public opinion changed significantly. The 1957 Agreement with Japan was renewed in 1963, and this time everyone greeted it warmly.
In 1966, Japan overtook Britain as a leading export market for Australia, and by 1970, more than 50 per cent of Australia’s exports went to Asia. Japan replaced Europe as the major market for wheat and wool in 1972.
Trading with America proved to be an easier sell to the Australian people. Rather than being the chief enemy, America was the nation that had, in most people’s eyes, helped save Australia in World War II. Australia and the US also shared similar origins. Both had begun as British settlements and colonies, and America provided a template for what a viable alternative to Britain might look like for Australia. On top of that, with the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951 and the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1972, Australia’s defence interests were intimately bound up with America. (See the following section for more on Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.)
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, America was a significant trading partner for Australia. By the late 1950s, the US had replaced Britain as the chief recipient of Australia’s beef exports. When Cuba went communist under Fidel Castro in the late 1950s, America placed a trade embargo on the country, opening up a big market for Australian sugar.
Most of all, however, America was valuable to Australian economic life because of its large-scale investment. Australian postwar manufacturing and industry couldn’t have expanded at the rate that it did without massive amounts of American capital being invested. By 1965, American interests controlled more than 90 of Australia’s top 300 companies.
Defending Australia . . . with America
In 1962, Bob Menzies declared ‘no country in the world more than ours needs great and powerful friends’. Ardent British imperialist that he was, Menzies didn’t actually mean just Britain but also America. Britain, less powerful with every passing year, was withdrawing from the Asia-Pacific region just as America, engaged in a global strategic struggle with Russia and China, was seeking to fill the post-colonial vacuum. Bases to assist US communications and equipped with nuclear missile-carrying submarines were established on Australia’s North-West Cape, and later a highly classified satellite ground station was set up at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. The alliance met with the strong approval of the Australian people — at elections it was a consistent vote-winner for successive Liberal governments in the 1950s and 1960s.
The reality of being in an alliance with a ‘great and powerful friend’ can, however, involve following the powerful ally into regional conflicts and wars — if you’re dependent on a global superpower for your security, you’re going to find yourself popping up in all sorts of unlikely places. In the 1960s, this meant a civil war in Vietnam, where communist and non-communist forces were clashing.
In 1962, Australia sent 30 military advisers to help train the South Vietnamese Army, signalling the quiet beginnings of a long-term involvement. In July 1964, the first Australian battle casualty occurred and in November of the same year, Menzies reintroduced compulsory military service: Men aged 20 were liable for two years’ service if selected by a lottery of birthdates.
In April 1965, Menzies decided to send a battalion of combat troops to Vietnam. Although Menzies said this was based on a request from the government of South Vietnam, the real decision had been made in cabinet three weeks prior to his announcement and three weeks prior to a request from South Vietnam being made (and, even then, the request was only made after some behind-the-scenes prompting). It was agreed in cabinet that the US would appreciate a material display of support, especially as other large powers like Britain and France seemed to be dragging their feet.
Calwell, the Labor opposition leader and fiercely against conscription (he had denounced his own leader, John Curtin, for introducing a limited version of it in World War II), made a prescient speech against Menzies’s decision to send the first combat battalion to Vietnam: ‘We do not think it is a wise decision. We do not think it is a timely decision. We do not think it is a right decision. We do not think it will help the fight against communism . . . Our men will be fighting the largely indigenous Vietcong in their own home territory . . . They will be fighting . . . in support . . . of an unstable, inefficient, partially corrupt military regime . . . our present policy will, if not changed, surely and inexorably lead to American humiliation in Asia’.
Ultimately, Calwell’s prediction proved to be spot-on. At the time, however, the threat of communism’s spread further south and downward into Australia’s immediate neighbourhood, and the desire to aid America proved powerful inducements to get involved and stay involved. In 1966, Australia’s new Prime Minister, Harold Holt, trebled troop involvement to 4,500, which included for the first time National Service conscripts. By 1969, Australia had deployed more than a third of its available combat strength in Vietnam (more than 8,500 troops). Overall, some 60,000 Australians participated in the war, and 521 Australians were killed by the time Saigon fell and the South Vietnamese were defeated in 1975.
Was it worth it? Considering that after the fall of South Vietnam no other nearby nations collapsed into communist dictatorship, you’d have to say a resounding No. But there’s no way of measuring what might have happened if there had been no holding operation in Vietnam, which delayed communist success by more than a decade. Then there was the Realpolitik — sometimes you just have to go in to bat for the superpower that happens to be underwriting your security.
Attack of the Baby Boomers!
The baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s created a generation growing up in a new environment of prosperity. Whereas the varying fortunes and hardships of world war and economic depression had largely shaped their parents’ outlook on life, baby boomers were the beneficiaries of improved standards of living and education. The 1960s and 1970s will be forever marked with the imprint left on it by this generation.
For the baby boomers, gaining a university education began to approach the norm rather than being the reward of an elite. The emergence of highly educated baby boomers in Australian society had a profound impact on entrenched attitudes in Australian culture, administration and government. Long-standing policies such as the White Australia Policy came to be seen as untenable in the modern era. Music, tastes, fashions and philosophies took distinctly new directions, and a new air of rebellion became manifest.
Ending White Australia
The greatest occasion of mass crowd hysteria previous to the Beatles tour (see the sidebar ‘From rock and roll to Merseybeat’) had been in 1919 when then Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes had returned to Australia from the Versailles Peace Conference, boasting that he’d secured Australia’s White Australia Immigration Restriction Policy. Crowds were spontaneously rapturous then, but 45 years later, White Australia’s keenest enthusiasts weren’t given to outbursts of spectacular emotion.
Increasingly, the divide between those for and those against the continuation of the White Australia Policy became generational. People from all parts of the political spectrum who had reached maturity in Australia before World War II couldn’t help but think that abandoning the policy was akin to national suicide. For the generation coming of age in the 1960s, the policy was a national embarrassment that needlessly offended most of Australia’s immediate neighbours — not to mention the vast majority of newly independent nations in the Commonwealth (the new association that had emerged from the old British Empire).
Getting White Australia policies removed proved to be a long, drawn-out process that only succeeded as the ‘new guard’ began to assert their influence in both the Liberal and Labor Parties and in the public service.
In the red corner — the Labor Party
Arthur Calwell was the Labor Minister who engineered the great migration revolution in the late 1940s when he abandoned the established Brits-only migration policy, and opened the migration door to people from all over Europe (refer to Chapter 17). However, while Calwell was for a ‘melting pot’, he wanted the pot to only contain European ingredients. He saw the White Australia Policy as a vital plank protecting workers from too many (low-paid) non-European workers entering the country, and Calwell proved to be one of the fiercest guardians of White Australia, both in power and out.
In the early 1960s, while the party was still in opposition, the younger generation within the Labor Party — including Don Dunstan, Gough Whitlam and Lance Barnard — tried to have a commitment to the White Australia Policy removed from the party platform. Calwell led a rearguard action against this move. ‘Only cranks, long-hairs, academics and do-gooders’ wanted to get rid of the policy, he said — Australian workers would never accept its removal.
After repeated attempts at successive annual Labor Party conferences, the White Australia Policy commitment was finally removed from party policy in 1965. And even then most of the old guard — such as Calwell and the immigration spokesman, Fred Daly — only agreed because they assumed that the change was cosmetic, and that the bipartisan agreement for Australia to maintain complete ‘social homogeneity’ would mean the White Australia Policy would continue to be applied in practice.
On the blue side — the Liberal Party
In the Liberal–Country Party coalition government, a similar phenomenon to the Labor Party experience took place.
The top bureaucrat in the immigration department was Peter Heydon, who had taken over in 1961. Having represented Australia in India in the 1950s, he was acutely aware of how offensive newly independent non-white nations found the policy, and he was determined to do something about it.
Figuring that a large-scale public debate and its attendant controversies would be counterproductive, Heydon, along with many of the younger generation of career bureaucrats, set about effecting a quiet revolution. By loosening the administrative restrictions to the point of non-existence, Heydon and his supporters dismantled the policy from within, even while denying in public that there was any intention of removing it as official policy.
When ex–world champion cyclist Hubert Oppenheimer became Immigration Minister in 1963, he worked with Heydon. In 1964, Oppenheimer took to cabinet a proposal to review the non-European elements of Australia’s migration policy. The changes being requested were relatively small, Oppenheimer said, and would resolve administrative inconsistencies that would have to be dealt with eventually. Oppenheimer argued it was better to make these changes now, rather than being forced to make them later, unwillingly, with controversy and the opprobrium of world opinion. The idea of a policy review was supported by most of the younger generation in the cabinet but ran into a road-block — Prime Minister Menzies.
Like Calwell, Menzies had been pivotal in ensuring Australia had made the great demographic leap postwar to allow substantial inflows of non-British migrants. However, again like Calwell, he was now very much of the old guard. To the objection that the White Australia Policy was discriminatory, he had previously retorted that it was ‘a good thing, too’, adding that it was ‘the right sort of discrimination’.
Ending the policy finally . . . sort of
Despite the wishes of many, the White Australia Policy couldn’t be abandoned until after Menzies retired at the start of 1966 and his long-time understudy, Harold Holt, took over as prime minister.
At his first parliamentary appearance after becoming prime minister, Holt announced policy changes that removed restrictions on non-Europeans, citing the changed international environment in which 1960s Australia found itself. (At the time, 12,000 Asian students were entering Australia annually to study, trade with Asia was expanding rapidly, military and diplomatic involvement with the region was becoming ever-more intricate, and tourism within the region was also growing.)
Insisting on the right to say No — to war
One of the most remarkable changes to the national psyche that baby boomers left for future Australian generations was the simple idea of refusing to fight in a war. For the first time in Australian history, a significantly large minority of the younger generation refused to involve themselves in a war Australia’s leaders had committed to.
While pro-American feeling had helped the Liberal–Country coalition secure a massive election victory in 1966 and then a narrow victory in 1969 (on the back of ongoing support for American forces in Vietnam), from 1970 the tide of resistance rose rapidly. Opposition to the war crystallised when Menzies and then Holt introduced forms of conscription.
Conscription had a track record of fostering animosity in Australian life. The greatest social division the nation ever experienced had been during the conscription referendums of World War I, which led to a split in the Labor Party (refer to Chapter 13). In the 1960s and early 1970s, the opposition to conscription became far more generational. In 1970, marches were held across Australia to protest against Australia’s involvement in Vietnam, with a large part of the opposition stemming from Australian males being forced to fight. Across the country, an estimated 200,000 people marched, with 100,000 of these joining the one Melbourne protest (see figure), making these protests the largest street demonstrations in Australian history. In 1971, Liberal Prime Minister McMahon announced that just about all Australian troops would be home by Christmas, and the new Labor government in 1972 abolished conscription completely.
However, the bipartisan commitment to what Holt described as the ‘maintenance of the essential homogeneity of its people’ continued. In short, Australia was reserving the right to maintain controls and restrictions on migration flows, but was now recognising the need to do so with a little more nuance and deftness of touch than its previous preference for the ultimate in blunt instruments, the White Australia Policy.
No serious alteration in the proportion of non-white immigrants in Australia took place until the late 1970s, when a new social policy — multiculturalism — was established in place of social homogeneity (see Chapter 20 for more on this development).
Gaining rights for Indigenous Australians
The new mood in national affairs meant that the 1960s and 1970s witnessed two significant shifts in the way Indigenous Australians were treated. Success at a referendum in 1967 meant that Aboriginals would finally receive equal treatment under the Constitution and under Commonwealth law. Simultaneously, a movement for land rights began to flourish, asserting that Indigenous Australians had special rights to parts of Australian land that all Australians should acknowledge and respect.
Riding for Indigenous rights
In 1965, Charles Perkins, an Indigenous soccer star who became Australia’s first Indigenous university graduate, began a series of ‘Freedom Rides’. Inspired by footage of American civil rights campaigners then being broadcast on television, Perkins initiated a series of rides to various parts of rural NSW, bringing public attention to towns where racism was entrenched in local practices. In one town, Indigenous ex-soldiers were refused drinks at the local RSL. At another, Indigenous children weren’t allowed to swim in the town pool.
The Freedom Rides took place as a popular campaign to remove discriminatory provisions from the Australian Constitution was reaching its peak. Mass petitions were raised and public meetings held until May 1967, when a referendum was held on the question. On 27 May, an overwhelming 90.8 per cent of Australian voters said Yes to the question of finally including Aboriginal people in the national census. The referendum marked an epoch.
Australia didn’t change entirely just because of one referendum. The following year, Charles Perkins and ‘Pastor Doug’ Nicholls, two generations of Aboriginal activists, were refused drinks at a Cairns pub because of their skin colour.
Pushing for land rights
In 1966, Gurindji Aborigines in the Northern Territory walked off the cattle stations where they’d been working. The walk-off, which began as a protest against intolerable working conditions but soon became a nine-year struggle to gain title over their land, marks the beginning of the Aboriginal land rights movement.
The distinctive Aboriginal flag was designed and used for the first time in 1971 as part of a campaign to win recognition for indigenous land rights. In December of the following year, protesters pitched an Aboriginal ‘Tent Embassy’ on the lawn outside Parliament House in Canberra. In the same month, the new Labor Government set up a Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and established a judicial inquiry into Aboriginal land rights. The inquiry reported in 1974 that, where traditional land ownership rights could be proved as enduring in Aboriginal reserves and unalienated Crown lands, Indigenous Australians should be given title.
In 1975, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam flew to the Northern Territory and in a ceremony loosely based on the one used by John Batman and the Werundjeri people in 1835 (refer to Chapter 7) poured earth and sand through Gurindji clan leader Vincent Lingiari’s hands, symbolising the return of land to local indigenous ownership.
In December 1976, the Fraser Liberal–Coalition government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Bill.
Fighting for women’s rights
Women gained rights over their lives in crucial new ways as the baby boomers came of age. At the beginning of the 1960s, a new form of contraception — the contraceptive pill, or just ‘the pill’ — became widely available. In the 1970s, ‘fault-free divorce’ was introduced. Both measures gave women considerably more freedom in deciding what they wanted to do in their lives. Simultaneously, entrenched inequalities — in such things as pay and treatment — were being vigorously opposed.
The pill was a form of birth control that meant that women had close-to-complete control over their own reproduction. Now they could be sexually active without the constant risk of unwanted pregnancy, and could choose much more effectively when they did have children. This had clear flow-on social effects. Clearly, many women valued such a freedom, because by 1970 a third of all Australian women between the ages of 15 and 49 were taking the contraceptive.
In 1975, the Family Law Act was passed. Coming into force from January 1976, the Act established that divorce could be granted after 12 months’ separation and ‘irretrievable breakdown’ in the marriage. (Previous to this, fault, such as adultery, had to proven before a divorce could be granted.) A new Family Court was established, to apply principles of fairness and justice to people ‘undergoing the misfortune of a broken marriage’, and to resolve all related disputes around marriage, divorce and child custody.
The long-term effect of the ‘fault-free’ divorce in Australia has been mixed. On the definite plus side is the simple fact that it is now easier for married couples who have since come to dislike each other intensely to get away from each other — or, indeed, for women trapped with violent or controlling husbands to leave. On the minus side is the acute grief that is often caused by protracted custody battles, as well as the loss of marriage as an enduring social institution, something stronger than the often passing whims of infatuation and personal attraction.
For women, the combined effects of the contraceptive pill and the fault-free divorce were enormous. Instead of marriage and raising a family being the only real option for women, possibilities started to open up.
Crashing — or Crashing Through — With Gough
In 1972, Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party to victory after 23 years in the political wilderness. While Menzies had retired in 1966 (after 17 years as prime minister) and many substantial alterations had taken place in the years since, it was Whitlam’s ascension in 1972 that broadcast — in loudspeaker, at full volume — that a break with the immediate past of Australia’s history was being inaugurated. Whitlam described his approach as ‘crash-through or crash’ and his three years of prime ministership, like his six years leading the opposition preceding it, proved him right on both counts.
It’s (finally Labor’s) Time!
Gough Whitlam replaced Calwell as leader of the Labor Party in 1966, and spent much of the next six years seriously renovating the political platform of the party — getting agreement on finally eliminating Communist Party alliances and shared union ticket agreements, removing a stated and explicit commitment to the White Australia Policy, and dropping Labor Party opposition to state aid to independent (read Catholic) schools.
Whitlam himself was very much of the ‘new guard’ — unlike previous leaders and heroes such as Chifley, Curtin and Calwell, Whitlam was no working-class hero but was profoundly middle class in origin, which made him closer to Menzies than Chifley in background. He concentrated on appealing to Australians who had largely left the class allegiances of traditional neighbourhoods behind when they moved into new suburbs after the war, and were more concerned about ‘quality of life’ issues like health, education, urban infrastructure, regional development, social justice and equity.
In 1969, Whitlam recorded the largest pro-Labor swing since Federation — 7.1 per cent of the national vote swung to Labor as the Coalition majority was sliced from 40 to 7 seats. The Coalition only held onto power through preferences given by the DLP (refer to Chapter 18 for the 1955 Labor split and the DLP).
In the following two years, Whitlam managed to rub many on his own side the wrong way — Gil Duthie, the parliamentary whip, described him as ‘tactless, arrogant, domineering’ — but he had certainly cut through with the public. Opinion polls showed Labor was more popular than all other parties combined. The 1972 election policy launch was attended by sports stars and celebrities, and Whitlam launched the most famous political slogan in Australian history — ‘It’s Time’ (for a change).
On election day, the swing to Labor was 2.5 per cent, which was the smallest of any swing either way in the previous five elections. It was, however, enough for Whitlam to get over the line and win.
The Whitlam typhoon
Once in government, Whitlam didn’t waste time. Even before the government was officially sworn in, he formed what was nicknamed ‘The Duumvirate’ (meaning a government of two) with his deputy, Lance Barnard. They divvied up most of the large ministerial portfolios between them and got to work.
In the space of two weeks, 40 decisions were made and acted on. The actions included the following:
Conscription was ended.
All previously arrested draft-resisters were released.
Australia’s previous votes on anti-apartheid resolutions in the UN were reversed.
The first steps to granting Aboriginal land rights were taken.
The Australian Arbitration Commission was asked to reopen its hearing on equal pay for women.
Turning up for Labor’s inauguration, old hand Fred Daly looked around and was struck by how different Labor parliament members looked — ‘What a change from our predecessors: trendy dressers, bearded long hairs, short back and sides — you name it, we had it. “It’s Time” had done the trick.’
After the government was fully sworn in, the pace was maintained. In 1973, Whitlam introduced 118 bills to parliament in the first autumn period of sitting (between February and April), and 103 were passed (the average from 1950 to 1972 had been 53). Parliament had its greatest number of sitting hours in 50 years. Commonwealth Departments increase from 27 to 37, and 39 new international treaties were struck.
Over the course of Whitlam’s term:
All tuition fees at Australian universities were abolished.
Maternity leave was granted for the first time for working mothers in the public service.
A set of national awards — the Order of Australia — replaced the traditional imperial honours list.
A new Racial Discrimination Act was introduced.
A new scheme of medical and hospital benefits came into operation, giving Australians free health care.
The old Tariff Board was abolished and protective tariffs for Australian industries were cut by 25 per cent.
When it came to introducing reforms, Whitlam wasn’t going to die wondering.
When the wheels fall off . . .
Under Whitlam, big changes were made in a short period of time. Even on Whitlam’s side of politics, some thought too much was being done too soon. The amount of time that members of parliament had to spend in parliament reduced the amount of time they could spend in their electorates explaining all the changes that were being made. In such a drastically transforming environment, where so many previously presumed certainties were being up-ended, this was risky. Combined with a rapidly deteriorating global economic situation, it proved to be fatal.
In October 1973, the Israeli–Arab conflict in the Middle East led to international oil embargoes. Oil quadrupled in price by the end of 1973, and the ‘oil shock’ effects were felt around the world.
In Australia, inflation was soon ‘galloping like a Randwick runner’ (in the words of old Labor diehard Fred Daly) and production was stagnant, making for a new phenomenon of ‘stagflation’. Whitlam ignored Treasury advice and continued with massive high-cost projects — over three years, public expenditure doubled. While this was going on, some of Whitlam’s other reforms were having a negative impact on the economy. The effect of significant tariff cuts and women being granted equal pay were felt across major industries — particularly textiles. Unemployment surged past 250,000 in 1975. After decades of the unemployment rate generally remaining below 3 per cent, in 1975 the unemployment rate climbed to 4.9 per cent.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Resources, Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor (known affectionately as ‘the strangler’ for his not entirely subtle methods of persuading political friends and enemies around to his viewpoint) had been negotiating for a $4 billion overseas loan to develop Australian resources — oil, gas and uranium — but the difficult economic environment made raising these kind of funds difficult.
Connor dealt with shadier and shadier characters in his attempt to meet the elusive (and, ultimately, disastrous) dream of securing Australian control over its own resources. Indeed, Connor’s London-based broker and intermediary with Middle Eastern funds, Tirath Khemlani, looked like a caricature of a shady dealer. By this stage, Connor had lied to Whitlam — who had consequentially unwittingly lied to parliament — saying that he was no longer seeking such funds. When the truth came out, all hell broke loose.
The loans affair wasn’t the only scandal and stuff-up that dogged the end of Whitlam’s government, but it was the biggest. After it came to light, the opposition leader, Liberal Malcolm Fraser, forced a constitutional crisis in parliament.
As the opposition had the majority in the Senate, it could block supply, which meant it could deny the government the funds it needed to govern. Although usually the opposition would not interfere in the government’s mandate to govern, Fraser jumped at the chance to do so, wanting to force Whitlam to call an election — which a clearly unpopular Labor Government would lose. Whitlam refused and stood his ground. The nation stopped, and watched.
In the end, the impasse was resolved by the Queen’s representative, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr. On 11 November 1975, Kerr sacked Whitlam and appointed Fraser the interim prime minister until elections could be held. Having already declared ‘Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor General!’, Whitlam urged supporters to ‘maintain the rage’, and added for good measure, ‘shame, Fraser, shame’. However, the election held soon after swung things decisively in the favour of the Liberal–Country Party coalition. Fraser came to power with a large margin.