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ACTION PAINTING

Clearly in our thrust towards a more equal society we shall come into conflict with entrenched interests, determined to hang on to the privileges granted to them at the public expense over the past generation. We should not underestimate their determination and their powers of misrepresentation.¹
—Gough Whitlam

IN EARLY August 1973, soon after Whitlam’s return from his meeting with President Richard Nixon, the Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, was invited ‘for a drink and an informal conversation’ with the Governor of Western Australia, Sir Douglas Kendrew. Kendrew, an old-style British military appointment of more than a decade, was soon to retire and Hasluck expected that this might be the focus of their discussions. ‘Somewhat to my surprise’, Hasluck recalled with great deliberation, Kendrew spoke extravagantly of the ‘threat to the nation’ posed by the Labor government and of the grave need to ‘save Australia’ from Gough Whitlam.

What shocked Hasluck even more than the state governor so forcefully repugning an elected national government, was the carefully devised plan Kendrew then outlined to meet this threat: to remove the Whitlam government through the intervention of the non-Labor states.² The problem for Kendrew was that Western Australia was no longer a non-Labor state, the Labor Party under Premier John Tonkin having defeated the long-standing Coalition government in 1971. It was this situation that the West Australian governor now sought to change. To Kendrew, the leader of the state Opposition, Sir Charles Court—‘for whom he has a strong admiration’—was the only man who could ‘save Australia’ and so, before removing the Whitlam government, the governor would first have to remove the state Labor government.

Kendrew’s plan was to ‘get Court into office in Western Australia’ in order for Court to ‘lead a fight against the Federal government with the assistance of the non-Labor Premiers of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria’. The particular strategy for achieving this was set out: the Opposition would reject the government’s supply Bills in the Western Australian Upper House (where it had a majority) and force Premier Tonkin to a double dissolution. At that point, the Governor would refuse Premier Tonkin a double dissolution and instead install in office the leader of the Opposition, Sir Charles Court. Kendrew would then grant the new, unelected premier supply ‘by royal warrant’—a colonial concept in a postcolonial world that, he assured a quizzical Hasluck, was being ‘looked at’ by the state solicitor-general. Hasluck was astounded as much by the constitutional and political impropriety outlined to him as by the realisation that the Governor had already discussed it at length with the leader of the Opposition and that the entire strategy had been devised ‘in collusion’ with him, behind the back of the Labor premier.³

Perhaps it never occurred to Kendrew that the Governor-General might cavil at such executive disregard for a government, at such extraordinary deception of a government and its leader. Kendrew could not have imagined, as he regaled Hasluck with his plan to replace not one but two Labor governments, the excellent relationship that had developed between Whitlam and Hasluck. During Whitlam’s early months in office the two men had met regularly. Hasluck recorded that he had had more conversations with Whitlam during his first six months in office than in the full terms of any of his predecessors.⁴ Their discussions were unhurried, ‘easy and cordial’. Whitlam welcomed this rare opportunity to discuss all aspects of politics—from the performance of individual ministers to international diplomacy and relations with the monarchy—‘turning over a few ideas with someone who was detached from argumentation’. The Governor-General, concerned by Whitlam’s remarkable pace and solicitous for his health, spoke to him ‘in a fatherly way’ about preserving his strength, advising him not to put himself under strain, to take time at weekends to walk and to think: ‘Being Prime Minister was not just a “sprint” but a “long distance” race. He not only had to be vigorous, energetic and in full possession of all his powers at the end of six months but also at the end of six years’.⁵ Hasluck was not alone in these concerns; Margaret Whitlam shared them, telling David Frost during a nationally televised interview that she never thought Gough could be busier than he had been in Opposition—but that now he was.⁶

What Whitlam and Hasluck shared above all else was a fundamental respect—for the institutions of government, for their respective positions within that structure, for the processes of government and, more recently, for each other. This institutional propriety was at the core of their renewed relationship, as Whitlam later described it: ‘Hasluck and I got on very well because he was a very competent and proper Governor-General’.⁷ Hasluck understood the paradox in Whitlam: a committed reformer who was also, and just as determinedly, procedurally proper. Several times during their numerous meetings, the Governor-General was struck by Whitlam’s desire to do things ‘in the accustomed way’, by his insistence on adhering to established protocol—on each maintaining their proper roles and responsibilities in their respective positions. This aspect of Whitlam’s character eluded those who could see no further than the radical egalitarianism of the government’s program. The parliamentary system—to Whitlam, Britain’s greatest legacy—had been the path to universal democratic rights and freedoms, and parliamentary government the path to equality and opportunity. The ‘proper role’ of parliament, Whitlam argued to his party colleagues, was as ‘the effective instrument for economic, social and political change … Parliament is the real instrument—the only instrument for achieving democratic socialism in our time’.⁸ Whitlam was a believer not only in the Australian Labor Party as the party of progressive reform but also in parliamentary government and the party system, in the capacity of strong political parties to move into and out of government, as essential for successful parliamentary democracy. Despite the inevitable opposition to the Labor government inside and outside the parliament, he never doubted that the system itself would continue, that the institutional framework for government was inviolable: the public service would work with the new government, the Opposition would oppose, negotiate and rebuild their platform and the parliament would continue to function. In this benign expectation Whitlam was the son of a disinterested public servant first and a politician second. His great mistake was to imagine this expectation could ever be reciprocated.

The unique challenge facing Whitlam was the fundamental distortion in the political process after so many years of unchanging government and the domination of the institutions of government by consistent conservative appointments. The political system had stultified. Parliamentary democracy presumes change, anticipates new governments with new appointments and accommodates alternative policies. By 1972, the normality of political change had been forgotten. It was inevitable that deviations from long-established policies and accepted modes of politics would be seen by some as not merely a change of government but as bad government, even as illegitimate government. Such was the contrast between the emotion and activism of the new government and the jaded indifference of its immediate predecessor that ministerial action and passion could be readily taken as indiscretion, impetuosity and unprofessionalism. Political journalist Paul Kelly considered the phenomenon that quickly took hold in this context—the denial of the legitimacy of the Whitlam government—as immensely significant.⁹

From Senator Reg Withers’ early denunciations of Whitlam’s mandate and assumption of office as an ‘aberration’, as the ‘temporary insanity’ of the Australian electorate, the language of illegitimacy surrounding the Whitlam government was unceasing and ever expanding. It was a peculiar political alchemy as intriguing as it was potent. What began as the typical political bluster of a failed Opposition, hoping for a quick return to the polls, was taken up with particular vehemence by organisations and sectional interests affected by government decisions—from private schools to foreign companies, from churches to private health insurers. Illegitimacy became the prism through which the normal activities of government—from appointments to policies—were seen as more than just the actions of government, as if the Whitlam government was a carefully constructed mask for an unknown, but always disconcerting, intent. This was more than just a difference in political tone or a disagreement over policy: it was a different vocabulary altogether, one that effectively closed normal political debate, as arguments over policy options, differences between the political parties and over specific government decisions were reduced to claims of illegitimacy. A linguistic continuum emerged: from self-interest to incompetence, from impropriety to corruption and even criminality.

Unknown to Whitlam, the first claims of criminality against the government had circulated privately, carrying the weight of the legal opinion furnished by a senior Melbourne QC, in the months after Murphy’s visit to ASIO. The view that Murphy had acted at best improperly and at worst illegally persisted. The following year Sir Robert Menzies inquired of his own former Attorney-General and now Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Garfield Barwick, whether ‘this Murphy chap’ was even a lawyer—‘as you and I understand the term’. ‘No, no, no!’ replied a shocked Barwick, recalling Murphy’s expertise in the dubious realm of industrial rather than constitutional law, his appearances for unionists rather than corporations or high-end tax evaders; ‘he has handled some work in the Industrial Court’, Barwick conceded, ‘which is not legal work at all’.¹⁰

Despite Whitlam’s delight in invoking the actions and constitutional interpretations of the Menzies government in support of his own, Robert Menzies could not abide Whitlam and feared his government. Locked in the time of his own prime ministership, as unchallenged leader of the party of his own creation, Menzies’ views were jaded, immoderate and highly influential. To him, the Whitlam government was but a contemporary incarnation of postwar radicalism, with policies mirroring those of the Communist Party, intent on destroying ASIO, making Australia a republic, cultivating China and disengaging from ‘our old allies like Great Britain and the United States’. Ten months after Whitlam’s election, Menzies wrote to his putative biographer, Lady Frances McNicoll, detailing his concern over the disarray of his own party and the direction of the new government: ‘this Government is carrying out a purely Communist policy’, he told her. Whitlam’s foreign policy aim for a South-East Asian grouping of countries was ‘the old Communist idea which I fought for many years’ and now coming to fruition. He was, he concluded, ‘in a state of despair’.¹¹

Such dramatic, apocalyptic language, shared by those within the hierarchy of the Liberal Party, illustrated the extent to which the Whitlam government was seen as not just a change of government but a potent threat to the nation itself. Barely three months after Whitlam’s victory, in a speech to the Liberal heartland, the Association of Superannuation and Provident Funds of Australia, the Liberal Party’s federal president, Robert Southey, was moved to consider whether the ‘Australian philosophy of life is now doomed’. The fundamental democratic principle of ‘one vote one value’ underpinning the government’s proposed electoral Bills, for instance, Southey considered merely ‘propaganda’. In his view, electorates ought to vary in size and population, in order ‘to serve the interests of justice in the highest sense’. The notion of an unarticulated higher interest, taking precedence over the democratic principle of one vote, one value, was a pervasive sentiment frequently invoked in support of the continuing inequality in electorates. Southey argued for what he also termed a ‘democratic principle’: ‘that electors ought to have equal access to their parliamentary representatives’.¹² Accordingly, large rural electorates would always have a weighting to meet this requirement of ‘equal access’—a recipe for perpetual imbalance.

This was a bitter, institutionally partisan, side of politics that Whitlam would never fully grasp. He was the committed parliamentarian who imagined the rough and tumble of parliamentary party politics would remain in the parliamentary sphere, smouldering but contained. He lacked the political cunning and suspicion of Murphy, who during his first few months in office had ordered his offices swept for surveillance devices, asked ASIO to check on a journalist whom he suspected of spying on both himself and Whitlam, and raised concerns about the US-based Stanford Research Institute that had recently relocated next to his Sydney office.¹³ Whitlam simply had neither time nor inclination for such dramatic concerns, any differences in party politics, he imagined, would be transcended by the shared interests in maintaining political and governance institutions; he would defer to Menzies, respected Hasluck, had specifically recommended Garfield Barwick to the International Court of Justice for its consideration of Australia’s case against the French and had retained the four public servant ‘mandarins’, convinced of their capacity for disinterested service to any government, even his.

By mid-1973 it was clear that the greatest immediate threat to the government’s reform program came neither from the enervating institutional conservatism nor the seriously obstructionist Senate, but from a slowly creeping inflationary pressure that would upset economic possibilities and recast the government’s reform expectations. Whitlam had come to office after decades of economic prosperity: low unemployment at 2 per cent (which was nevertheless the highest unemployment level in over a decade),¹⁴ continuing economic growth and with a detailed platform for reform based on the expectation that those years would continue. While Whitlam showed no great interest in the minutiae of economics, this stemmed less from an unexpected gap in his intellectual capacity—as Bob Hawke said while trying to convince his leader to undertake private economics tuition, Whitlam was so ‘extraordinarily intelligent … that he could acquaint himself with economics’ very quickly, had he wanted to—as from a perceived lack of need.¹⁵ The postwar pattern of low unemployment and economic growth was simply expected to continue. The government’s dilemma, Whitlam thought, would be one of distribution, how to manage the allocation of plentiful funds through Cabinet and caucus, not restraint and certainly not the unthinkable: abandoning aspects of the program altogether.

The first stirrings of the inflationary pressure that would shatter Whitlam’s economic indifference had been felt in the final months of the McMahon government. Treasury’s concern at that time over McMahon’s expansionary election promises had been further fuelled by the high levels of public expenditure on the Labor government’s programs, exacerbated by moves towards equal pay and an increase in average weekly earnings of 14.8 per cent during the government’s first year. Changing economic circumstances internationally provided a further impact over the coming year, from the delayed effects of the massive US expenditures on the Vietnam War to the surging price of oil in the Middle East. These factors combined to deliver increasing inflationary pressure; that this occurred together with signs of increasing unemployment took the government, and Treasury, by surprise—a booming economy not seen since World War II yet with pockets of rising unemployment.¹⁶ The rarity of this situation confounded even the usually clear-sighted and single-minded Treasury officials, who struggled to explain the simultaneously growing unemployment and high demand for labour. Until that point, the presumed certainty that a trade-off could be reached between unemployment and inflation had driven Treasury advice and government policy in an easy zero–sum game: rising inflation could be tempered by unemployment. The figures facing the Whitlam government showed otherwise.

As Frank Crean rose to deliver his first Budget, the prospect of serious inflation was already looming. But the indelible link between the Budget and the government’s reform agenda, the mandate they were so determined to meet, was equally clear; Crean introduced the Budget as ‘not simply an economic document’ but ‘an important instrument whereby we give effect to our goals and aspirations’. If this was a choice between Treasury and the program, Treasury never stood a chance. For not only was the Whitlam government avowedly activist, committed to the implementation of the program, but its leader was unable to take charge of the Cabinet. Whitlam’s own failing in this regard was exacerbated by that of his Treasurer, who was utterly ineffectual: ‘too lazy or weak to put the Treasury line’ in Whitlam’s damning assessment.¹⁷ Whitlam in turn could scarcely control his cabinet any better: ‘in the end the Treasurer is only as strong as the Prime Minister allows him to be’.¹⁸ The best thing that could be said about Crean, and everyone said it, was that he was a good man. But in Cabinet, Crean could not adequately present the Treasury view and in the demarcation disputes over spending that inevitably arose between twenty-seven ministers he commanded little authority. Few submissions were overturned at Crean’s direction and at every Cabinet meeting further spending was approved, as individual ministers who had waited for decades for the opportunity to introduce Labor programs were not about to hesitate now.

For Treasury, arguing for fiscal restraint and reliant on the Treasurer to prosecute its views in Cabinet, the 1973 Budget had been ‘a continual matter of concern for us’.¹⁹ No Labor Treasurer could fail to tackle unemployment, and certainly not Crean, who had seen the impact of the Great Depression firsthand. That unemployment, not inflation, would always be Crean’s prime concern introduced another element into the government’s spiralling relationship with Treasury. As Treasury urged monetary restraint against the demands of the program, the government moved further in its reliance on alternative sources of financial advice. In July 1973, Whitlam accepted a unanimous recommendation from an advisory committee of five, headed by Alf Rattigan (then chairman of the Tariff Board), for a 25 per cent across-the-board cut in tariffs. It was a bold, immediate decision with equally dramatic repercussions: dividing Cabinet, angering farmers and manufacturing industry and workers, and further alienating Treasury, which had not been included on the committee (although Rattigan later recalled that Treasury had declined to participate).²⁰ Whitlam had always intended to overhaul the myriad of generous and inefficient subsidies, concessions and tariffs that had proliferated over the previous twenty-three years and that now cushioned the agricultural sector in the Country Party’s image. To him these represented the worst excesses of Coalition government, a sop to the junior coalition partner and were, like the impropriety of the electoral boundaries, inequitable and unjustifiable except as a means of protecting the Country Party and its rural constituents. His determination to introduce some measure of trade liberalisation in this highly protected sphere could be seen in his immediate post-election decision to bring the Tariff Board into his own prime minister’s portfolio. Soon after the announcement of the tariff cut Whitlam described his government to a sceptical New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures as ‘the first genuine free enterprise government in 23 years’.²¹ On this and other tariff decisions Whitlam worked closely with the Minister for Overseas Trade and Secondary Industry, Jim Cairns, in a rare example of constructive collaboration for these two long-term party opponents.

Rattigan had for many years advocated not only a lowering of tariffs but also a comprehensive review of the tariff system and a recalibration of the disparate levels of protection, a position that had brought him into dispute with the Country Party and its feisty leader, John McEwen, on more than one occasion. By 1970 ad hoc decisions and inconsistent tariffs in the manufacturing sector alone were equivalent to a subsidy of $2700 million every year.²² Whitlam had asked the Rattigan committee to report back within just three weeks. Rattigan handed down the committee’s unanimous recommendations on 16 July; Cabinet met the following day and, after an unusually divided and emotional debate, by a margin of 16 to 10 endorsed the proposal to implement a 25 per cent cut in tariffs.²³ ‘The largest adjustment to Australia’s tariff protection had been achieved without reference to the Tariff Board, without public inquiry and within a matter of weeks.’²⁴

Although the tariff cut was widely described as having been taken ‘against Treasury advice’, things were not quite so simple.²⁵ Treasury at that time supported lowering the relatively high Australian tariff rates but did not support a uniform cut across the board and certainly not as high as 25 per cent, arguing that existing tariff levels should be stepped with smaller tariffs reduced by a smaller amount. The Rattigan committee recommended otherwise and Whitlam—who had consistently criticised previous governments for their failure to act on the recommendations of expert reviews and who described himself as ‘a Rattigan man’—was always going to act on that advice. The highly influential deputy head of Treasury and future National Party senator, John Stone, recalled that Treasury first heard of the government’s decision through the media and immediately urged Whitlam to reconsider: ‘Treasury being Treasury we thought we should advise the government that what they were going to do was second best and it perhaps could have some unhappy consequences for them’.²⁶ The Treasury criticism and counter-advice quickly became public knowledge, infuriating Whitlam and fuelling concerns within government that the head of Treasury, Sir Frederick Wheeler, and key sections of the public service were actively destabilising the government.

Nevertheless, this dramatic cut in tariffs stood as one of the government’s most damaging decisions in its first year, creating hardship for some of its most important constituencies—local manufacturers, small farmers, workers and unionists in the manufacturing sector—and contributing to the deepening sectional antagonisms in small business and agriculture, long dependent on generous and inefficient tariff protection. Clyde Cameron and Jim Cairns were surprise supporters: Cameron claiming that tariffs had enabled some local manufacturers to ‘rip off’ Australian consumers and Cairns, a one-time protectionist, conceding he was a recent convert to the reduction in tariffs, arguing that this was the most rational way to improve the current shortage of goods and deal with inflation.²⁷ The decision also generated serious divisions within the government, as the Rattigan committee acknowledged that, while stimulating imports and cutting inflation, the tariff cut would also ‘require changes in employment’ for up to 33 000 people.²⁸ It was this potential impact on unemployment that caused the greatest dissent within Cabinet.

In the heat of the disputed claims it was frequently overlooked that the Rattigan committee had also recommended targeted assistance for businesses and workers affected by the change, with an initial grant of $25 million to those affected.²⁹ But the furore that greeted the decision to cut tariffs by 25 per cent showed just how difficult it is to remove an existing benefit, even when replacing it with another one. For Labor member Gil Duthie, whose Tasmanian seat of Wilmot took in a large rural community, the tariff cut was just one of several decisions that were ‘a nightmare’ for him as a local member.³⁰ Whitlam was also assailed by the new national president of the Labor Party and president of the ACTU, Bob Hawke, who did not hide his frustration at the tariff decision over which he had not been consulted and that he feared would risk unemployment in the manufacturing heartland in Victoria where unionism was strong and business margins small. As the government prepared for a difficult by-election for the New South Wales seat of Parramatta in September 1973, Whitlam and Hawke had a further bitter exchange over a Cabinet decision, confirmed by Whitlam during the campaign, to conduct a feasibility study for a second airport for Sydney on the margins of the electorate of Parramatta. Hawke reacted with incredulity, describing it as ‘political insanity’ and accusing Whitlam of being out of touch with the electorate.³¹ It was all good theatre but what was more telling was the increasingly strained relationship between Whitlam and his party that this perverse decision represented.

Parramatta was a Liberal seat but only narrowly held by the now retiring Liberal member Nigel Bowen at the 1972 election; the government hoped at least to retain that tight margin and at best, although far less likely, to claim a narrow victory. But the final result was the worst of all possible scenarios: a 6.6 per cent swing against Labor provided the first concrete indication that, despite the government’s reforms aimed squarely at improving services, health, education and employment opportunities in electorates just like Parramatta, the benefits of these were not yet apparent to the voters.³² The party undertook an internal review of its campaign and performance and the national secretary, David Combe, was despatched to discuss with Whitlam the disastrous by-election result. Combe found Whitlam stretched out on the couch in his office, reading reports and in no mood either for criticism or introspection:

 

Gough had a very long lounge in his office and he was lying on it and was not happy, the veins were popping, the teeth were grinding … So I thought well maybe, having known Gough for a long while at this stage, maybe a bit of flattery won’t go astray. So I said, ‘Gough, look, I want you to understand it’s not as if we don’t recognise that you’re the best thing the party has got going for it’, at which stage he swung his legs around leaning forward into my face and said ‘Comrade you’ve got it almost right, the fact is this party has got one thing going for it, now stop wasting its time!’

And I thought, we have a problem.³³

The government’s standing in the rural sector deteriorated further as long-standing generous concessions on petrol costs, subsidies to the dairy industry and a large superphosphate bounty, which provided a disproportionately lucrative rebate for wealthy farmers, all came under scrutiny from the task force headed by ‘Nugget’ Coombs examining the expenditure commitments of the previous government. The removal of the superphosphate bounty and the petrol concession early in 1974, taken to enable a more equitable redistribution of targeted concessions to struggling farmers, far from repairing this damaged relationship only added to the growing rural antagonism. The strain of government under siege was beginning to show on Whitlam as he confronted irate farmers at the opening of an agricultural show in Gippsland. His attempt to ‘placate their mood’ consisted of reminding them that, ‘Your incomes have more than trebled in the last three years’, while his exasperated retort, ‘You’ve never had it so good’,³⁴ showed the truth of Bob Hawke’s observation. The Prime Minister was now officially out of touch.

Whitlam’s problem was that he could not let go, either of the mandate or the program, and neither would he bow to the intense and increasing pressure from sectional interests affected by government policies. On his immensely damaging comments to farmers he was unrepentant: ‘The affront caused by the statement lay only in its accuracy’, he later retorted.³⁵ For Whitlam, government meant action, ‘a command to perform’; he had spent too many years on the barren Opposition benches, watching, powerless and frustrated, as the Menzies government instituted review after review only to refuse even to table their reports and shelved their carefully considered recommendations. Whitlam had experienced this himself as a member of the Constitutional Review Committee in the 1950s; the committee had produced the most detailed and rigorous proposals for constitutional, democratic and electoral reform since Federation, yet the report was never tabled and every one of the recommendations shelved until Menzies’ departure from the parliament. Armed with the findings of a litany of his own reviews, inquiries and commissions, Whitlam was just getting started.

As he approached his first year in office, Whitlam had been considering a ministerial change for some time. In a series of remarkably frank exchanges with the Governor-General, Whitlam had discussed his ministers, expressing frustration and disappointment with some and unexpected delight at the performances of others.³⁶ Frank Crean had been ‘a bit of an embarrassment’ as Treasurer and Kep Enderby was giving him some concern as Minister for the ACT while Gordon Bryant had simply been ‘behaving in an extraordinary way’, treating his ministry for Aboriginal Affairs as a personal fiefdom. Bryant had even, Whitlam told Hasluck, appointed members of his family to positions within his department and office and practised ‘racial discrimination in reverse’ by promising positions to people by his own decision.³⁷ ‘There was no worse minister than Gordon Bryant.’ Whitlam freely criticised the capacity and behaviour of several of his ministers, yet he had himself been unable to control his Cabinet or manage his ministers.³⁸ Whitlam spoke favourably of Wriedt, Bowen, Barnard and particularly of Connor, as Hasluck noted: ‘the Prime Minister expressed appreciation of the qualities of Mr Connor and mentioned steps he was taking to try to get closer to him. Connor was a very determined and single-minded man but a good tough Minister’.³⁹

Whitlam announced that there would be a small ministerial reshuffle by the end of the year, most notably that he would relinquish his own portfolio as Minister for Foreign Affairs. This was an extraordinarily difficult decision for Whitlam; he was moving on from the field he loved with great reluctance. As he indicated to Hasluck ‘much as he liked the portfolio’, he was putting the party and the government first. Whitlam recognised that not only was his own workload insupportable but that for the sake of the government’s health as well as his own, he needed to be in a position to exercise greater control, guidance, even restraint over his determined ministers, an area in which he had clearly failed. Although he was well versed in every one of the government’s wide-ranging ministries and policies, it was not Whitlam’s style to intervene in the minutiae of minister’s portfolios—nevertheless he would leave every Cabinet meeting in no doubt about his views on individual performances. The furious grinding of teeth, the explosive asides and the Cabinet agenda that routinely dropped unwanted items off the page served as a form of control, up to a point. Labor governments are burdened with a style of individualistic ministerial government encouraged by the power of the caucus over the ministry—although Whitlam acknowledged that, as Prime Minister, he was ultimately responsible for the performance of them all; ‘I don’t care how many prima donnas there are so long as I’m prima donna assoluta’.⁴⁰ Whitlam would hand over the foreign affairs portfolio—not to Jim Cairns, whom he dismissed as ‘a Foreign Minister manque’, or to Barnard who ‘wanted it and … was completely reliable’—but to Senator Don Willesee, who had already performed well as Minister Assisting the Minister for Foreign Affairs and whom Whitlam thought more open to his continuing influence than either Cairns or Barnard.

Rex Patterson became the first Australian minister to be sworn in by a member of the royal family when Queen Elizabeth II personally swore him in as Minister for the Northern Territory—he had been overseas when the other ministers appointed in the Cabinet reshuffle were sworn in.⁴¹ A further landmark in postcolonial relations was reached as the Queen formally became the ‘Queen of Australia’, signing her assent in person to the Royal Style and Titles Act in Canberra. Margaret and Gough Whitlam hosted an ‘alfresco lunch’ in the garden of the Lodge for the Queen and Prince Philip. Among the guests were Sir John and Lady Bunting, Kenneth Myer, Bob and Hazel Hawke, Lance Barnard and Labor Party vice-president, Jack Egerton, who greeted the monarch with an amiable, ‘They tell me, luv, you’ve been naturalised’!⁴² Margaret had overseen the menu and kept a close eye on the weather, determined that the lunch would be in the garden and, as far as possible under the circumstances, that it would be relaxed and informal—and it was. ‘Weren’t we lucky with the weather!’, she exclaimed with relief to her readers. As Prince Philip chatted with Bob Hawke and the Queen admired Al Grassby’s exotic tie, they dined on asparagus from the Lodge’s own vegetable garden, followed by trout with almonds, savoury rice, Australian wines and cheese.⁴³

In her short but significant speech at the parliamentary luncheon the next day, the Queen appeared completely in agreement with Whitlam’s moves to modernise relations between the Crown and Australia, with her description of that relationship as a dynamic one that would necessarily change over time.⁴⁴ The royal visit then moved to Sydney for the official opening of the Sydney Opera House on 20 October and the Prime Minister and Margaret moved with it. Politics got no rest even in this magnificent setting, attended by more than a million people, as the Liberal New South Wales Premier Robert Askin asserted his position on the dais next to the Queen, demanding precedence over the Prime Minister. The next day The Sun-Herald’s lead story, ‘Poll shock for Federal Labor’, showed the Coalition easily regaining government had an election been held at that time.⁴⁵ The Queen left from Sydney and Whitlam presented her with a parting gift—Al Grassby’s tie.

As Parliament resumed for its final sitting for the year, the government’s early success in negotiating legislation through the hostile Senate had stalled. Amongst the backlog of rejected or amended legislation were the now threatened Family Law Bill, the Health Insurance Bill (which would introduce universal health insurance through Medibank) and the Petroleum and Minerals Authority Bill. Even the government’s most prominent electoral pledge, education, was not spared. The Schools Commission Bill and States Grants (Schools) Bill that gave expression to needs-based funding, implementing the recommendations of the much-lauded Karmel report, remained in limbo as the senior Liberal member, Malcolm Fraser, led the Opposition’s objections to the government’s policy that would redirect funds away from the most advantaged schools and towards those of greatest need.⁴⁶ As Whitlam threatened to call a double dissolution over the refusal to pass the critical education Bills, his education minister Kim Beazley (Snr) collapsed under the strain and spent some time recuperating in hospital. The acting minister, Lionel Bowen, persuaded the leader of the Country Party, Doug Anthony, of the folly of advancing to an election with such a powerful major equity issue as education and a twofold increase in education funding as its main focus. The Coalition, temporarily revived in the wake of the Parramatta by-election, fractured again as the Country Party supported the historic passage of the government’s education reforms through the parliament.⁴⁷

Despite the political and economic cost of the tariff cut, inflation had continued to rise and in September the government sought another means to control it. Although the Prices Justification Tribunal had provided a mechanism for reviewing proposed price increases by companies with an annual turnover of more than $20 million, its function was only advisory. Many within caucus believed that with inflation rising and the manufacturing sector hit hard by the tariff cut, more immediate control over prices by government was essential. Caucus and Prime Minister came into damaging conflict over the matter of national control of prices—which Whitlam did not support and was in neither the policy speech nor the party platform.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, caucus carried a motion to support a referendum that would grant the federal government power to regulate prices. It was a petulant decision by a caucus driven by the desire to exercise its power over the Prime Minister—ill-considered, self-serving and counterproductive. Whitlam, hoping to allay the inevitable concerns of the business community, tried to present a balanced approach on government economic controls by persuading caucus to also support the Opposition’s call for a concurrent referendum over incomes. The dual referenda, held on 8 December to inevitable defeat, won few friends: the business sector was horrified at the prospect of centrally controlled prices and the union movement was equally horrified at the prospect of centrally controlled wages.

For some, the government’s referendum on prices, with its connotations of monolithic socialist governance, was just part of a pattern of government control over business practice. ‘It’s time to start buying Australia back’! Whitlam had proclaimed in the 1972 policy speech, and from the government’s earliest days he had moved to redress the ‘complacency’ of the Coalition government’s ‘open-door policy’ on overseas investment. This complacency, he argued, had led to ‘massive transfers in the ownership of Australian resources’ and the abdication of a national role in the exploration and development of Australia’s vast and extremely valuable minerals and energy resources.⁴⁹ One of the first decisions of the duumvirate had been a freeze on the proposed takeover by a British firm of the Victorian firm of MB John & Hattersley Ltd, a move that had sparked concerns among British companies.

Whitlam had also put the large American multinational energy companies on notice during his visit to the United States, with a pointed reference to the fact that the principal foreign ownership of Australian resources was by American companies. His government would not tolerate the continued exploitation of Australia’s ‘greatest asset’, its mineral resources:

 

the big industries which have set up in Australia since the last war, automobiles, petro-chemicals, have been controlled from the United States. It is no wonder, therefore, that Australians become concerned about it, and to take the greatest asset that we have now, our mineral resources, 62 per cent of them are controlled from overseas.

Now the natural aspiration for us is to see that the degree of overseas ownership and control is not extended, that in fact we buy some of it back, that we enlarge what share we retain.⁵⁰

 

The facts were stark, as Whitlam had set out in a 1966 speech to the University of New South Wales:

 

Some of the most amazing mineral discoveries in our history are now in foreign hands. Foreigners do Australians the honor of employing them to dig up their own wealth, to be exported overseas.

The Vernon committee reported that the whole of our production potential in aluminum is controlled by overseas interests. Over three-quarters of our oil and gas potential is determined by overseas interests. Almost all the new and rich iron ore discoveries, particularly in Western Australia, have been taken out of our hands. The new coal deposits in Queensland are controlled by overseas interests.

Three quarters of the mining and treatment of copper is controlled by overseas interests. Already 70% of the mining of lead and 60% of the mining of zinc is outside our control …

Not only is our birthright being forfeited but there has not been proper insistence on the processing of the minerals in Australia. There is no better future for Australia as a Japanese mine than there was for us as a British farm.⁵¹

The increase in foreign ownership of Australian resources had escalated to such an extent over the previous decade that even some Coalition members now bristled at the damage being done to the Australian economy by the inducements to foreign investors, the repatriation of profits overseas and the consequent lack of investment in research and development in Australia. The dominance of the mining industry in particular by foreign multinational companies had created a form of quasi-colonial economic dependency that demanded its own type of nationalism—‘economic nationalism’—in response. The deputy prime minister and leader of the Country Party, John McEwen, had warned that ‘we are selling off the farm’ as American ownership in the mineral sector tripled during the 1960s and moves towards controlling levels of foreign ownership in such critical sectors became more widespread.⁵²

The Whitlam government’s restrictions on foreign investment and levels of ownership were the continuation of earlier attempts to exercise some control over investment and ownership in the mining sector first begun in earnest by Prime Minister John Gorton, and for which he had paid an obvious political price. Gorton later described those few instances in which he had interrupted the continuing influx of foreign investment as his government’s greatest achievement.⁵³ The McMahon government’s reluctant and belated passage of legislation shortly before losing office formalised Gorton’s concerns through the Companies (Foreign Take-overs) Act 1972, enabling the Treasurer to veto takeovers ‘not in the national interest’. It was, ironically, because of this Act of the McMahon government that Whitlam was able to act so quickly against foreign takeovers.

Yet despite the passions unleashed by the new controls on foreign ownership, consternation over the government’s foreign investments rules was by no means universal, even within the business community. The prominent Melbourne businessman Kenneth Myer, for instance, welcomed the government’s moves that would protect local businesses as much as the broader Australian economy from multinational dominance and end the inefficiencies that had been able to flourish in these protected international resource companies. Myer argued that, in a country like Australia with a relatively small economy, it made sense for the government to take a role in the development of resources, particularly when dealing with large corporations whose budgets were larger than that of the whole Australian economy. ‘The socialist bogey argument doesn’t cut any ice with me’, Myer said, ‘the government’s not saying we won’t need foreign technology or funds, just making sure that we Australians have a damn good go at things first, giving our national interest top priority’. Myer, who did a lot of business in Japan, pointed out that the Whitlam government’s foreign investment rules were less stringent than those in Japan where, he told journalists, he would have no hope of investing in land or property.⁵⁴

The American-based Utah Development Corporation symbolised the extent of the exploitation of Australia’s mineral wealth and the inadequate controls imposed by successive governments. With generous subsidies, direct payments, tax exemptions and transfer payment arrangements, Utah made the highest profit of any company in Australia—most of which was sent offshore.⁵⁵ In this most highly concentrated sector, foreign companies paid the least taxation and yet were paid the highest subsidies and granted the largest tax concessions. The previous Liberal–Country Party governments had paid these same companies $341 million in direct subsidies and tax concessions—more money left Australia through these companies than came in as 58 per cent of all mining profits after tax were sent offshore. Whitlam described the profits accruing overseas to foreign-owned mining companies from Australian projects as ‘scandalous’ and the arrangements that enabled it as ‘disguised extortion’.⁵⁶ In early 1973 Whitlam was guest speaker at the annual dinner of the Australian Mining Industry Council, telling his audience of mining magnates and executives that with 62 per cent of the mining industry foreign owned, his government would be introducing foreign investment rules to ensure a minimum 50 per cent Australian ownership in all resource projects. He went on to say that ‘high among my Government’s ambitions is to give natural rights to our Aboriginal people’, and confirmed a ‘freeze’ on mining and exploration on Aboriginal reserves in the Northern Territory. His final flourish was hardly conciliatory: ‘one thing you can be sure of is that the free-wheeling approach of the previous government is gone forever’.⁵⁷

Whitlam’s Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, was a passionate nationalist, proud of his birthdate—Australia Day—and of his birthplace—Wollongong, the heartland of some of Australia’s largest mining projects. A youthful socialist who had joined the Hughes–Evans Labor Party in the New South Wales split of 1940, Connor had entered state parliament for Wollongong–Kembla in 1950. He held the seat for thirteen years before shifting to federal politics. Connor was one of the few ministers who displayed that rare combination of policy vision and detailed application that so appealed to Whitlam. Where others saw obstacles, Connor saw only possibilities and, like Whitlam, he rarely hesitated. Connor had been a long-time Whitlam supporter through the Labor Party’s internal struggles and the party’s spokesman on minerals and energy for six years. Unusually for Whitlam, who had few friendships among his immediate party colleagues, the two were close and for a time, before government, Connor would regularly telephone Whitlam from Wollongong every Sunday.⁵⁸ By the time he became minister, Connor in Whitlam’s assessment ‘knew more about minerals and energy at home and abroad than any person in the Parliament’.⁵⁹ Connor took charge of the government’s expansive and critical resource development policy, encompassing matters of foreign investment and ownership as well as the development of a role for government in the exploration for and ownership of Australia’s massive natural resource projects.

 

It involved an extensive national pipeline grid, enrichment plants to process uranium deposits, electrification of rail facilities and the development of solar energy. These projects were to be financed and managed by existing or new government agencies, which would locate, mine and process materials, and market the end products, thus locking out the transnational corporations.⁶⁰

It was a grand scheme, one that would underpin moves towards Australian self-sufficiency in oil, petroleum and alternative energy sources. It would increase Australian equity in mining projects, develop a national infrastructure through the pipeline and railway network for the carriage of energy resources across Australia and would ensure an adequate share of the massive profits of the untapped resources of the North-West Shelf remained in Australia and in Australian hands.

The Arab–Israeli war in October, leading to a devastating oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and dramatic increases in the cost of oil, gave added impetus to the need for precisely such independence in the vital resources field. Over the next seven years, crude oil prices would increase 500 per cent, adjusted for inflation.⁶¹ As the scarcity of oil sent prices to record highs, the essential logic in the proposed Petroleum and Minerals Authority became increasingly apparent. But the Bill to establish this scheme was one of several Bills that, by December 1973, were stalled before the Senate.

From the achievements of Whitlam’s first six months in office, the next six months were ones of increasing rancour, division and general opposition that saw attitudes harden on all sides. Legislative successes for the government were fewer and those few more hard fought, with every substantive Bill mobilising its own entrenched interests outside the parliament and inevitable opposition within it. The strain on individual ministers at the front line of these reforms was particularly marked and Bill Hayden, then working through the tortuous process of consultation, explanation and parliamentary support for the universal health insurance scheme, Medibank, suffered greatly.

A universal health insurance scheme, funded by a compulsory 1.25 per cent surcharge on income tax, had been one of Whitlam’s major promised reforms. As he came to office, 17 per cent of Australians had no medical or hospital insurance at all and as Whitlam saw it, ‘the underprivileged were torn between a need for health cover and the realities imposed by their own limited financial means’.⁶² Whitlam viewed universal health care second only to education as a fundamental equity issue. His immediate concern was both the inability of so many to access health services and the generous tax deductions that left higher income earners perversely paying less than lower income earners for the same cover: ‘I found it morally offensive that my Commonwealth car drivers … paid twice as much as I did for family cover, not despite the fact that my income was four or five times as high as theirs, but precisely because of that fact’.⁶³ The two health Bills that would introduce universal health insurance, free public hospital treatment and public payment of doctors’ fees were some of the most vigorously debated of all the Whitlam government’s Bills and, by April 1974, had been twice defeated in the Senate. Hayden described it as ‘indisputably the most furiously fought domestic policy issue’, for which the outcome was never certain.⁶⁴

The debate at times more closely resembled a theatre of the absurd as the most preposterous claims tumbled out in rapid succession, from the Queensland Country Party Premier Bjelke-Petersen’s comparison of Medibank to ‘the Biblical Flood, the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii, [and] the Titanic’, to claims that under Medibank, hospitals would be forced to perform abortions in order to qualify for federal funding.⁶⁵ The Australian Medical Association established a $2 million ‘fighting fund’ to underwrite a massive advertising campaign against Medibank, joining forces with the private health funds and the General Practitioners’ Society—which described the country as being ‘in the hands of socialists’ and the fight against Medibank as ‘a fight for freedom’.⁶⁶ Throughout that year, the hostility from the health insurance industry and the medical profession—in Whitlam’s description, ‘Australia’s most militant trade union and its most self-serving bureaucracy’—toward a scheme that would provide health insurance for all was extreme, at times even irrational, and the rumours that circulated against the minister, Bill Hayden, crude and persistent.

 

He was supposed to be full of revenge after failing as a medical student; he was alleged to have had psychiatric treatment and used his ministerial authority to have the records destroyed; and a telephone caller told Dallas [Hayden’s wife] one night that her husband had gone berserk on a plane and been conveyed to a mental institution.⁶⁷

Labor organiser Jack Egerton, who first heard these stories from a doctor in his home state of Queensland, told Hayden not to worry. ‘I defended you’, he told the embattled minister, ‘I told him you didn’t have enough brains to have a mental breakdown!’⁶⁸ But the pressure was relentless; The Canberra Times considered it ‘one of the most vicious campaigns of denigration any contemporary politician has had to face’.⁶⁹

One place where Whitlam maintained a clear superiority was the House of Representatives, where he had secured an immediate dominance over his fourth parliamentary opponent, Liberal leader Billy Snedden. Presiding over a disintegrating Coalition and a tactically divided party, Snedden, the son of a Perth stonemason, who had come to study law after his service in the RAAF, had neither the personal gravitas nor the background for the unstinting support of the conservative Liberal hierarchy that he needed to survive the bruising politics of that time. ‘Snedden has no breeding’, his erstwhile party colleagues whispered; Sir Magnus Cormack called him ‘the paperboy’ in reference to a childhood job.⁷⁰ In parliament, Whitlam showed Snedden no mercy; he was equally disdainful of Snedden’s facile attempts to outdo Menzies in style and image as he was of his attempts to outdo Whitlam himself in devastating rejoinder. Whitlam’s description of the Country Party at the time of a rumoured Democratic Labor Party–Country Party merger earlier in the year—‘the old whore churched at last’—was later reprised by Snedden, when the Democratic Labor Party supported the government’s referenda Bills through the Senate, as ‘who’s churching the old whore now?’ In Snedden’s clumsy mimicry the Democratic Labor Party had become the ‘old whore’, raising unfortunate sectarian overtones and only further diminishing relations with both the Country and Democratic Labor parties.⁷¹ His party colleagues could only shake their heads in amazement and await the inevitable. Snedden quickly became a seat-warmer, a necessary stopgap before the advent of the man biding his time to mount his certain challenge for the leadership: Malcolm Fraser.

The Liberal Party’s greatest division was over strategy, for it was not only within government that concerns were expressed about ‘electoral suicide’ in this volatile political climate. The Parramatta by-election result had increased pressure within the Opposition for a move against the ‘temporary aberration’ of the Whitlam government, with some members now openly agitating for their senators to block the government’s 1973 supply Bills and force it to an election. The Liberals’ ‘elder statesman’ and long-term President of the Senate, Sir Magnus Cormack, was one of many who were shocked that this unprecedented idea of the Senate denying an elected government its financial supply could even be contemplated. The Senate would be ‘committing suicide’, he said, if it ever took such a step.⁷² Snedden made no moves against the Whitlam government’s first Budget, brought down by Frank Crean in August 1973. Indeed, much to the chagrin of those demanding action in his own party, Snedden stated that he would not use the Senate to bring down the government in this way.

The next month Liberal Senator Reg Withers, who had already laid out his strategy for removing the aberrant Labor government by precisely this means, wrote to Snedden urging him to use their numbers in the Senate to defer consideration of the supply Bills, thereby denying the Whitlam government the financial means to govern and forcing it to another election.⁷³ Again Snedden refused, only further ensuring that his time as leader was limited. But while he may have rejected using this ultimate, constitutionally uncertain, sanction against the government that retained a majority in the House of Representatives, the Opposition’s obstruction of other government Bills remained unstinting. It was a fraught strategy and an increasingly tense parliament as, with every Bill that the Senate rejected, the possibility that Whitlam might call a double dissolution election grew. By November 1973 a total of three Bills had been rejected twice by the Senate and had fulfilled all the requirements under section 57 of the Constitution that would give Whitlam the grounds to call a double dissolution. Although this section had been used on two occasions previously, on neither of those had it been invoked on the basis of more than one Bill and this possibility raised the political stakes even higher, for both sides. Every one of the rejected Bills now added to the ‘stockpile’ of Bills on which Whitlam could call a double dissolution would also be passed at the subsequent joint sitting of both houses of parliament should Whitlam win that election. By its continued rejection of these key elements in the government’s reform program, the Opposition was also handing Whitlam one final opportunity to pass them.

In the midst of the parliamentary rancour, a rare honour was extended to the renowned author Patrick White, Australia’s recent and first recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature: to be seated on the floor of the House as the guest of the House of Representatives. Although this was the first such invitation since the attendance of the aviator Bert Hinkler in 1928, White, describing the invitation as ‘gratifying and moving’, nevertheless declined. As Gavin Souter later described it, ‘Perhaps this was just as well, for the House at that time was no place for a gentleman.’⁷⁴

On 26 October 1973, Whitlam began his final international trip as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Accompanied by Margaret, Frank Crean, Senator Ken Wriedt (Minister for Agriculture), Jim Cairns and Rex Connor, Whitlam visited first Japan and then China. In Japan, one of Australia’s major trading partners in energy resources as a large importer of Australian raw materials, the focus was on minerals and energy. Whitlam was keen to reassure Japanese officials and Prime Minister Tanaka that Australian resources remained a secure import source for Japanese industry despite the ongoing arguments over foreign ownership within Australia. A historic bilateral treaty, the Treaty of Nara, was agreed between the two countries, reversing the previous government’s refusal to enter into such an arrangement.⁷⁵ Whitlam chose this trip to Japan to announce that there would be no new foreign equity investment in the four major Australian resource industries—oil, natural gas, coal and uranium—and that all uranium development would have to be 100 per cent Australian-owned. In Beijing, Whitlam, Margaret and Frank Crean were joined by the First Assistant Secretary South Asia Division, Richard Woolcott, and met by Ambassador Stephen FitzGerald.

Whitlam arrived in China to begin the most significant of the many visits he had undertaken in his first year as Prime Minister, the first visit of an Australian Prime Minister to communist China, symbolising ‘the successful ending of a generation of lost contact between Australia and the most populous nation on earth’.⁷⁶ The visit, his personal reception and the importance of the discussions vindicated his bold and politically perilous decision in Opposition to lead an official ALP delegation to China in 1971, severely criticised as proto-communist by the Coalition government still persisting with the fable of Taiwan as the true government of China, and a visit the Chinese did not forget. The greeting at the airport was stunning, as Margaret recorded: ‘Such a welcome at the airport! Thousands of dancing schoolchildren in blue and red, green and pink pants and shirts all waving scarves and singing “Welcome”. Bands played while the entourage met several hundred waiting dignitaries who were introduced by Premier Chou En-lai’.⁷⁷ That night, Zhou Enlai held a banquet in their honour in the Great Hall of the People.

For a Western leader whose country had only recognised the reality of communist China less than a year earlier, it was an extraordinarily successful visit. Over the next five days Whitlam had no fewer than four meetings with Zhou Enlai—a total of eleven hours of formal talks. Their discussions were wide ranging, Woolcott recalled that each of Whitlam’s four lengthy meetings with Zhou ‘gave a global tour d’horizon. Zhou’s basic approach was that the British Empire had been replaced by a “neo-colonialist” Soviet Union and United States “imperialism”’.⁷⁸ For his part, Whitlam concentrated on South-East Asia, suggesting ways in which China might improve the perception of it and of its intentions in the region; he also raised with Zhou the recent fall of the socialist Allende government in Chile. The lengthy discussions between these ‘two articulate, well-informed and well-read leaders’ were not entirely mutually congratulatory and Whitlam did not shy away from reaffirming Australia’s ‘determined opposition’ to all nuclear testing.⁷⁹

At every meeting, a sea of red Mao badges set against grey Mao suits reflected the still rigid authoritarianism of life in China under Mao.⁸⁰ Whitlam had been in Beijing for two days, hoping that a meeting with Chairman Mao would be arranged and, just as he had found during his visit in 1971, hearing nothing. He was with Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People when Zhou received a call that Mao was expecting them.⁸¹ The official Australian party was seated at a long table in the Great Hall, with Australia’s ambassador to France, Alan Renouf, alongside the ambassador Stephen FitzGerald, listening intently to the whispered negotiations. Those bureaucrats who had resisted the recognition of China for so many years, and abhorred the impertinence of Whitlam’s appointment of the non-diplomat FitzGerald as Australia’s first ambassador to China, now fell over themselves in the rush to join Whitlam at this meeting with Chairman Mao in his study in Zhongnan Hai.⁸² FitzGerald felt the uncertainty: ‘Renouf was sitting beside me and wrote on my pad, “What’s going on?” And I wrote, “Mao perhaps.” And when Gough came back and sat down … he looked at my pad, saw what was written and picked up my pen and wrote, “FitzGerald perhaps”.’⁸³

FitzGerald, who had been pivotal to Whitlam’s first visit to China, was equally pivotal to his second. Whitlam recalled Mao’s ‘massive smiling countenance and an air of scholarly refinement, as if, for all the courtesy and attention he paid his guests, his mind was still burdened with deeper things. The conversation lasted nearly an hour and was marked by great animation’.⁸⁴

Returning from China, with a record of change and modernisation in Australian foreign policies, Whitlam handed over to Senator Don Willesee. This was a record that more than any other was of his own making, one of which he was justifiably proud:

 

In no field in its first year of office has my Government so profoundly, so beneficially, and—let me be quite clear—so successfully established new perspectives as in Australia’s foreign policies. That this has been so was first of all the result of the bitter distortions into which our predecessors had forced Australia’s policies, the injustices they did to the great mass of decent Australians in a short-sighted pursuit of policies as ugly as they were outdated, as narrowly conceived as they were equivocal. If anything came to an end on December 2—the anniversary of Austerlitz last year—it was the demeaning of Australia in the eyes of the world as the country our predecessors had represented it to be: insignificant, racist, militarist, sycophantic, a timid and unworthy creature of the great powers to whom it had surrendered its identity. Australia is no longer thought of in those ways: if I take pride in that it is because I believe that the ugly Australia of the past did an unforgivable violence to the way in which ordinary Australians thought of themselves, and to the way they hoped their Government would act in its dealings with the rest of the world.

There have been great changes. My government is unequivocal in its belief in the equality of men of all races: we have proclaimed that belief and have consistently acted in accordance with it. My Government believes the war in Vietnam was a bitter disaster, the end result of the squandering of opportunities for peace presented two decades ago. We shall have no more Vietnams, and we shall do all in our power to promote the forces for peace in our region and the world. Above all my Government believes in those abiding virtues in Australian society which have given us a distinctive nationhood, the belief in fraternity and independence, the instinct for fair play, justice and freedom that Eureka signifies. It is those virtues which Australia’s foreign policies have sought to embody over the last year: it is that independence which my Government has celebrated and revived.⁸⁵

Some of the greatest animus toward the Whitlam government was generated not by a policy but by a painting. The National Gallery of Australia was not yet even in existence when its founding director, James Mollison, acting on a recommendation of the gallery acquisitions committee, announced the purchase of the American artist Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for $1.3 million. Pollock’s work—modernist, abstract, unconventional—generated controversy not merely because it lacked the comfort of immediate realist recognisability but because his method—slashing, strewing, dribbling paint from above—defied established descriptions and broke conventions of space, form and style. The technique, dubbed ‘action painting’, arrived at meaning through action—action in painting and action in viewing.⁸⁶ And the purchase of Blue Poles certainly delivered action—particularly by those who had never seen it, who knew little about art, and even less about modern art.

Whitlam enjoyed the aggressive denunciations that followed the acquisition of Blue Poles; it brought out the essential Philistine in his opponents and was a welcome diversion from the anguish of the stymied program and the animosities he and his ministers were facing. To him, there was no argument: Pollock was ‘one of the great figures in modern American art’ and Blue Poles was ‘his masterpiece’.⁸⁷ The parliamentary debates were absurd; the Country Party member for McMillan memorably described Blue Poles as ‘a foreign painting of accidental value’.⁸⁸ Whitlam was held personally responsible for the purchase that was invariably seen as being of no value and the government as having been conned—and he was happy to take the responsibility. To Doug Anthony, who feigned dismay at the merits of the painting, ‘which I cannot comprehend’, Whitlam retorted, ‘If Australian galleries were limited by the comprehension of the right honourable gentleman they would be very bare and archaic indeed’.⁸⁹

It was the end of what Whitlam described as ‘a momentous and memorable year in the life of the Australian parliament’. Despite the unrelenting pressures and ‘defence of vested interests’ inside the twenty-eighth Parliament and the intense antagonisms outside it, the achievements listed by Whitlam in his second ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’ were as remarkable as in his first: 253 Bills had been introduced; 203 Bills had been passed, while thirteen had been rejected by the Senate, ten deferred and twenty-one amended. Thirty-nine reports had been tabled; six constitutional alteration Bills, nineteen treaties and agreements entered into and the Cabinet had considered 823 submissions and made 1675 decisions. The House of Representatives had sat for the greatest number of hours in more than fifty years, yet only once had it sat later than 11 p.m. It was a record that Whitlam proudly described as ‘a year of progress and reform on a scale unmatched in the records of this Federation’. It had been difficult, obstructed, yet in key respects successful and he gave every indication that he was undeterred, that he would continue to respect the mandate and that the government would continue to implement the program, ‘its manifesto for the years to come’:

 

I do not pretend that the year has been plain sailing. Of course it has not. There is much in our program that we have yet to accomplish; many of our plans are still in their formative or embryonic stages. There is much, regrettably, that we have been prevented from doing or bringing to fruition. If the year has revealed clearly the nature and purposes of the Government, it has also revealed—even more nakedly, more unmistakably—the nature and purposes of the Opposition. I shall give the House presently the detailed evidence of the Senate’s obstruction. I doubt whether any of us can recall an Opposition that has behaved with such reckless and irresponsible indifference to the people’s will. We have seen in the Senate a pattern of blatant obstruction, of flagrant defiance of a popular mandate conferred by the people on an elected Government. We have too often seen in this House a pattern of rowdiness, of delay, of unruliness, of persistent attempts to bait the Chair and frustrate the business of the Parliament. We have contended with dinosaurs in one place and schoolboys in the other …

The Government is proud of its record. We have abolished unemployment and restored a healthy rate of economic growth. Australia has a new strength and confidence at home and a new respect abroad. We are no longer a cipher or a satellite in world affairs. We are no longer stamped with the taint of racism. We are no longer a colonial power. We are no longer out of step with the world’s progressive and enlightened movements towards freedom, disarmament and co-operation. We are no longer in thrall to bogies and obsessions in our relations with China or the great powers. We have strengthened old friendships and established new ones.⁹⁰

Whitlam described ‘the two great and guiding themes of this Government’ as ‘the promotion of equal opportunity for our people and the promotion of Australian ownership and control of our industries and resources’. But of all the government’s achievements, it was those in education that gave him the greatest pride: the Schools Commission, the doubling of funds for education and their distribution on the basis of need not patronage, and, of course, the removal of university fees that would take effect in the new year. In these, as in all the government’s reforms, he told a national broadcast the next week:

 

the great theme … is the promotion of equal opportunity. That has been the theme behind the enormous strides we have made in social security, in our support for equal pay, in all we have done for the Aboriginal people, for migrants, and in our plans for a national superannuation scheme for all Australians … We lifted pensions and introduced new benefits for great numbers of people in need. We have tried, as best we can, to pass our legislation for a health insurance scheme that will cover everyone in the community. Remember, there are something like one million Australians who are not protected by the present scheme, for whom illness is a real and ever-present threat. I believe a nation as rich as ours, a people as fair-minded as ours, can afford to correct this injustice.⁹¹

As Whitlam moved to table this list of activities in the House, a surly Snedden refused to support it. And so the parliamentary year ended with Whitlam reading the entire list of his government’s undeniable achievements into the Hansard—a task that took over two hours—while Snedden worked on his Christmas cards. Whitlam’s prime ministerial Christmas cards were already done. This year he and Margaret had chosen a secular theme—a reproduction of Blue Poles.