Gough Whitlam: His Time Updated Edition

Jenny Hocking

• Publisher: Miegunyah Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780522867695
• eBook ISBN: 9780522868043
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Gough Whitlam, Australia's twenty-first prime minister, swept to power in December 1972, ending twenty-three years of conservative rule. In barely three years Whitlam's dramatic reform agenda would transform Australia. It was an ascendancy bitterly resented by some, never accepted by others, and ended with dismissal by the Governor-General just three years later—an outcome that polarised debate and left many believing the full story had not been told.
In this much-anticipated second volume of her biography of Gough Whitlam, Jenny Hocking has used previously unearthed archival material and extensive interviews with Gough Whitlam, his family, colleagues and foes, to bring the key players in these dramatic events to life.
The identity of the mysterious 'third man', who counselled the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, in his decision to sack the twice-elected Whitlam government and appoint Malcolm Fraser as prime minister is confirmed here by Kerr himself, as the High Court justice Sir Anthony Mason, and the full story of his involvement is now revealed for the first time. From Kerr's private papers Hocking details months of secret meetings and conversations between Kerr and Mason in the lead-up to the dismissal, that had remained hidden for over thirty-seven years. In response to these revelations Sir Anthony Mason released an extensive public statement, acknowledging his role and disclosing additional information that is fully explored in this new edition.
This definitive biography takes us behind the political intrigue to reveal a devastated Whitlam and his personal struggle in the aftermath of the dismissal, the unfulfilled years that followed and his eventual political renewal as Australia's ambassador to UNESCO. It also tells, through the highs and the lows of his decades of public life, how Whitlam depended absolutely on the steadfast support of the love of his life, his wife, Margaret. For this is also the story of a remarkable marriage and an enduring partnership.
The truth of this tumultuous period in Australia's history is finally revealed in Gough Whitlam: His Time

1

‘WE’RE IN’

‘The early days of the Whitlam Government would rival the 100 days of President Roosevelt in its scope and initiatives. … There will be a flow of legislative and administrative activity unparalleled in the history of national government in Australia’.

—Lance Barnard

ROOM 7 of the Cabramatta Sunnybrook Motel was crowded, hot and noisy, bristling with expectation. Four television sets carried the same live image of the national tally room in Canberra, while seven white telephones brought insistent updates from Labor Party scrutineers.² Gough Whitlam was at the centre of it all, hunched forward, shirt-sleeves up, watching the televisions intently. Not long after the counting began, he turned to his long-time speechwriter Graham Freudenberg and quietly said, ‘I think we’re in’. All around him, his advisers and staffers, those who had been with him for years on this remarkable journey from chaotic opposition to party revival, through the internecine battles and the electoral disasters to the brink of government, were in unrestrained celebration. At 10.30 p.m. Whitlam emerged from Room 7 with wife Margaret by his side, greeted the press throng outside, poured the (Australian) champagne and joined them. The moment they had been waiting for came soon after 11 p.m. as they watched the Liberal Prime Minister, Billy McMahon, the man Whitlam had once mercilessly but aptly described as ‘Tiberius with a telephone’,³ concede defeat in a ‘landslide’ result for Labor. With Margaret, his advisers, office staff and campaign workers around him, Whitlam left the Sunnybrook Motel and walked back up the hill to Albert Street, past the hundreds of supporters along the street chanting ‘Gough, Gough, Gough’, to join the party members, neighbours and jubilant family members at the packed election night barbecue in their Cabramatta backyard.

A remarkable scene greeted him as he entered the modest Albert Street house, surging with people streaming in to celebrate, to watch the tally on the television sets scattered around the garden, to see Gough Whitlam. Hundreds of chanting, cheering party-goers rushed towards him and in between the crush of ecstatic supporters, the eager journalists, the jostling camera crews engaged in a fist-fight over prime position and the sheer mayhem of victory, Margaret kissed him: ‘Darling, we’ve made it’. At 11.30 p.m., a ‘tired but delighted’ Gough Whitlam climbed a three-metre-high scaffold temporarily erected in the backyard and, perched above the willing crowd, sweat pouring from the heat of the camera lights above, gave his first televised public address as Prime Minister–elect: ‘It is a magnificent victory. The Government will have a mandate from the people to carry out all its programmes … Tomorrow is the first Sunday in Advent—the advent of the first Labor Government in 23 years’.⁴

Whitlam had led the Australian Labor Party into government for the first time in twenty-three years, but more than that, he had led it out of Opposition and into government from an election for the first time in forty-three years—an achievement not matched since Jim Scullin took Labor to victory in 1929 over the sitting Bruce–Page government. Whitlam’s victory was more marked, more closely identified with the ideas and determination of Whitlam himself, for his having done so in less than six years as leader. The victory was all the more remarkable for his bringing the Labor Party back, in that short time, from the despair of its massive defeat at the 1966 election. Whitlam would now become Australia’s twenty-first prime minister and its eighth Labor prime minister, leading a party that had formed national government for only seventeen of the seventy-one years since Federation. Although the final margin of victory was not yet clear, with several close seats still being counted, the Labor Party had secured a 2.6 per cent swing in its primary vote and would take government with a majority of at least nine seats.⁵ The swing was not uniform, being strongest in Tasmania where Labor won all five seats, and against the party in Western Australia. But two aspects of it gave Whitlam the greatest personal satisfaction: the party’s support from the new outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney; and, secondly, the substantial swing to Labor in Victoria. The branch that had for years been his greatest obstacle to victory was now his vindication.

Whitlam recalled McMahon’s concession speech as ‘a brief, brave television appearance of memorable charm and grace’, the first nationally televised concession by an Australian prime minister.⁶ But later that night he was less generous about his predecessor and the departing dishevelled Coalition government: ‘They would have been beaten under anybody. It’s just too silly for them to blame—or us to thank—Mr McMahon’.⁷ It was after 2 a.m. before he finally went to bed, only to be woken an hour later with a cable of congratulations from the President of the United States, telephoned through as ‘urgent’. ‘I think it could have waited’, he remarked wearily, with a hint of the coming end to this supine bilateral relationship.⁸

After twenty-three years out of office and with a policy exposition as detailed and as carefully articulated as the decades of Opposition had allowed, it was inconceivable to Whitlam that he would do anything other than immediately take office, form government and govern. To Whitlam the election result confirmed his mandate as ‘not merely a permit to preside but as a command to perform’⁹ and to perform at once. His planning behind the scenes had been meticulous: before polling even began he had arranged for an RAAF flight to take him to Canberra the next day, a flight that ‘in all probability would have been my first … with its 34 Squadron as Prime Minister-designate or my last as Leader of the Opposition’ had he not achieved victory.¹⁰ As Prime Minister–elect he had immediately announced that the government’s ‘top priority’ would be to repeal conscription laws ‘within hours of taking office’,¹¹ and his adviser, Dr Peter Wilenski, had already prepared a paper on the transition to government that was to prove crucial in restructuring the public service. Even as he fell into bed, exhausted but exhilarated, he was planning to set in train the immediate formation of a new Labor government.

As he and Margaret woke that Sunday morning to a house overflowing with the debris of celebration and sleeping interlopers spilling from the couches to the floor of his lounge room, he took a brief telephone call from Billy McMahon to discuss the handover of government. The Whitlams’ neighbours made them breakfast and Margaret struggled to imagine what they would now do: ‘I hadn’t given any thought to the aftermath’.¹² After thirty years with Gough, Margaret was surprised but scarcely unprepared for his peremptory announcement that they would be leaving Cabramatta for the airport that afternoon. ‘I was just sort of scooped up’, Margaret recalled of their sudden departure, and they collected others along the way—the bleary-eyed staffers Graham Freudenberg and Carol Summerhayes, the bedraggled advisers Jim Spigelman and Richard Hall. Whitlam had waited until 3 p.m. only in grudging acknowledgement of his colleagues’ monumental hangovers.¹³

As Whitlam arrived at Mascot airport barely fifteen hours after claiming victory on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, he gave the first public indication of his intention to form government in two days’ time, although the means through which he could do this were by no means clear. It was a particularly Labor problem that now beset him—a new government, with a clear majority of seats in the House of Representatives but with a ministry that could not yet be determined. As several seats were still too close to call and counting would not be finalised for several days, the Labor caucus therefore could not meet to elect the full ministry and the new government could not be formed—or so it appeared. The assembled media, more interested in the fact of the Labor Party’s election than the mechanism of the transfer of power, had not yet recognised this political intricacy nor grasped its implication and although Whitlam politely suggested a question that might lead them to it—‘Perhaps you might be asking me shortly when I would expect the Caucus to meet to elect the ministry?’—none did. Asked instead whether the job ‘frightened him at all’, Whitlam replied, ‘Not in the least’.¹⁴

In the Australian Financial Review the next morning, Max Walsh confidently predicted not only the immediate formation of a Whitlam government but that it would see out its full term: ‘We can expect the first Whitlam Parliament to run its full three-year course’.¹⁵ Only the Sydney Morning Herald, clinging to the forlorn hope of at least prolonging the McMahon government that it alone had steadfastly supported during the election campaign, quoted an unnamed ‘Constitutional expert’ that, according to ‘normal procedure’, the McMahon ministry should continue in office until the new Labor ministry was ready to be sworn in.¹⁶ Of this, there was no chance.

Indeed it was the outgoing Prime Minister McMahon who ensured that the transfer of power would be smooth and immediate. During his early morning telephone call, McMahon had told Whitlam that he would tender his resignation to the Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck the following Tuesday, 5 December, and that he would be advising Hasluck to call upon Whitlam to form the next government. What McMahon did not reveal to Whitlam was his intention to advise the Governor-General that he should remain as caretaker prime minister until the first Labor ministry could be called—then nearly two weeks away, while results were being finalised.¹⁷ McMahon suggested to Whitlam that he contact the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Sir John Bunting and, somewhat superfluously, that Whitlam consult the precedents for transfers of government after an election, particularly for incoming Labor governments.¹⁸ Of these there were remarkably few: since Federation governments had changed at election on only seven occasions and of these only the election of the Robert Menzies-led coalition in 1949 was within Whitlam’s own political experience. McMahon was hopeful that this previous changeover would set the parameters for Whitlam’s transfer into office, for Ben Chifley had remained as prime minister in caretaker mode until the victorious Menzies took office nine days later. McMahon now put this prospect of his own continuation as caretaker prime minister to Sir Paul Hasluck; but the Governor-General agreed only to take advice and consider it.¹⁹

The story of previous incoming Labor governments would have given Whitlam cause for concern, particularly that of Jim Scullin. Whitlam had witnessed with such great excitement the beginning of the end of Stanley Melbourne Bruce’s loose coalition in 1929 when, as a young schoolboy in Canberra doing his homework in the lounge of the Wellington Hotel, members of the Labor caucus spilled into the bar in absolute elation at the government’s loss of a crucial vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. Whitlam was spellbound by the alchemy of belief and emotion that is politics, and knew that this was where he wanted to be. Yet despite Scullin’s overwhelming victory over the Bruce–Page government, he had waited ten days before taking office while counting was finalised. During this time Bruce remained as prime minister, despite having lost not only government but his own seat.

Whitlam now faced an even longer wait for the distribution of preferences to be completed and the Labor caucus to meet to elect a ministry, and, with Christmas and New Year, there would be no real government action for several weeks. Leaving the hapless McMahon as prime minister, maintaining the policy positions of the defeated Liberal–Country Party government or, even worse in Whitlam’s eyes, continuing their abstentions in critical votes due before the United Nations and losing the great momentum for change that the election result represented was something that Whitlam simply never considered. ‘The members and supporters of the ALP were entitled, after 23 years of disappointment and defeat, to see prompt and vigorous action from their new Government. Undue delay in forming a government would have been a kind of breach of faith.’²⁰

The usually soporific Sunday afternoon in Canberra was transformed as Whitlam and his party arrived by VIP jet to cheering crowds gathered outside Canberra’s Fairbairn RAAF base and lining the streets nearby—‘the biggest welcome for a political figure since Nixon’, one journalist reported rather incongruously.²¹ For Freudenberg and the slightly seedy staffers, ‘it was really only then that it hit home that we had won’.²² It was a scene reminiscent of the mythic homecoming of a conquering hero and elicited a rare moment of unchecked emotion for Whitlam as he hugged the local member for the ACT, Kep Enderby, his wife Dorothy and Joe Forace, the Maltese high commissioner and Labor supporter, as they welcomed him at the airport.²³ He had intended to drive directly to Parliament House to meet senior public servants, but on seeing the enthusiastic crowd Whitlam stopped the Commonwealth car and walked across the tarmac to speak to them. He thanked them for supporting Enderby in the face of ‘some of the most contemptible and irrelevant arguments of the campaign’ over his position on abortion law reform, and left for Parliament House to the sounds of cheers and car horns.²⁴

Assembled at Parliament House to meet their incoming Prime Minister were the permanent secretaries of three key Commonwealth departments: Sir Keith Waller from the Department of Foreign Affairs; Clarrie Harders from Attorney-General’s; Sir John Bunting from Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Chairman of the Public Service Board, Alan Cooley. A notable omission was Sir Frederick Wheeler, head of Treasury. Whitlam had requested the meeting to discuss what was coyly termed ‘certain administrative arrangements’. He made it clear that he wanted to find a way to assume government and to avert the McMahon government remaining in office even for a single day longer. Despite the fears that had been expressed for the future of senior public servants under a Labor government, it was an entirely constructive meeting. In this Whitlam had been greatly assisted by Wilenski’s meticulous paper ‘Transition to Government’²⁵ and he was better prepared for the immediate assumption of office than his unsuspecting senior public servants. Neither Sir John Bunting nor Clarrie Harders had any great desire for the inertia of the outgoing McMahon government to continue and they cleared the way for Whitlam’s negotiations with the Governor-General to form an interim ministry.²⁶

It was during this initial meeting with his senior departmental secretaries that Whitlam made the first of several critical unilateral decisions that day in asking Bunting, Harders and Waller to remain in their positions. He had discussed it neither with his party nor his staff, many of whom were privately appalled. John Mant, Tom Uren’s adviser and later to be Whitlam’s private secretary was particularly keen that all four heads be replaced: ‘it had been so long in the Menzies mould … we thought it was really important that you get the person r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 ‘We’re In’
• 2 ‘Euphoria, Absolute Euphoria’
• 3 Colonial Relics
• 4 Action Painting
• 5 Night of the Long Prawns
• 6 A Toothpick in the Raging Sea
• 7 A Magnificent Obsession
• 8 Fire-eaters
• 9 ‘The Falsification of Democracy’
• 10 The Third Man
• 11 ‘An Ending Fitting for the Start’
• 12 By the Stroke of a Pen
• 13 A Divided Soul
• 14 ‘It’s His Name’
• 15 The Brave Idea of UNESCO
• 16 ‘My Best Appointment’
• Epilogue: ‘I never said I was immortal, merely eternal’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index