Five decades on, when will the Whitlam dismissal beat-up end?
Labor’s annual whinge fest about the Whitlam dismissal masks a much more sinister scandal; the tragic decline of our once brave Senate into a chamber of flunkies and traitors.
Fifty years on Tuesday has got to be enough. Please god, make this the last year we hear the annual whining about the sacking of Gough Whitlam’s government.
Let me spare you having to go through all the media yammer again trying to incite outrage over that day which, one weekend polemic declared, left distraught journalists “with their hands shaking”.
I’ll sum up November 11, 1975, in one paragraph: a dangerously incompetent and lawless Labor government ignored all warnings to obey our Constitution when it tried to run Australia without having the money which elected Senators had to approve, and relieved voters then endorsed its dismissal by giving Labor its worst hiding in 44 years. The end.
How Labor supporters managed to maintain their rage for 50 years is a mystery to fascinate those with a mind for bizarre trivialities, like: where do all those odd socks hide? Why are pigeons pigeon-toed?
Yet our current Governor-General, Sam Mostyn, has added to this bonfire of inanities by declaring she wouldn’t sack Prime Minister Anthony Albanese the way GG John Kerr did Gough Whitlam.
No, says Mostyn, Albanese’s friend and personal pick: “I would not act in that way.”
She’d never surprise Albanese as Kerr surprised Whitlam – by sacking him without an explicit warning. Which, Mostyn forgot to add, was a warning Kerr correctly feared Whitlam would abuse by sacking Kerr first, creating an even worse mess.
How nice for Albanese to hear his mate publicly give him more licence to potentially misbehave, knowing she’d always tip him a wink. But is that smart?
I’ve already written more about this whiskery non-scandal than it deserves, so to those still apoplectic that a Liberal-dominated Senate thwarted a Labor government, before a Labor-appointed Governor-General finished the job, some advice: better to be outraged at the Senate today.
What a corrupted institution it’s become. For a start, check some of these characters there.
There’s race-baiter Lidia Thorpe, who was the Greens’ token Aboriginal candidate, even though seven of her eight great-grandparents were of British stock. But once voted into a Senate seat she could never have won on her own, Thorpe quit the Greens to become a wreck-the-joint independent, even betraying her oath of loyalty to the King by abusing him to his face.
Then there’s Fatima Payman, chosen by Labor as their token Muslim candidate, despite being just 27. She then did a Lidia, quitting the Labor party that got her elected to her $212,000-a-year job, and became a noisily Muslim activist, “the first hijab-wearing woman elected to any Australian parliament”.
Extreme examples, but they illustrate a wider truth about a Senate that’s now nothing like what the people who wrote our constitution intended.
They meant the Senate, as Parliament’s website puts it, “to represent the states equally in the federal Parliament”. That’s why, for instance, Tasmania’s 12 Senators today each represent just 48,000 Tasmanians, while NSW’s 12 senators each represent 683,000 New South Welshmen.
How is that fair? The excuse that this gerrymander stops big states from bullying small ones is a fraud, because when did Tasmanian senators unite to defy their parties and stick up for Tasmania? Most just vote as their parties command.
Nor do I buy the modern excuse for the Senate - that, says Parliament’s website, by allocating seats in each state in proportion to each party’s total vote means the Senate’s “composition closely reflects the voting pattern of the electors”.
In fact, Labor and the Greens between them won 43 per cent of the vote in 2022, and 47 per cent at the last election, yet in those two elections won 54 per cent of the seats in the Senate today – a clear majority, able to ram through any law between them in a senate of just 76 people, even allowing for Payman and Thorpe’s desertion.
And see the chaos that this unrepresentative Senate of flunkies and traitors, of tokens and box-tickers – enlivened only too seldom by talent – has wrought.
The Abbott Government was shattered by a no-saying Senate, which for years has dragged politics to the foggy Left.
Now this Albanese Government must give in to the worst of its hard-Left instincts to placate the Greens Senators, its allies, or else cut a deal with the despised Coalition or the likes of One Nation.
So what should most outrage us? The sacking of a government 50 years ago that betrayed our constitution and country? Or a Senate today that’s betrayed its purpose?
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