IN The Australian’s 50 years of publication no year stands out more vividly than 1975. This newspaper’s role in the Dismissal — the removal of the Whitlam government from office on November 11, 1975 — is still debated. Depending on your point of view, November 11 was the day when Australia was rescued from political insanity — or a day of infamy that traduced democracy.
1975
The Dismissal
Nearly four decades on, it remains a sore point on the nation’s body politic. It is difficult to overstate the mounting levels of fevered public debate that led to the Dismissal. The nation had faced nothing like it before, or since.
Controversies
By mid-1975 the wheels were falling off the economy — government spending was out of control and revenues were dropping. Annual inflation reached 17.6 per cent in 1973-74, 16.9 per cent in 1974-75 and was predicted to hit 20 per cent in 1975-76. Controversy beset the government at every level.
Depending on your point of view, November 11 was the day when Australia was rescued from political insanity – or a day of infamy that traduced democracy
No-fault divorce came into effect over protests from churches and conservatives, the Aboriginal land rights took a step forward with the Gurindji people granted ownership of the Wave Hill station after a seven-year battle, and appeals to the Privy Council in London were abolished.
But nothing matched the furore sparked by allegations over the government’s pursuit of $4 billion in petrodollar loans from Iraq, involving the shady middleman Tirath Khemlani. Minerals minister Rex Connor and treasurer Jim Cairns were both sacked as the government lurched from crisis to crisis. Cairns was also at the centre of a storm over his relationship with his aide Junie Morosi. On the other side of politics, Malcolm Fraser overwhelmed Bill Snedden to become opposition leader.
All this domestic unrest took place against serial international convulsions — South Vietnam surrendered to the Vietcong as the last American troops pulled out; the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia with murderous intent; and four of Richard Nixon’s top aides were convicted of Watergate cover-ups.
Whitlam ousted
It is difficult to overstate the mounting levels of fevered public debate that led to the Dismissal. The nation had faced nothing like it before, or since.
Campaign against Whitlam
In June there was change at The Australian. Jim Hall was replaced as editor by former chief sub Les Hollings, formerly of The Times, London. He was to become a key player in The Australian for the next 14 years. Bruce Rothwell, former editor of The Sunday Australian, returned to Australia from London as editor-in-chief, although he was not granted the title at the time. He was joined by Bryan Boswell, also formerly of the paper’s London bureau, who had broken several stories about the loans affair. This trio was to become the driving force in The Australian’s campaign to bring the Whitlam experiment to an end.
Under Rothwell and Hollings, editorials took on a new passion. Rothwell, who was in almost daily contact with proprietor Rupert Murdoch, wrote most of them. In July he argued that “like an over-ripe fruit, the Labor government seems about to fall … You can actually feel the mood in the streets …” In August he was attacking Gough Whitlam’s adherence to the welfare state and talking up Fraser’s policies of individual freedoms; by September, when Fraser had decided “extraordinary and reprehensible circumstances” required him to block supply and deny the government the money it needed to operate, headlines and editorials were in lock-step: “Liberals have duty to force poll: Fraser” and “Governor must sack PM, says Fraser”.
Rise of Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975
On October 21, the day five Australian TV reporters were killed in East Timor, The Australian editorialised: “The longer the deadlock continues, the closer (Governor-General) Sir John Kerr is going to be pushed into the centre of the ring. He has the power to end the stalemate and ultimately, as the final protector of constitutional government in Australia, it seems he will have to act. He should be consulting other authorities, as is his right, preparing for the vital and momentous decisions which now appear likely to be forced on him.”
Two days later Hollings was urging Kerr to consult the chief justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, while adding: “But in the end, it is his decision alone.” When Whitlam turned to the nation’s banks to provide the funds to pay public servants, The Australian editorialised that “this extremely dangerous path” was not “a situation Sir John Kerr can view with equanimity”.
The Dismissal
1975: Dismissal of Gough Whitlam0:13
Hear the famous words Gough Whitlam spoke after being removed from office.
On the morning of November 11 — Remembrance Day — the editorial again urged Kerr to “abandon his role as mediator and intervene positively to restore order to the political process”. And he did. Shortly after noon on November 11, Kerr, having consulted secretly with Barwick, called Whitlam to Government House and withdrew his commission, after first obtaining agreement from Fraser that he would take over as caretaker prime minister and call an immediate election.
I was editing the Daily Mirror on that day. When word of Kerr’s action came from Canberra I rushed to the executive offices where Rupert Murdoch and his key executives Ken May, Frank Shaw, Jim McPherson and Merv Rich were having lunch. I blurted the news and saw a frozen moment of stunned silence. Then Murdoch bolted from his chair and rushed towards his office without saying a word. Ken May threw his napkin in the air and whooped in triumph.
Hollings, in a 1997 oral history given to the National Library, says Kerr told Murdoch at the Melbourne Cup the week before his action that “I am reading The Australian’s editorials with the greatest interest”, and later confirmed directly to Hollings that the editorials had been influential in arriving at his decision. But any sense of satisfaction Hollings may have allowed himself was quickly tempered by the actions of a fractious staff.
Journalists strike
Senior journalists, led by journalists’ association office holders Barry Porter and Bob Duffield, were concerned about what they saw as a lack of balance in political reporting and a week before the Dismissal had protested against “the deliberate or careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation and distortion of copy”.
Cricket
Cricketers Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee who terrorised opposing batsmen in 1975 pose for a promotional shot.
The day after the Dismissal, unions rallied in Hyde Park before marching on News Limited headquarters in Surry Hills and burning copies of the Daily Mirror in the streets. Inside, Porter and Duffield accused Rothwell of refusing to run stories showing any sympathy for Whitlam. Rothwell conceded he had spiked a story by Bruce Stannard that portrayed Whitlam “bestriding the nation like a colossus”, describing it, rather than his decision not to run it, as biased.
A week before the election The Australian’s journalists went on strike for two days in protest, not over a proprietor’s right to express views in editorials, but “the deliberate and blatant bias in the presentation of news”.
On December 13 the nation went to the polls. Labor under Whitlam lost 33 seats and government went to Fraser in a landslide.
Circulation hit
Rothwell and Hollings saw the people’s’ verdict as a vindication of the paper’s stance and ordered the publication of a 60-page magazine, History in the Making, to record the stories and editorials that they believed had so strongly influenced the outcome.
Readers who had been attracted to a more liberal-minded Australian departed and some senior journalists resigned. Circulation took a hit, financial losses grew and there was renewed talk of closure. Hollings was unrepentant. “Yes, we did lose,” he says in his oral history. “But you have to be prepared, when you campaign on something you believe in, to lose circulation, if necessary.”
But there was a big repair job ahead.
Outside Canberra, a big year
It was the endgame in the Vietnam war in April. South Vietnam’s forces surrendered to the victorious Viet Cong in Saigon on April 30 after troubled scenes at the US Embassy with the final retreat of officials. Desperate Vietnamese fearing reprisals pleaded for a passage out. The RAAF had airlifted staff from the Australian embassy before it closed days earlier. At home, war orphans were arriving and the Government was warned to expect an influx of refugees risking the boat trip to Australia.
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