Goal of total victory cost Gough total defeat
Here are three little-known or long-forgotten factors in the saga. First, why did Gough Whitlam go home for lunch after being dismissed? He was shocked and the homing instinct came to the fore. But it was a serious political blunder. Gough always had a big appetite but that won’t suffice as an explanation.
I have always suspected there was another reason.
Whitlam didn’t know Malcolm Fraser was already the prime minister. This is one of the bizarre aspects of the day. Whitlam was dismissed by Sir John Kerr at Yarralumla about 1pm and promptly left. He didn’t know Fraser was already at Yarralumla and was sworn in as prime minister with a caretaker commission about 1.10pm when Whitlam was still in his departure car.
Whitlam was playing catch-up all afternoon. He didn’t know Fraser was PM and had no knowledge of the terms of Fraser’s commission. If Whitlam had known, things may have been very different. Fraser arrived back at Parliament House as PM about 1.25pm and immediately set in train events to deliver his commission, notably talking to Liberal Senate leader Reg Withers about securing supply for the Fraser government.
The juxtaposition is almost crazy. Whitlam having a steak while summoning Labor people to The Lodge, while Fraser is busy at Parliament House ensuring the change of government will be a success.
Whitlam had no contingency plan for a dismissal. No fallback, nothing. And he had stranded himself at The Lodge during the decisive hour post-dismissal.
If Whitlam had known Fraser was already PM he surely would have gone immediately to Parliament House to confer with ministers and advisers. In that scenario it is most likely Labor’s Senate leaders would have been informed of the dismissal. Instead, when the Senate resumed at 2pm Labor senators still knew nothing and Withers secured supply.
Over lunch, Whitlam wrote out his resolution to put to the House. That resolution declared “confidence” in the Whitlam government and said “if” the governor-general “purports” to commission Fraser then the House would not have confidence in his government.
In short, Labor was framing its tactics unaware that Fraser was PM. Whitlam missed his mission: at that point it was not to defend the deposed Whitlam government but to undermine the Fraser government by delaying Fraser’s ability to get the supply bills through the Senate.
My second forgotten aspect concerns Whitlam’s failure to accept the compromise victory in early November that Fraser offered him. This is a very unpopular view among Labor people. But it is a pivotal event in Whitlam’s misunderstanding of the crisis. On November 2, Fraser, under pressure because of public hostility to the blocking of supply, chaired a summit of conservative leaders, including state premiers, in Melbourne. The upshot was a communique that supported the opposition’s stance but gave Fraser a more conciliatory image. The summit decided to pass supply provided Whitlam agreed to advise a House of Representatives election before mid-1976 when the next half-Senate election was due.
The purpose was to cast Fraser as a reasonable man; the risk was that the concession would make him look weak. Fraser suspected Whitlam would interpret the concession as evidence the opposition was starting to crumble. And this is exactly what Whitlam concluded.
Fraser took his compromise proposal to the governor-general on November 3 after clearing it though shadow cabinet. Fraser told Kerr that if Whitlam rejected the offer the opposition would stand firm on its rejection of the supply bills. They would not surrender. When Kerr put the compromise to Whitlam, he rejected it immediately.
In truth, this was a very substantial concession. Consider what it meant. It meant the budget would pass immediately. There would be no general election. Whitlam would have achieved his goal – in denying Fraser a pre-Christmas poll. Whitlam would depict himself as the winner from the deadlock. He would spend Christmas at Kirribilli House planning Labor’s tactical revival in early 1976 with Bill Hayden as treasurer and the chance to improve the government’s stocks.
There had to be a half-Senate election by mid-1976 anyway and that meant a double-dissolution election before mid-1976 was always a likely step for Whitlam. So Fraser was offering a concession Whitlam was likely to adopt anyway. Even if Whitlam chose the bizarre option of going to the half-Senate election and then a double dissolution in late 1976, it would mean a term only six months longer than Fraser was offering him in the compromise.
Reg Withers told me: “Of course Whitlam should have taken the deal. He would have bought time with a better-looking government.”
Kerr wrote that Whitlam was adamant when he rejected the offer. This leads directly to the critical point: for Whitlam, only total victory would suffice. This is the key to Whitlam’s defeat. He had the chance to prevail over Fraser in denying any immediate election. But that wasn’t enough – Whitlam had far bigger goals that he repeatedly made public. He wanted to smash the Senate’s power over supply for all time – in effect, to alter the power balance between the House and the Senate and impose a de facto constitutional change on the system of government. Whitlam wanted an unqualified victory that meant no opposition in future would ever thinking of blocking supply again.
Beyond that, he wanted a victory that would discredit the opposition and stain Fraser’s leadership beyond recovery – the sort of victory that could transform the existing political equation.
Given his objectives – smashing both the Senate and Fraser – it made sense for Whitlam to rebuff Fraser’s offer. Yet it was a massive gamble. More than ever, he needed to be sure of Kerr. Whitlam was now rejecting the offer of a tactical victory in the cause of total victory. Yet he misread Kerr and underestimated Fraser. Fraser’s offer was tactical – it wasn’t a sign of weakness at all.
Talking to Whitlam’s office at the time, I suggested it made sense to end the crisis on these terms. But I was thoroughly disabused. The office sensed a Labor triumph for the ages, the ultimate “crash through” win in Whitlam’s career. Gough went for total victory but the cost was total defeat.
The third issue is the chronic claim that the CIA was really behind the dismissal, an allegation too exciting to ever die. Margaret Whitlam once said that while Gough didn’t believe it, “I’m prepared to believe it”.
The point is it’s too thrilling not to believe it. There was a profound crisis in Australian-American security relations at the time. On November 10, one of the most dramatic cables in our history was sent from the ASIO liaison officer in Washington to ASIO headquarters here based on a briefing a senior CIA officer, Ted Shackley, had provided.
I read this cable in early 1976. The CIA feared the public debate initiated by Whitlam threatened to “blow the lid” off the US bases in this country, notably Pine Gap and that the revelation of the CIA’s role at Pine Gap would destroy intelligence relations between the two nations.
The famous Defence Department chief, Sir Arthur Tange, told a Whitlam staffer that “this is the gravest risk to the nation’s security there has ever been”.
An entire industry has been built on the security crisis attempting to tie it to the Dismissal. Sadly, for its advocates, there has been no evidence establishing this nexus in half a century.
The lesson is that correlation is not causation.
Tange privately and publicly denied the spurious claims he had briefed Kerr or authorised briefings of Kerr on the crisis. Kerr, interviewed by Gerard Henderson, got upset that people might think the CIA put him up to it: “I sacked Whitlam, nobody else inspired me to do it.”
The Americans were alarmed by Whitlam. But the many hundreds of pages of Kerr’s notes, diaries and memoirs make clear he was too busy with a constitutional crisis to worry about a security crisis. There was no link. But don’t think conspiracists will ever stop their chatter.
More Coverage
Social media ban to come at a cost for parents
The Dismissal is endlessly fascinating for its insights into human nature under pressure, the bedlam because there were no accepted ground rules for a prime minister’s dismissal by the Crown and for a story that will be forever exploited by phony conspiracy theorists.