Gough Whitlam’s dismissal wasn’t the end of democracy

I remember being in my office in the old Parliament House (now the Museum of Australian Democracy) on November 11, 1985, 10 years after the Dismissal. I was working for John Howard, who had recently become leader of the Liberal Party and the opposition.

As I recall, it was a quiet day apart from the ceremonies for Remembrance Day marking the end of World War I. I do not remember much activity about the Dismissal in 1985. But the day seemed to gain greater attention as the decades rolled on. There was growing coverage of the event in 1995, 2005 and 2015. And now the 50th anniversary of the occasion is upon us.

For its program on next Tuesday titled The Dismissal: 50 Years On, Sky News Australia filmed the prime minister’s office, the Senate and the House of Representatives in Old Parliament House. As well as the front steps on which David Smith, the governor-general’s official secretary, read the proclamation dissolving the parliament and Gough Whitlam gave what would be his most famous speech.

What about the opposition leader’s office? Well, alas, it was destroyed when a temporary place for the National Portrait Gallery was constructed some years ago. So the office of significant opposition leaders such as John Curtin, Robert Menzies, Bert Evatt, Malcolm Fraser, Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Bill Hayden and Howard was wiped off the map, despite the fact this was Fraser’s office when the Dismissal took place.

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‘Partisan ambush’: PM fights for Whitlam in scorching speech

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In November 1975, I was a senior tutor in the La Trobe University politics department. Among my colleagues, I was closest to Hugo Wolfsohn. We were two of the few political conservatives in what was a typical social sciences faculty of the day, replete with left-of-centre and leftist types. Nice people for the most part but many were quite naive. Like most Australian campuses then, academics and activists were overwhelmingly opposed to the Dismissal and hostile to Fraser and Sir John Kerr. Some academics reported the event as a constitutional crisis from which Australia might never recover.

At the time Max Teichmann, a left-wing academic at Monash University, put out a pamphlet titled Don’t Let History Repeat Itself. He maintained that Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam had similarities with the events that occurred before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933. In his rant, Teichmann made reference to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels before predicting that if the Coalition were elected in December 1975 it would establish a dictatorship.

The Monash academic’s political hyperbole annoyed Wolfsohn. On December 4, 1975, The Age published a joint letter signed by Wolfsohn and Rufus Davis, who was professor of politics at Monash University. They were well equipped to identify political hyperbole in a modern democracy.

Wolfsohn was a Berlin-born Jew who fled his country of birth as a young man in 1937 and arrived in Australia some time later. Many of his family died in the Holocaust. Davis was a Jewish Australian of Ukrainian background who arrived in Fremantle as a young boy in 1927 with his family.

The duo expressed concern at the pronouncements of academics containing alarming statements about a crisis in democracy and references to a coup d’etat. They wrote: “Australian democracy is neither in crisis nor has it come to an end.” They said “coups d’etat are not usually followed by elections” and dismissed comparisons of Australia and Nazi Germany as “merely comic were it not for the fact that these people are occupying responsible teaching positions in our universities”. Australia was merely facing a “temporary technical difficulty in the working of our parliamentary system which lacks adequate provisions for the satisfactory resolution of deadlocks between the two Houses of Parliament”.

Looking back after half a century, the Wolfsohn-Davis analysis holds up well. Australian democracy survived the events of November 11, 1975. Whitlam lost to Fraser again in December 1977 and stepped down as Labor leader. He was replaced by Hayden, who won seats from the Coalition at the October 1980 election.

Labor was back in office, under Hawke’s leadership, in March 1983 – and won five elections in a row. Howard led the Coalition to victory in March 1996 and won four elections in a row. Sounds like an efficient functioning democracy, don’t you think?

In the event, Australian politics was mugged by reality. The Fraser government was adversely affected by the way it came to office. A general feeling emerged within the Coalition that attempting to block supply to force an early election was not worth the trouble.

For its part, Labor refused to acknowledge that, when in opposition in the late 1960s and early 70s, Whitlam had advocated blocking supply to bring down the Coalition government. Whitlam had advanced such a tactic in his budget-in-reply speech on August 25, 1970.

As it turned out, the main victim of the Dismissal was Kerr, who was forced to resolve the dispute. Whitlam became a Labor hero. This hid the fact, despite high intelligence, Whitlam was a failed leader who was incapable of dealing with economic downturns that afflicted Australia in 1974 and 1975.

There was some political violence in late 1975 and into 1976. Fraser and Kerr were the main targets until the former stepped down as governor-general in 1977. From the mid-80s Fraser became a critic of the Liberal Party that had made it possible for him to become prime minister. In time Fraser became a hero among the leftists who had hated him years earlier.

But the important point is that Australia escaped virtually unscathed from the political crisis of October-November 1975.