We take for granted the radical changes Moss Cass sought to make

From allowing abortion to decriminalising homosexuality, we take for granted the radical changes Moss Cass sought to make.

Dr Moss Cass, always an environmentalist, in February, 1998.

Moss Cass cost Labor government in 1961. Had he won the safe seat for which he was selected, opposition leader Arthur Calwell would have had a majority in the House of Representatives and Labor would have been back after 12 years. But the perennially azure streets of Kooyong were, and remain, safe for the Liberals. The efforts by first-timer Cass to unseat prime minister Robert Menzies failed. Even 458 preferences from the Communist Party candidate didn’t help; Menzies won more than 70 per cent of the vote.

But Cass was fearless and always up for a fight. Unperturbed, he lined up next time for the safe Liberal seat of La Trobe and was thumped again.

Cass moved across town and won the Liberal-held seat of Maribyrnong in 1969 – in a campaign managed by The Australian’s columnist Phillip Adams – becoming part of the youthful force for change being assembled by Gough Whitlam that would sweep to power three years later. Even by the standards of Whitlam’s colleagues, Cass was radical.

He was a doctor who believed women should have access to abortion and that laws against it were unworkable and made criminals of many Australians. In July 1968 he estimated that 25 per cent of married women had had abortions, incriminating their partners who were co-conspirators.

Months out from entering parliament in 1969, he risked his medical career and political prospects by admitting: “I have certainly broken the law on numerous occasions by sending patients to other doctors for the purpose of having abortions induced.” He was so far ahead of contemporary thought that it was only last year that South Australia joined with the rest of the country to legalise abortion.

Since the federal government took over migrant selection from the states in 1921, immigration has been a defining issue for the nation and sometimes controversially during election campaigns. Prime minister John Howard’s campaign launch in Sydney on October 28, 2001, included the indelible line: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

Howard, a dedicated reader of this newspaper, no doubt recalled Cass’s notorious column of June 29, 1978, when he wrote: “The continuing stream of refugee boats arriving in northern Australia poses a problem which the Australian government cannot ignore any longer … The word is out in Indo-China that if you make it to Australia you can expect to gain resident status. Who can blame these people for trying … but those refugees seeking residence in Australia who jump the queue by arriving on our shores without proper authorisation should not be given resident status, even temporarily.” Did you see that? “Queue jumpers”. That freshly minted phrase would take some time to gain currency, but you read it there first.

And had later prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard taken notice of this sage advice from their party elder many fewer desperate asylum-seekers might have drowned on their way here. And two governments might have lived a little longer. Remember that Gillard’s deadly email to Rudd hours before she challenged him for leadership of the party was headed “Asylum seekers”.

Whitlam appointed Cass Australia’s first minister for the environment and conservation. An immediate challenge was the flooding of Lake Pedder for a hydro-electric dam in Tasmania. Whitlam and Cass opposed the project but were unable to stop the defiant state government. And while history records that it was Malcolm Fraser as prime minister who cancelled the sandmining licences on Fraser Island, it was Cass who led that charge.

When renegade former prime minister John Gorton moved a motion on October 18, 1973, that homosexuality be decriminalised, it was seconded by Cass.

But he wasn’t always right: In 2009 he argued that Israel’s response to “crude, homemade” rockets fired at it from Gaza was disproportionate. The terrorists of Hamas, who have pledged to destroy Israel and murder Jews across the world, have long since attacked it with sophisticated weapons supplied by Iran.

Cass’s death leaves Doug McClelland and Bill Hayden as the only survivors from the first-term Whitlam ministry.