Whitlam is memorialised as a political failure — but he’s still winning the culture war
Margaret Thatcher said the facts of life are conservative, but the facts of culture seem persistently progressive.
Since Whitlam, and because of him, progressives have deified the international and relegated the national. “Progressive patriotism” should not be a misnomer; it is becoming a contradiction in terms. Progressivism has become the subordination of Australian history (unless it started between 65,000 and 237 years ago) and power (literally with its war on coal) to the moral priorities of an “international community” – an entity almost universally understood to represent left-wing elites.
And it has worked. While the half century transnational turn has met resistance in American MAGA and UK Reform movements, in Australia it stomps unchecked across our institutions and on the Liberal Party. Whitlam lost a political battle in 1975; he is surely winning the culture war in 2025.
If I had a cent for every student I have taught across my career, who wants to work at the United Nations, I’d have $7.39. In Victoria, the number of children studying Australian History in years 11 and 12 has collapsed (to about one in 100). Global Politics is four times larger and growing. We are teaching our young “the international” before they have formed a grasp of the national part.
Legal Studies, which is increasingly progressive and internationalist in its focus, is larger still (about 17 per cent of VCE students). Psychology, a subject which in its modern guise is seemingly designed to make young women unhappy (while simultaneously attracting them in large numbers), enrols about a third of Victoria’s 16-year-olds.
‘Any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing’
It should not be a surprise that the ABC, staffed by these young men and women, is run according to a strict internationalism.
I woke my wife last week shouting at the radio: “Ask her a hard question!” It was the ABC’s Sally Sara lobbing up softballs about climate change to the Lord Mayor of Hobart, Anna Reynolds, who had flown to Rio de Janeiro in a bid to reduce global temperatures.
The BBC combines a globalist outlook, disdainful of British imperial history, with a deep anti-Americanism; look at how they edited Donald Trump’s January 6 speech. The current President has enabled the BBC to indulge a long-held contempt for the American experiment.
These taxpayer-funded national broadcasters are proof of the late historian Robert Conquest’s Second Law: that any institution that is not explicitly right wing will become left wing.
J’accuse Whitlam in all this – not exclusively but significantly. We memorialise him as a political failure. It might be better to consider him a long-term cultural success. His transnational turn eventually redefined left-wing morality. It made for a much more conducive terrain for the ALP to fight on – and has met little LNP resistance. Whitlam’s progressive patriotism has not catalysed an alternative conservative nationalism. The vocabulary of the latter enjoys really no status at all in Australian public life. But we are all globalists now.
Whitlam used international law and treaties as instruments for domestic reform. These were not universally bad. Extradition treaties with Sweden and Austria, for example, enabled co-operation on international crime.
His environmentalism was similarly inspired by some excellent motives. Who doesn’t love a good wetland? The consequence was a set of federal statutes that took their letter and spirit from international law, with all the evasions of democratic control such law entails.
Climate change dominates political discourse in Australia because Whitlam entrenched a deep reverence for international legal machinations around the environment. The ALP continues to prosper from this and the LNP to suffer.
The impact on human rights
It was on human rights that Whitlam’s internationalism had the most marked cultural impact. He passed 15 significant human rights treaties. One of them, the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (1975), according to former justice of the High Court Michael Kirby, “is one of the most significant human rights treaties ever joined by Australia”.
Again, this turn was not all bad. He abhorred racism. But he took measures to tackle it that have resulted in a progressive obsession with race and “white supremacy”. “Anti-racism” is now a strategy across our public institutions which takes its lead from dubious foreign theorists, like Frantz Fanon and Ibram X. Kendi. Australians of colour have been more coddled than liberated thereby. The “decolonisation” of university curriculums has negated both student confidence and academic freedom.
Not all Whitlam’s fault. But he made the international morally superior to the merely national. Our nationalism has grown more suspect, our acknowledgments of Indigenous people displaced by it, longer and increasingly mandatory – with no obvious material pay-off for them. He invited consequences he could not foresee. And some that he would revel in: the inability of the Australian centre right to counter a progressive cultural takeover.
Observe how the Liberals have torn themselves apart for years, and again this week, trying to reconcile their instinctive patriotism with a climate change theory that demands the negation of national interests. The affordable energy which has made Australia great must be abandoned to meet approval of a global elite.
An almost exact inversion of 1975
Transnationalism, human rights, climate change, truth telling and treaty. The vocabulary of Australian society is framed by these progressive concepts. Conservative alternatives are thin and unpopular. Labor’s net zero mantra won’t make an iota of difference to the weather. But it has guaranteed a progressive hegemony that its opponents just have not been able to touch.
The smugness of Energy Minister Chris Bowen is evidence that the adaptation of Whitlam’s agenda has worked politically. Labor has a stonking majority, and the Coalition are years away from power. There is no issue on which a comparable smugness among conservatives can be observed. The situation is almost an exact inversion of 1975. Then, Labor was dismissed and bereft and, 36 days later, the Coalition secured one of the largest majorities in its history.
If you are a conservative, how long ago that false dawn was. I call it a false dawn because 50 years later it is the Australian left that enjoys a political and cultural dominion that Whitlam could never have imagined but laid the foundations for.
The Whitlam Dismissal, 50 years on
‘I saw journalists with their hands shaking’: Paul Kelly recalls the Dismissal
From Whitlam to Albanese: the remaking of Australian politics
The day that shocked the nation
Whitlam’s long shadow still looms over us all
Whitlam ignored all the warnings
I saw it all – Kerr’s move strengthened democracy
The action of the governor-general resolved an administrative gridlock and political stalemate.
My dad’s downfall brought out the worst and best in people
Truth and fury: Whitlam Dismissal not quite as unprecedented as it seemed
‘Don’t write some emotional piece of trash’: Paul Kelly on the Dismissal
Kerr failed by not warning Whitlam: Fraser
Kerr’s torture over Whitlam dismissal revealed from grave
Dismissal day: ‘People very nearly fell down in the street with dismay’
The Dismissal wasn’t the end of democracy
In fact, Australia escaped virtually unscathed from the political crisis of 1975.
An unforgettable Remembrance Day
The Whitlam era was one of enduring change and great mistakes.
‘Partisan ambush’: PM fights for Whitlam in scorching speech
Whitlam did not go away. He had only 1100 days in office. His cultural legacy lasted much longer. If we review the last 50 years, at least among the major English-speaking democracies, there is a cursorily good news story for the right: neoliberalism had routed the left. What this “End of History” triumphalism ignored was culture.
Conservatives assumed economics would take care of everything else. What they ignored was the manipulation by their domestic opponents of an emerging global infrastructure. Progressives used to decry international institutions as vehicles of global capitalism. Now the European Union and the United Nations, and every agency in between, is seen as a base for progressivism.
Australia’s Great Awokening
In Australia, Whitlam knew instinctively that this new global order could be better exploited by the left. Troy Bramston offers a brilliant accounting of Whitlam’s transnationalism. A domestic failure in 1975? Yes. An international success by the time of his death in 2014? Absolutely. He doesn’t get enough credit for this. The vocabulary of internationalism – from human rights to climate change – reflect a progressive agenda and supremacy. No right of centre leader, in Whitlam’s lifetime, could slow this capture.
The Great Awokening of this century augmented during a nominally conservative ascendancy. While the right satisfied itself that its Cold War victory would eventually expand into the culture, progressives begged to differ.
Australia was a good illustration of this. For decades, a trade union left had resisted mass immigration as a threat to native workers and their wages. Whitlam’s Universal Migration Policy (1973) shifted the progressive conception of immigration as a political tool.
Steadily, but surely, a working class left gave way to a managerial and campus-based one. These new progressives demanded the dilution of national sovereignty as penance for the shame of White Australia. The Australian centre-right has yet to come up with a viable response to this strategy.
Their American and British peers have found their voice on immigration. Trump and Nigel Farage took strong positions and prospered. British Tories and Australian Liberals didn’t and haven’t.
MAGA (in power) and Reform (on the cusp of it) may, however, be another false dawn for conservatives. Their battles are intense because the left’s cultural capture is deep.
Leftist ideas, seemingly defeated when the USSR collapsed, have never gone away. In Australia, Whitlamism (in substance if not in style – Albanese learned that lesson) looked vanquished 50 years ago. Now it is pre-eminent. His internationalism dictates the acceptable terms of institutional debate – when there is any debate at all.
Not everything Whitlam did was bad
Margaret Thatcher said the facts of life are conservative; millions of east Europeans proved her right by throwing off their communist oppressors. But the facts of culture seem persistently progressive. Marx was wrong. History advances by culture, not economics.
My argument is not that Whitlam should be seen as a conservative nemesis or culture warrior. Not everything he did was bad. His motives were often pristine to the point of naivety. And this was the problem for the generations of the left that assimilated them. He was right to replace the White Australia policy with an overdue multiculturalism. The long-term consequence was a left not colourblind, but race-obsessed.
Making higher education cheaper increased access to it, especially among women. A good result. Decades later, our campuses have become enormous bastions not of working-class mobility and gender equality but of managerial hegemony with too little viewpoint diversity.
According to Helen Andrews, an American conservative commentator, universities in the West have been “feminised” and filled with young women, according to sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, angry at the dwindling number of educated men with which to partner.
Again, hard to pin this on Whitlam. Robert Menzies also expanded university places. Are we to blame them both for the growing class and gender imbalances in our modern universities? There was certainly nothing in Whitlam’s public policy which aimed to downgrade the life chances of young men. And yet there is something in the symbolism of his university reforms which remains powerful to those progressives who see the campus as their ideological laboratory.
His Land Rights Act was a new legal era for Aboriginal Australians. In the hands of metro progressives, it has descended into repetitive acknowledgments of country and a banal identity politics.
Whitlam’s Family Law Act copied Ronald Reagan’s in California and abolished at-fault divorce. The collapse of stable households for poorer children was faster in America than here. But Australia also saw a rise in fatherless homes which many on the left applauded as “more diverse family structures”.
Lone-parent households – the family structure statistically most likely to retard a child’s life chances – doubled in the intervening half century (from 7 per cent of homes to 16).
Gough’s fault? No. His supporters’? Perhaps. Attributing blame is less important than recognising the cultural transformation this family breakdown presaged. It provided an enabling environment for the gender revolution – from trans ideology to intersectionality – that gives contemporary progressive politics its air of moral superiority.
At time of writing, Sussan Ley is leader of the Liberal Party. She shares one key challenge with her predecessors: she cannot easily replicate the Triple F – faith, family, flag – that has worked so well for Trump. She (and her successors) must somehow prosper within a political and cultural order that prioritises an atheistic internationalism (masquerading as progressive patriotism). Nine years of a supposedly Liberal ascendancy, 2013-22, did little to change this. Malcolm Turnbull accelerated it (and now tours campuses advertising the fact) and Scott Morrison saddled us with net zero – a key objective of the global left.
We should credit (or blame) Gough Whitlam for changing the terms of the game so fundamentally.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
Although Gough Whitlam was the last Australian prime minister to have served in World War II, there was little this week that linked nostalgia for his dismissal with remembrance of the fallen. That absence reflects an unease on the left with traditional ideas of Australian nationalism. But which has served them well.