How Gough Whitlam’s long shadow still looms over Australian politics
In February 1966, the then deputy leader came within two votes of being expelled from Labor for “gross disloyalty” after a typically withering flourish. In a stoush with the party’s federal executive over state aid to non-government schools, he quipped that Labor had “rid itself of the stigma of the 36 faceless men only to be confronted with the 12 witless men”.
Whitlam survived only because his campaigning in a by-election for the seat of Dawson had been so effective the two Queensland executive members had enough wit to change their votes.
The next year, as Labor leader, Whitlam strode into the eye of the storm in Victoria. At a state conference he ridiculed the ideological purity of a branch that had consigned the party to permanent opposition. “Certainly, the impotent are pure,” he said. This met with “thunderous boos and catcalls” from the party’s Socialist Left.
In 1968, Whitlam clashed with the party executive again and dramatically resigned his leadership.
Former leader Arthur Calwell hated Whitlam and willed his downfall, sending him an excoriating telegram that ended: “You are not, and never were, a Labor man.”
That sentiment rang through the indignant campaign slogan of the Left’s Jim Cairns: “Whose party is this, ours or his?” The caucus, at least, was Whitlam’s, but only barely. He won by 38 votes to 32.
This was the swashbuckling “crash through or crash” style of one of our most colourful and consequential post-war political leaders. It was a style Whitlam would carry through into government where, eventually, he would crash and burn.
In an interview for a Sky News documentary marking the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal, Whitlam Institute chairman and former senator John Faulkner says it is often forgotten that one of his enduring legacies is in reforming Labor.
“He’s there at a conference being howled down,” Faulkner says. “But he’s taking on the vested interests in the belief and understanding that the Labor Party had to change, it had to reform, it had to become more relevant in the modern world for it to have a chance of success in federal elections.”
It’s a view John Howard shares. “I give him enormous credit for having rebuilt the Labor Party,” he says. “Made it a respectable alternative government. People wanted a change at the end of ’72.”
In 1996, former Labor minister and federal secretary Bob McMullan told this columnist the Whitlam government’s successes and failures shaped the modern party.
“Much of the nature of the Hawke and Keating governments is made possible by, and driven by, remembrance of the Whitlam government era,” McMullan said. “The positives and the negatives, the things we think we learnt from it, whether we’re right or wrong.”
There is a lot to learn from this leader, in both his triumphs and his tragedies. Today’s Liberal Party should study Whitlam’s plan to retake government after Labor was eviscerated at the 1966 election. It was laid out in three steps: to modernise the party; to lay out detailed policies; and to convince the people that “such reforms were relevant to themselves and their country”.
In The Whitlam Government: 1972 to 1975, the former prime minister wrote of ideas that went well beyond reforming Labor and would shape the thinking of all future Australian governments.
Labor had no hand in writing the Constitution and was demoralised by its inability to change it.
So, the former air force navigator and barrister plotted a path to turn the Constitution to the left’s advantage.
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The Dismissal wasn’t the end of democracy
In fact, Australia escaped virtually unscathed from the political crisis of 1975.
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The Whitlam era was one of enduring change and great mistakes.
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“As one of the world’s great social democrat parties, (Labor) had to devise policies which could secure not only the approval of the electors but also the approval of judges,” he wrote. “By the late 1950s we were manifestly failing to do either.”
Whitlam had a plan to use the broad list of commonwealth powers in section 51 of the Constitution to rewire the nation’s operating system. He began by stretching the reach of the external affairs power, which until then had been narrowly confined to foreign relations and treaty-making. Whitlam saw it as a lever to nationalise reform, a way to overcome state resistance by anchoring domestic law in international obligations.
This was used to introduce the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which relied on the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The law was challenged by Queensland, and the Fraser government defended it and won. This cemented the most significant constitutional expansion of commonwealth power since World War II. The High Court confirmed that the commonwealth could legislate to give effect to international treaties even in areas traditionally reserved to the states. That principle was tested and affirmed again in 1983 in the Tasmanian Dams Case, this time under the Hawke government.
Despite political differences there is a great continuity in prime ministers after Whitlam. Their politics might be different but all try to centralise power. Howard used the constitutional toolbox to create Work Choices, effectively nationalising industrial relations through the corporations power.
Work Choices was unwound, but Labor’s institutional changes stuck. And that matters a lot because Labor’s worthy causes were legion. What began with the Racial Discrimination Act grew into an expanding empire of rights-based lawmaking, each new principle spawning an agency, a commission or a tribunal to enforce it.
Every fresh moral campaign required a new bureaucracy and each relentlessly widened its brief. Across time it has led to institutional capture, reshaping the public service, the law and the administrative state so that the moral assumptions of the left became embedded as orthodoxy.
The language of social justice and sustainability spread to the states and became the default idiom of government, regardless of who held office.
What began as Whitlam’s centralising impulse evolved into a regulatory culture that spanned the nation, a bureaucracy that no longer needed a Labor government to act like one.
Ideas that had taken root in the public service spread outward. Universities adopted the same language of equity, sustainability and inclusion, producing generations of graduates steeped in its assumptions. Business followed, importing the moral vocabulary of the state into corporate mission statements, human resources policies and environmental, social and governance reporting. What began as the moral architecture of Whitlam’s Canberra transformed the culture of the Australian establishment.
All this began as a worthy enterprise, built to promote fairness and inclusion. Across time it followed the drift of the left from universal principles to the intellectual cul-de-sac of identity politics. Institutions once devoted to equality before the law became instruments of grievance and division.
Governments come and go but institutions are forever, and they are now claiming powers that once were the remit of state and federal parliaments.
The last thing the nation needs is to entrench another federal environmental regulator and fill it full of activists, and yet we will.
The institutions demand revolutionary reform and could do with a cull. When the Sex Discrimination Commissioner can argue there is no such thing as male and female it is time to torch the joint, shake the dust from our feet and move on.
Those who think Whitlam’s influence on Australia is marginal are missing a much larger picture. He was a towering figure in every way. Love him or loathe him, his shadow is long.
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If Labor’s old guard had prevailed in the 1960s, Gough Whitlam would have been dismissed by his own and vanished into history.