Political messiah to martyr, a modern morality tale

THIS week is the 40th anniversary of the modern Australian prime ministership originating with Gough Whitlam that, for better or worse, enshrined in the heart of power a deep faith in active government, the centrality of the media and the idea of the leader as messiah. Whitlam lasted in office three crazy, brief and rushed years. Yet he changed the nature, pace and principles that define the prime ministership and many of his successors are slave to the Whitlam legacy often without realising this heritage.

The modern age of Australian government began on December 5, 1972, with the swearing-in of the most remarkable ministry in our history. This was the two-man government with Whitlam holding 13 portfolios and his deputy, Lance Barnard, holding 14 portfolios. The duumvirate, as it became known, was an act of initial brilliance - a signal that Australia had changed its direction, decisively and urgently. The duumvirate was a monument to Whitlam's impatience and hubris. He couldn't wait, literally, to assume power and, instead of cooling his heels until the caucus was able to meet to elect the full ministry, Whitlam advised the Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, to commission himself and Barnard across all ministries. What else would a rational leader do?

Gough's private joke was that the duumvirate had one minister too many. He couldn't resist saying it was the smallest ministry with jurisdiction over Australia "since the Duke of Wellington formed a ministry with two other ministers 138 years previously".

As you can appreciate, the duumvirate engaged Whitlam's theatrical sense. He was on a grand stage presiding over a new order.

The duumvirate was great fun. For a fortnight it rolled out dramatic decisions each day and the media stood to report and applaud. It was the apotheosis of Whitlam's vision of a new age of government power and intervention.

Yet it was a trap - the duumvirate left the deceptive impression that reform was easy and thrilling. Whitlam and Barnard ended conscription, freed draft resisters, took action to establish diplomatic relations with China, restored Wilfred Burchett's passport, re-opened the equal pay case before the Arbitration Commission, lifted the sales tax on contraceptives and took the first steps towards Aboriginal land rights.

Such drama and euphoria was unsustainable. The two-man government generated expectations that no leader could fulfil. Whitlam's start, glorious and furious, doomed him to the long, downhill run. These days the inauguration of Whitlam's government is forgotten while its demise is immortalised.

Yet the duumvirate and the dismissal are a perfect complement. They fit together as bookends of an era. They show that Whitlam arrived and finished with deeply unorthodox governance arrangements - he began with a two-man ministry and he ended by ruling in defiance of the Senate's deferral of supply. It heralded the cult of the leader. He began by showing how the prime minister could transform the nation in just a few days and he finished in a dramatic deployment of the power of the prime minister against the Senate and the governor-general.

In a profound insight Whitlam's speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, said later the passionate hostility aroused by the Whitlam government had its origin in the sheer unorthodoxy of the duumvirate in defiance of normal political process. It signalled that Labor had come to excite and experiment, a most unwise stance for any Australian government.

Whitlam left an abiding legacy of government intervention and activism. In a pace that never slackened he created Medibank, needs based private school funding, 'one vote, one value' electoral reform, 'no fault' divorce (a bill he conspicuously introduced wearing a dinner suit), along with the $4 billion overseas loan disaster and the infamous 1974 budget that boosted spending by more than 40 per cent.

The slow, measured pace of the Menzian age was decisively killed off. While his successors aspired to govern with less excess, more efficiency and greater discipline than Whitlam, in their compulsion to activism and faith in their powers they were Whitlamites.

Whitlam's immediate successor, Malcolm Fraser, was an impatient, ceaselessly active prime minister who rang his ministers any time of the day or night, conducted the longest cabinet meetings in memory and took more decisions each year than any previous government in Australian history. Fraser showed that activist government was a bipartisan phenomenon. Like Whitlam, he believed in the "great man" theory of history.

Activist government evolved into a related concept: the leader as messiah. Whitlam embraced this idea, yet it destroyed him. Bob Hawke perfected it (at least for a few terms). Hawke took the advantages of Whitlam's model and corrected many of the defects.

Under this model the leader began to transcend party as the pivotal player in determining how elections would be won or lost. The leader's task became more daunting - to re-interpret party values as class and tribal loyalties faded. Hence the leader's media image, perceived character and, to use the dreaded word, vision, became the staple of politics.

The upshot is that the entire system of government shifted - from cabinet government to prime ministerial government. Whitlam's successors achieved the power he pretended to have but did not really possess. Hawke was the best exemplar: a populist with a cult following yet a PM who ran an activist government while usually minimising the area of blunder (until the recession arrived).

Paul Keating as PM took the great man theory to new and dangerous peaks. Aspiring to use the office to transform the country, Keating embraced the republic, Mabo, native title and engagement with Asia, revealing that the leader as messiah ran a high risk of overreach.

John Howard proved that activism did not necessarily mean transforming the nation. Howard gave the model a new twist: the PM as daily political manager. Howard was a ceaselessly active 24/7 PM who widened the office in vital dimensions - he was economic manager, national security guardian, border protection guarantor and cultural doctor encompassing the field from sporting success to the Anzac legacy. Under Howard, the office was not just an instrument of policy but the prime minister became a pervasive presence in most households. A highly ambivalent outcome.

Then came Kevin Rudd. Fixated on media exposure, obsessed about prime ministerial power, prone to push himself to the brink of exhaustion, Rudd concentrated more power in his office. Upholding the messiah complex he broke from Labor's tradition that the caucus elect the ministry.

Rudd engaged in some of the most spectacular government interventions since Whitlam - a huge fiscal stimulus to meet the 2008 financial crisis, the National Broadband Network, an ambitious industry policy, a partial re-regulation of the labour market, an expansive defence agenda and ambitious programs in health, social and indigenous policy. He seemed unable to keep his hands off most portfolios yet lacked the internal mechanisms to order priorities.

He spoke to the public virtually every day. Yet Rudd revealed the limits of the model. Activism can verge on dysfunction and a leader's invulnerability can be cancelled by an assertion of old-fashioned caucus power. In the end he lasted a shorter time than Whitlam.

The moral is obvious yet painful. Prime ministerial power is now more enabling and more seductive. It is an instrument able to deliver immense progress or to be deployed in gesture politics devoid of genuine purpose. It is capable of deceiving its incumbent.

The model Whitlam pioneered has taken many leaps forward. Because it is vested with even more power it becomes a greater test of character. And because the public sees and hears so much of the prime minister, it forms much faster, sharper and tougher judgments. This is a permanent change. It is the first thing a wise PM needs to grasp these days.