Labor's problem with women, migrants, suburbanites, elderly

IF it had been left to women to decide, Billy McMahon would have won the 1972 election comfortably on preferences. Then again, if it had been up to the men, Gough Whitlam would have been the incumbent prime minister and McMahon would have been enjoying an early retirement.

Three years earlier, in October, 1969, male voters favoured Labor to the Coalition by 49 per cent to 38 per cent in pre-election polls. Female voters went the other way; 37 per cent backed Whitlam in 1969 compared with 46 per cent who backed McMahon. The discrepancy between Whitlam's male and female support in 1972 is rarely commented on, yet it was larger than that of any Labor leader before or since in elections when reliable figures are available.

The It's Time television commercial has fixed a misleading picture of the Whitlam ascendancy in the popular mind. Far from being a popular anointing, as the images of the swaying choir suggest, pre-election polls show an electorate starkly divided as women, older voters, managers, farmers and professionals largely favoured the Coalition. The It's Time campaign was not a celebration but a sophisticated exercise in modern marketing designed to compensate for Whitlam's weaknesses.

Focus group research, conducted on a large scale for the first time by an Australian political party, heard that Whitlam was "never seen with women"; he was seen as evasive and had a tendency to ignore questions. He was commonly seen as cold, distant, inhuman by test groups who described him as an "intellectual loner" who gave "impotent answers to potent questions". He had an "oily, irritating voice".

Whitlam invested his trust in a team of advertisers and marketers led by long-time Labor supporter Sim Rubensohn, who finetuned his policy platform, stage-managed photoshoots and softened his image by encouraging his wife Margaret to take centre stage. Outwardly, Whitlam appeared confident and self-assured, yet one photograph from the campaign shows his docile submission to his image makers' demands as he poses with an It's Time T-shirt under his middle-aged tweed jacket with a petite, blonde, 23-year-old singer who rose to fame with the hit He's My Blonde Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy.

In a campaign pitch to Labor, only recently added to the public record, the Hansen-Rubensohn-McCann-Erickson team described Margaret Whitlam as a latter-day Eleanor Roosevelt. "Sonia McMahon is of immeasurable help to her husband's image, despite the fact that she is not noted for her high IQ," they said. "Mrs Whitlam, on the other hand, is very intelligent. Many women will undoubtedly identify with her, respect her and listen to her point of view." Margaret Whitlam's presence might persuade voters that the "the leader is not a political automat but has a wife and family; that the Whitlam family is a tight-knit unit, which most women will support".

Labor's problem with women was deep-seated. In an era when homemaking was women's principal occupation, they were inclined to conservative attitudes and hated industrial confrontation. In 1971, workers had $45 million docked from their pays because of industrial action, reinforcing female concerns about trade unions. "Blue-collar wives will vote against Labor if there's union trouble," the marketing team advised.

Paradoxically, Whitlam's support of women's rights alienated many women still further. A Labor inquiry into the 1977 federal election, the last that Whitlam fought, was to find that women's rights were a boutique concern: "One submission suggests that women would have been better off being whales during that election campaign ... We are seen by some women as being too closely aligned with radical feminist views, or as opposed to the traditional view of the importance and role of the family."

Many voters were uncomfortable with Whitlam's progressive policies. Land rights, tariff reduction, the environment, divorce law reform and race relations were described euphemistically as "special issues" in the It's Time strategy document and none of them were playing well.

Immigration was "a potential disaster area for Labor"; the Coalition had dismantled the White Australia policy, but Labor appeared to be paying the price. Researchers noted that comments such as "Vote Labor and get a nigger for a neighbour" were beginning to emerge.

Ironically, the leader who later would be associated in the public mind with the birth of multiculturalism won government by pledging to restrict immigration. In June 1972, Peter Shenstone from Spectrum International warned Whitlam that there was "a strong underlying feeling that the ALP is somehow associated with 'floodgates' and black or Asian immigrants." He advised the leader to tie Labor to reducing all immigration "rather than try to battle it out on the question of the type of person that will be brought into the country". Two months later, in an interview with David Frost, Whitlam adopted that position: "I don't think the scale of migration which we've had up to now is fair to the migrants or fair to the Australian."

It's Time was the first political campaign in Australia to replace the raw, spontaneous rhetoric of the stump with technocratic mass-marketing. For the first time a leader would seek endorsement as a brand; McCann compared Whitlam to Johnny Walker, the whisky that commanded 50 per cent of the market. "On taste tests, people can't tell one from the other. However most people believe Johnny Walker to be superior because it is perceived to be the best. What they really perceive is not the whisky in the bottle but what is imagined to be in the bottle."

The results show pockets of resistance to Whitlam. He won seats in outer suburban Sydney and Melbourne but there were swings against the ALP in South Australia, Western Australia and country Queensland. Labor lost two seats in the west and one each in SA and WA. Veteran commentator Alan Reid wrote later that by selectively targeting outer suburban seats and ignoring the rest, Whitlam planted the seeds of his eventual downfall.

"It was as though, for Whitlam's advisers, and consequently for the ALP, Australia stops where the pavements of Sydney and Melbourne ended. It was an attitude for which the ALP was, at the 1975 elections, to pay dearly."