Gough Whitlam

by liberal japonicus

A very short post about Gough Whitlam, who recently passed away.

Whitlam was a major figure in the 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis and googling now shows the site http://whitlamdismissal.com/, with the source documents.

When I first found out about it, maybe a decade and a half after it took place, being an American, there was a focus, possibly because it was Aussies telling me, the American, this on the aspect of US control. Whitlam withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam in 1972, and tales have floated around about CIA involvement along with his relationship with Nixon, which has links to something that Donald Johnson has commented a lot about, East Timor and Indonesia. And coincidentally, Peter Carey's new novel Amnesia, covers many of those same points. The fact that Kerr, the Governor-General who dismissed Whitlam, was also ostensibly from the same party, increases the conspiracy quotient.

I don't know what to say about these suggestions of CIA plots, but I do think that what happened in Australia was an early salvo in the conflict between right and left all over the world. Here is the Guardian article of the time reporting about it.

The present situation was brought about by the death of a Labour Senator earlier this year. An ultra-right-wing state Government refused to follow the normal constitutional precedent and send a Labour nominee as replacement. When the new Senator took his seat, the Opposition then had the power to bring down the administration, a power which they finally exercised a month ago.
Tonight Mr Fraser said he had no pangs of conscience about the move. He promised to hold a new election and said he was confident of winning

In that 3 month build-up, Fraser and the Coalition party worked to block supply, such that the Labor government of Whitlam was engaged in ways to make sure that government paychecks would not bounce.

I suppose that this is a nice fox of a topic to put in the chicken coop, but the whole incident fascinates me greatly, not only for its content, but for shaking up my perspective of what I imagined Australia to be like.

Comments

[John M. Burt]

In spite of the trouble caused by this incident, it still shows the superiority of a Parliamentary system.
We'd be long shut of the Teabaggers and possibly of the Republicans as a national force under a parliamentary system.

[liberal japonicus]

John, that's an interesting point that I wasn't really considering, though I'm wondering about it. Australia has still had problems with the far right (Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) and in the UK, you have the rise of UKIP. If you go outside the Anglosphere, you have Le Pen in France and the Mussolini name still drawing votes in Italy. I realize that all of these have their own historical roots, so it is not fair to lump them all together, and you may be right (I'm thinking how California is now a one state party), but I'd be interested in hearing you fleshing out your thoughts a bit.

[lsn]

I'd have to say that the Liberal-National coalition appears to have absorbed One Nation, or at least veered considerably to the right since One Nation appeared (and then disappeared). Certainly they've veered a long way to the right since 1975, when Malcolm Fraser was the devil incarnate (well, for Labor voters at least), closely followed by Sir John Kerr. These days Malcolm Fraser is positively left wing - and probably not coincidentally has resigned from the Liberal Party.

I never know whether to believe the conspiracy theories or not to be honest - the CIA being involved is certainly more plausible than the Chinese submarine taking Harold Holt, but whether the CIA would have bothered... who knows.

Anyway. Vale Gough Whitlam. He changed Australia, and the impacts of those changes are still being felt and hopefully will still be felt for some time to come. If nothing else I hope his death gives the electorate pause to remember a time when positive change seemed and was possible, and to start electing people with vision.