By Peter Anderson
Downcast, pensive, obviously distraught, he mutters, "What can you say? What can you bloody well say?" But Gough Whitlam's appearance said it all. These closing frames of the recent ABC documentary, Whitlam, were probably the most telling of the whole two-hour production.
December 2 is the 20th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam Labor government, which in both its ascendancy and its demise provided some of the most dramatic events in Australian political history. Pundits from both sides of the Whitlam fence have used the occasion to push their own particular barrow.
Right-winger Gerard Henderson, writing in the November 24 Sydney Morning Herald, began his column with disdain: "Holy cow. It's Holy Gough (We praise Thy name) time again". A few days earlier in the November 20 Financial Review, federal Labor minister Rodney Cavalier wrote, "You do not begin to understand the Whitlam era until you understand what he did to provoke such passionate opposition outside the ALP".
Both were commenting on Whitlam, and both adequately condemned the show for its inaccuracies and omissions. Indeed, Whitlam was a rose-coloured account that falsely presented the Labor leader as a sort of Australian folk hero.
"Why has every Labor leader since relied on the Whitlam model as the negative example for going about government?", Cavalier asked. "In recent years such Labor figures as Paul Keating and Lionel Bowen have made profound criticisms of the excesses of the Whitlam era", Henderson adds. But neither really gets the point.
The political climate in 1972 in which Labor won government after 23 consecutive years of conservative rule was very different to what it is today. Labor's election was delivered by a wave of popular support, encompassing high hopes from many ordinary people that the new government would change the face of Australian society. There was something deep and genuine about that sentiment.
Labor rode the anti-Vietnam war movement to power — though not before Whitlam had attempted to overturn former ALP leader Arthur Caldwell's opposition to the war. In 1968 Whitlam almost lost the party leadership to antiwar campaigner Jim Cairns.
Labor was elected also with considerable support from sections of the business elite — led by Rupert Murdoch's Australian — that considered Labor's foreign policy much more in tune with the new reality of detente than was the Liberal's Cold War posture. Their hope was Labor would defuse the late 1960s mass movement and impose some form of wage freeze.
Potentially far-reaching reforms were made by the Whitlam government in the areas of Aboriginal rights, women's rights and services, and housing. But many of these gains were either never fully implemented or were quickly eroded.
With the recession of 1974-75 approaching, Labor gave grants to failing manufacturers, like the Leyland car maker, but did little to save threatened jobs. It unsuccessfully proposed a wage-freeze referendum in the face of soaring prices, and then introduced a rigged indexation scheme to cut real wages. It retracted pledges on child care and abortion rights.
With unemployment around 300,000, the highest in decades, treasurer Bill Hayden's 1975 budget cut public spending and raised taxes, initiating the austerity program later taken up by the Fraser Liberal government. And when Labor turned a blind eye to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975 — and the murder there of Australian journalists reporting the invasion — many former sympathisers knew time was up for the Whitlam dream.
Even so, public anger at the November 11, 1975, Fraser-Kerr coup was palpable. But in the face of mass demonstrations and strikes around the country, ALP president Bob Hawke called for "restraint" and for "law and order". "We must not substitute anarchy in the streets for the processes of democracy", he pleaded. And he accurately claimed: "We [the ALP] came to power to save the system". Is it therefore surprising that Labor lost the December 1975 election in such dramatic style?
Labor's post-Whitlam leadership studied the whole 1972-75 experience with great intensity. Their conclusion: maintaining government means unflinchingly meeting the economic needs of capitalist big business while at the same time holding down working-class pressures from below. The result: 10 years of Labor government under Hawke-Keating; 11% unemployment; and real wages 20% lower than a decade ago.
Labor has not caused this capitalist economic recession, but nor has it done anything sufficient to protect those who suffer most from it — ordinary working people. Were his own government not responsible for beginning the policy the current Labor administration now follows it might be possible to look on Whitlam with greater sympathy. As it is, we are left with nothing but the lingering view of his own forlorn face.