Whitlam legacy placed Australia in the modern world

Joshua Markham

Joshua is a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws student at the University of Western Sydney. He has an interest in Employment Law and says 'I am the first member of my family to have attended university, and have always been aware that the Whitlam government made tertiary education available to a greater number of Australians, from a greater range of backgrounds, than had previously been the case.'

The legacy of the Whitlam government is that of having been a moderniser of Australia and an exemplar of what, in social democracy, is attainable. It was a government which made more apparent, to the world and Australians, a nation which was independent, industrialised, culturally unique, a predominantly urban society (1) and above all, modern. As Whitlam-policies have been eroded, the more they have become ideals and thus his legacy.

A legacy of the Whitlam Government is that of having been a rapid moderniser of Australia, especially urban Australia, but also of having failed to achieve its promise and thus leaving many to ponder 'what might have been?' The Whitlam Government, commenced its maelstrom of reform two weeks prior to the Labor caucus even being able to appoint a full ministry. This feverish rush, le tourbillon social (2) came to be a defining aspect of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's administration.

It has been a defining aspect in the esteem with which Labor-faithful hold his terms in office and the criticism made by detractors, perhaps having been wary of an old man in a hurry. Gough Whitlam formed a two-man interim ministry with Lance Barnard, making it, Whitlam later said, 'the smallest ministry with jurisdiction over Australia since the Duke of Wellington formed a ministry with two other Ministers.'(in 1834) (3).

The Whitlam Government immediately implemented a long list of unprecedented reforms. Following Whitlam Government promotion, the equal pay case was reopened before the Arbitration Commission, resulting in 1974, of women achieving the full adult minimum wage.

The Imperial honours system was abolished, as were Imperial weights and measures, the last of Australia's soldiers in Vietnam were withdrawn, Legal Aid offices were opened and the Government commenced a foreign policy more independent of the policies of great powers such as the United States and Great Britain; a halt was made to granting of mining leases on Aboriginal reserves.(4)

Some of these and later Whitlam Government reforms, were to be eroded or abolished by successive Labor and Coalition Governments, however, it is the memory of much which was innovative and opportunity-advancing, being achieved in a short time; even in the first two weeks of the Whitlam government, that remain for many, an ideal as to what can be achieved in social democracy. Many regard Gough Whitlam as being an Australian leader, the style of which was unseen since Prime Minister Menzies and unlikely to be seen again.(5)

Rapid and wide-ranging decision making, continued after the two-man Ministry was replaced with a full one. Australia recognised the People's Republic of China and when the United States recommenced bombing raids on North Vietnam, the Prime Minister sent a firm protest to Washington and numbers of Labor Ministers used hitherto blunt language in denunciation, 'infuriating American policy-makers who were accustomed to subservient Australian governments prepared to go 'all the way with LBJ.'(6)

The Whitlam Government was to create a scheme of universal medical insurance, establish a Department of Urban and Regional Development to assist State and Local government to improve urban amenities. (7)

It was to increase expenditure on technical colleges, provide special incentives for isolated
school children, the handicapped, Aborigines and migrants, many of whom lived in Western Sydney, substantially increase educational expenditure, causing Gough Whitlam to describe the resulting transformation as the 'most enduring single achievement of my Government' (8) and abolish fees for tertiary students, one of many Whitlam government initiatives which has been eroded or overturned by succeeding governments.

In these and other matters, including recognition of new regimes in the world, reassessment of old alliances, commencement of new relationships with Aborigines, renewed efforts to achieve wage equality between the sexes, and the abandonment of assimilation for multiculturalism, many assumptions of conservative Australian Governments as well as what many Labor politicians had held to be traditional party policy, regarded as no longer solid, by the modernist Whitlam government, melted into air. (9)

Breadth of vision and interest in getting much done in little time, was what initially attracted Rex Connor, the Minister for Minerals and Energy to Gough Whitlam. Connor's ambitions included such massive projects as the construction of a giant pipeline grid to carry natural gas from one side of Australia to the other, a new agency, the Petroleum and Minerals Authority, to process and market raw materials in Australia rather than using foreign interests to export them, and seeing Australia use alternative energy sources when the long term viability of Middle Eastern oil,(10) seemed in 1973 to be uncertain.

In the Whitlam Government, not even depletion of overseas fossil fuels,(11) would stand in the way of it trying to modernise Australia.

The Whitlam Government projected Australia as a modern and culturally unique society. The government increased support for the arts, increased Australian content requirements for television, and more promoted the preservation of historic sites.(12)

Regarding this emphasis on culture, Stuart MacIntyre in A Consise History of Australia writes:

Whitlam cultivated a nationalism that allowed for internationalism. With the revival of local publishing, theatre and film, they contributed to a cultural renaissance that made it possible to see life in this country as possessing a depth of meaning and richness of possibility. The completion in 1973 of the Sydney Opera House and the acquisition by the National Gallery of 'Blue Poles', the large dribbling creation of Jackson Pollock, caught the mood of expansive engagement.(13)

An assessment of the Whitlam Government's legacy must acknowledge that for some, the legacy of the Whitlam Government, includes the memories that by 1975, effects of the Government's fiscal policies, the scandal over Jim Cairns' relationship with Junie Morosi and his later dismissal, the resignation of Rex Connor, removal from the Treasury of Frank Crean and shifting of Clyde Cameron to a different portfolio, gave the coalition strength, rankly abus'd(14) in pushing for the Government's deposition.

However Nathan Hollier correctly acknowledges the existence of a 'popular memory' of the Whitlam Government, and an attractiveness of the ideals of the Whitlam Government for many who are too young to remember the Whitlam era.(15)

The more the remains of the Whitlam Government's far-reaching achievements change, the more many people's holding of those policies as ideals, stay the same, and that is probably the enduring legacy of the Whitlam Government.

Footnotes

D. Horne, 'Imagining', Ideas for a Nation. Sydney: Pan Books, 1989, p.38.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was the first to use the word moderniste in the way it has become common in later centuries. He described society in Paris, Europe's cultural capital as a whirlwind, le tourbillon social. Quoted in M. Berman, 'Introduction: Modernity-Yesterday, today and tomorrow', All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Verso, 1983, p.17.
Gough Whitlam's eulogy for Lance Barnard at St John's Church Launceston, 15 August 1997 on http://whitlamdismissal.com/speeches/97-08-15_barnard-eulogy.shtml
R. McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party. 1891-1991, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991, p.338.
Clyde Cameron recounts Gough Whitlam's understanding of the powers he possessed and the means of utilising them:

"[H]e directed Bunting and Co (Senior public servants, including Sir John Bunting, Sir Keith Waller and Alan Cooley) to immediately cancel conscription and end our involvement in the Vietnam War. One of the public servants told him it could not be done, that there was some sort of regulation hidden in a dust-covered volume which said he could not make changes in this manner. Whitlam immediately dismissed this objection as sheer nonsense and within a few minutes they learned that they were dealing with a Prime Minister the like of which they had not seen since Menzies." [ C.Cameron , The Confessions of Clyde Cameron, 1913-1990, As told to Daniel Connell. Crows Nest, NSW , Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1990, pp.200-201]

Gareth Evans, for thirteen years a cabinet minister in the Hawke and Keating Governments, is quoted in R.Mc Mullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991, p.375 as saying of the Whitlam Government: "[t]here won't be another one like it."
Ibid., p. 341.
S.A. Macintyre, A Consise History of Australia, Cambridge, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999, p.233.
R. McMullin., op.cit., p..346.
K.Marx, "Bourgeois and Proletarians" Chapter 1, The Communist Manifesto, 1848. Karl Marx said, the modern environment is identifiable because: "[a]ll fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face...the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men."
R. Mc Mullin., op.cit., p.350.
It could have been about the Whitlam government's ambitions and era, that Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, with prescience wrote of modernism: "This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt." [Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge, 1992.p.123.]
S.A. Macintyre, Concise History of Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp.231.
Ibid., pp.231-232.
W.Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, line 39: "Rankly abus'd(...) The serpent that did sting thy fathers life, now wears his crown."
N. Hollier, 'From Hope to disillusion? The legacy of the Whitlam Government in Australian Policy and culture", in J Hocking, C Lewis (eds) Whitlam and Modern Labor, 2000, pp.416, 436. Hollier suggests that the popular music group, 'The Whitlams' and the representation of the Whitlam Government in Christos Tsiolkas' The Jesus Man, Random House, Sydney, 1999 are evidence of the popularity of the Whitlam Government's social democracy, as an ideal among many ,too young to remember the actual era.

Bibliography

Books

Berman, M. 'Introduction: Modernity-Yesterday, today and tomorrow', All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Verso, 1983.

Cameron, C. The Confessions of Clyde Cameron, 1913-1990, As told to Daniel Connell. Crows Nest, NSW, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1990.

Horne, Donald. 'Imagining', Ideas for a Nation. Sydney: Pan Books, 1989.

Macintyre, S.A. Concise History of Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

McMullin, R. The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party. 1891-1991, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Marx, K. "Bourgeois and Proletarians" Chapter 1, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

W.Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, line 39.

Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge, 1992.

Essay from a Collection

Hollier, N. 'From Hope to Disillusion? The Legacy of the Whitlam Government in Australian Policy and Culture", in J Hocking, C Lewis (eds) Whitlam and Modern Labor, 2000.

Internet

Gough Whitlam's eulogy for Lance Barnard at St John's Church Launceston, 15 August, 1997 on http://whitlamdismissal.com/speeches/97-08-15_barnard-eulogy.shtml (accessed 4/11/04).