Photo: Gough Whitlam during the 1975 federal election campaign. (ABC: Four Corners)
For Gough Whitlam, a leader prevailed because he persuaded - his party, his intellectual counterparts and the electorate. Rodney Cavalier writes.
In our time together on the Senate of the University of Sydney, Gough Whitlam, Peter Wilenski and I had lunch as often as we could before Senate meetings. Gough's presence in any establishment was a matter of moment for everyone present. After one lunch at the Macquarie Inn, an establishment of some provenance for the big end of town, a waiter enquired of Mr Whitlam if he could ask a question.
Of course, said Gough. His voice, his diction, were what they were - intimidating, imperious.
Cronulla days, Mr Whitlam, do you remember? And the waiter gave the name of his mother and father.
Just two names was all the trigger Gough required for him to remember party picnics in the National Park. "You know your parents made the occasions. But your aunt [named], now there was a fine woman, she worked so very hard. Which means that you are [pausing maybe twenty seconds as the wheels turned], you must be . . "” Out came the name.
Given the audience who had emerged from the kitchen and elsewhere, I deduced the waiter had not been averse to dropping Gough's name. His eyes were moist, a moment of supreme happiness for him which we were all sharing. Edward Gough Whitlam, in a life that had taken him in and out of the federal parliament, in and out of the prime ministership, a life in which he had shaken the hands of tens of thousands, he could that day remember the stalwart service of a father and mother and the mother's sister. Remember in microscopic detail the organisation of the picnics, who did what, the fun had by all.
I have seen him do it so often. Ask him a question on any matter that came before the parliament or the ALP Federal Executive, Gough was a one-man research service. All of the logarithms in all the world could not beat Gough's recital of what happened, often supplied with footnotes.
In absence of saloon passage, persuasion carried the day
Since news of Gough's death has spread this morning, tributes have been flowing in volume. The nation will pause, customary enmities are set aside, Malcolm Fraser has been gracious in his words. At Alice Springs in 2001 a grand gathering of Indigenous people gave thanks that these two men had made possible between them the largest peaceful transfer of land in the history of the world.
When Gough won the leadership ballot in 1967 he was against three highly credible candidates - Jim Cairns, Kim Beazley senior and Fred Daly. I assert that, if present rules applied for a membership ballot, Gough was going to be struggling against the strong support held in the party branches for Jim Cairns.
Gough's ride to the top was not a saloon passage. He broke from the pack in caucus by studied attention to each of his caucus colleagues, earning the endorsement of the NSW Right (though he did not share their values) and building a commanding presence in any public debate by way of set-piece occasions like lectures and addresses to influential professional associations.
No speech was ever wasted. Major legislation required a major speech. Go beyond the major, take a look at Gough in a valedictory or condolence: his language is magnificent.
Gough belonged to a Labor Party with a rude democratic culture. He led a party with that culture intact. For all of the perceptions of him as arrogant, Gough had a profound respect for the forms and processes of the ALP, as he did for the Australian Constitution. You changed the rules by way of the rules.
As Gough set about amending the policies and platform of the party, his mechanism was persuasion. Phone calls, letters, reportable occasions, culminating in Delegate Whitlam moving the motion. His first great internal struggle was to have the parliamentary leadership represented on the floor of conferences by right of office and inside the closed shops of executive meetings. A leader needed to be present to argue a case and persuade the delegates of its worth.
Argument and persuasion were tools to an end. Gough saw himself as a participant in a democratic party in which internal opposition was a given. A leader prevailed because he persuaded. If he could not persuade his own party, how could he persuade the electorate? The notion of leader as Godhead was utterly foreign to Gough's every political impulse.
Before the beginning of his parliamentary career, Gough understood the fundamentals. He was an unlikely winner of a tough pre-selection for the safe seat of Werriwa, famously chopping firewood for a preselector. Locals decided who was their candidate. They alone decided. Gough understood that he was invulnerable for as long as he retained the support of local members. No faction, no machine, could touch him.
A once rude democratic party made a strong leader
A redistribution in 1955 cast out his home base of Cronulla and brought in Left-wing redoubts around Carramar and Canley Vale. Those party members were ready for Gough. As Gough entered national prominence, local Leftist opposition to him intensified. Those people were in deadly earnest about defeating Gough in a local ballot. The Werriwa Federal Electorate Council was a killing field.
Critics assailed Gough through his iterations as Federal Member, Deputy Leader, Leader. Gough was not facing rhetorical feints. These were articulate men, motivated by belief, devoted to the removal of the federal member.
Gough did not call for protection. He fought his opponents, met them head on in debates, won the votes that counted. In the course of the struggle, people shifted, persuasion worked. Adherents of the Left by the 1969 Federal Conference worked out EG Whitlam was the real deal. Gough could win government and he would be transformative. He was not such a bad bloke either, mercurial for sure, but he really does believe in what he is spouting, so his opponents were concluding.
Nowhere was he preserved from criticism. In caucus he copped larry-dooley from all flanks including a Catholic Right who considered this non-believer a dangerous humanist who was bent on changing social relations. For much of the Left, his sins were otherwise.
In the parliamentary executive Clyde Cameron, ex-shearer, brooked no nonsense and filleted Gough with precision cuts appropriate to the occasion. For Gough in 1970 to win Clyde to the cause of intervention in the Victorian ALP did truly change the course of modern history.
The Federal President of the ALP did not then see it as his role to lead the cheering. The party had a platform and policies and binding rules that set the terms of engagement. The Leader was as much bound by those rules as any member.
Unfashionable now it may be to praise the likes of Clyde Cameron, Joe Chamberlain, Jim Keefe and a legion who respected party traditions. Those people should be honoured and studied. In the face of unilateralism, such machine leaders slapped Gough and they slapped him hard. Whatever his private thoughts, Gough copped the sermons and the putdowns. By 1969 he had learned the lessons that served his greatness.
After 1969 Gough prevailed because he had won the party over. The 1971 Federal Conference, assembling after interventions in the Victorian and NSW branches, was arguably the greatest convention in the party's history. The leader behaved as he always had and would: with the numbers likely locked in, Gough spoke as if his life depended on it. The vote of every delegate mattered to Gough.
I assert he was a far better leader and Prime Minister because the policies he advanced were the policies he advanced and argued for. The party membership believed they owned the government and its program. It has been a long time since the party membership has believed that.
These words have been a public identity whose elected public office ceased 36 years ago. He had such a rich life ahead, one that would be twice as long in that time remaining as the whole of life allotted to comrades in the Air Force and the other armed services.
After parliament so much that was magnificent was ahead
With the ending of his parliamentary career in 1978, Gough Whitlam was well advanced in his story of the Whitlam Governments of 1972 to 1975. He had allowed himself to be distracted by a comprehensive reply to the memoirs of JR Kerr as well as a never-ending round of public addresses on occasions of moment and by being always available to those elements of the Labor Party that sought an occasion of grace and moment. He was in no hurry about the writing, confident in his longevity and undiminished intellectual powers - a confidence blessedly justified. Not until 1985 did Gough publish The Whitlam Government 1972-75 (Viking 1985) 787pp.
The result was, in every sense, a magnum opus. Nineteen of the 21 chapters are devoted to public policy, the opening chapter deals with the concept of mandate, the epilogue explores dispassionately how his reform impulses were resisted by any and all means. We err in thinking of EG Whitlam through the prism of his dismissal. We err even more in tolerating the casual rejection of his government as economically illiterate given the international buffers that hit Australia directly and hard. Inflation was a killer of governments across the world, released because the US administration had declined to pay for the war in Vietnam by increasing taxes or cutting elsewhere.
Consider just chapter seven on health. In this chapter Gough traces his commitment to an expanded role for the Commonwealth back to his emerging political consciousness as an RAAF navigator much impressed by the efforts of Curtin and Chifley to take practical measures to ensure the health of all Australians. Being Gough means being thorough; his story goes back to the beginning of Federation in 1901 and the efforts of the early Labor governments to use the quarantine power of the Constitution to legislate for public health. Only in 1921 did a Commonwealth Department of Health come into existence.
Commonwealth responsibility grew only in times of Labor governments. The Curtin Government set about assisting people in need by passing the Pharmaceutical Benefits Act 1944 which reimbursed the cost of prescription drugs. The Tories challenged the Act and succeeded in persuading the High Court to overrule it.
Labor used to fight and win elections to carry its program. The Labor of Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating did not look upon policy speeches as sound bites to meet the mood of the moment, to be jettisoned as soon as the sky turned grey. In 1946 Ben Chifley placed a referendum before the people that conferred on the Commonwealth the power "to make laws with respect to the provision of ... pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services". Being a brilliant politician, as well as a man of principle, Chifley negotiated the support of RG Menzies by accepting an amendment that prohibited "civil conscription" as the UK National Health Service was. The referendum passed.
Having constitutional power did not change the landscape of medicine, not then. The doctors' union began a campaign against any measure of taxpayer-funded assistance to Australians in need of medical care, a campaign in which they were unflinching for most of the next 40 years. Gough was there for the duration, met them head on and bested them. Gough, being hopelessly old Labor, meant what he said and said what he meant. Belief is a most wonderful weapon in your cause.
The doctors organised boycotts of what the Chifley Government had made the law. In 1948 in another appeal to the High Court, the doctors succeeded in having the Health Service Act struck down. That same year the Chifley Government negotiated the first of the hospital agreements with the states out of which free hospital treatment would be funded by the Commonwealth.
Earle Page gutted the universal provisions of the national health scheme he had inherited by limiting government reimbursement of medical and hospital bills only to those Australians enrolled in a prescribed health insurance fund. Such funds were necessarily dominated by doctors who held the equity and total control. Through those funds, the shareholders earned a separate fortune on top of their fee-paying activity.
Against this hegemony from the time he entered Parliament in 1952, Gough employed the limited forms of communication of that era to stake a position that was consistent over the next two decades. One can trace the programs of the Whitlam Government in all areas to his statements in which every phrase was considered most carefully - not for its spin value or how it would play in Indooroopilly but how it would usefully inform an intelligent electorate exactly what to expect of a Labor government in which Gough had influence.
His passion for taking services to the people come through in these lectures. Mental hospitals were especially bad. The outer suburbs of all the cities were in a wretched condition even as they were filling with people. The facilities were not following them. The years passed, the defeats mounted, Gough moved through the ranks. By 1967 he was Leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party.
His first response to a Budget in 1967 he noted the existence of over 200 separate health funds with operating costs amounting to 14 per cent of contributions received. Reserves were huge, some 74 per cent more than was necessary. The funds did not enjoy price competition. Some 17 per cent of Australians were without medical cover, some 15 per cent without hospital cover. High income earners claimed tax deductions on their contributions, a distortion of the real costs that meant that Gough's two drivers were paying twice as much for medical cover as was Gough on twice the income.
Birth of Medibank
In that same year he went to a meeting at the home of Dr Moss Cass (a future Labor MP) in Melbourne where he met John Deeble and Dick Scotton as well as a number of other practitioners and health experts. "Medibank was conceived that night." Good public policy requires intellectual rigour and political muscle, good policy requires champions with public standing and acknowledged expertise, good policy requires a champion immersed in politics, blessed with patience and determination.
Medibank had all those elements. All of those elements it needed given the eight long years ahead. Change occurred incrementally. Gough used an address to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney in 1967 to stake the position of Labor. Practitioners recognised the importance of the statement by asking for the right to publish the speech in the Medical Journal of Australia. Would any speech of today, outside of Defence, warrant consideration on its merits?
Labor campaigned on the Scotton-Deeble plan in 1969, an aspect of its policies which was most popular. Labor won the popular vote in the wrong places on Gough's first outing, a near miss which denied Australia an age of wonders when tax revenues were flowing in fabulous numbers courtesy of a resources boom.
When Labor won, Bill Hayden did not become Health Minister for reason that Gough reckoned that driving the Medibank legislation would be challenge enough. A canny decision that placed Hayden in Social Security with sole responsibility for the agenda on Medibank.
Hayden was everything a Minister should be - on top of his portfolio, briefed ahead of crises, not given to name calling, able to absorb abuse by consulting his dignity; a compelling advocate in all circumstances, Bill Hayden was to enjoy his finest hour in a career with many fine hours.
The Medibank bills were twice presented to the Senate and twice rejected. The bills were not tricks but triggers. The bills made up part of the advice that caused a double dissolution in 1974. Labor was re-elected. The bills were again passed by the House of Representatives and again rejected by the Senate.
The AMA had created a fighting fund of $2 million, a fortune for those times when a national election campaign barely cost $1 million. The hysteria against the bills was as mindless as anything Australia had known. Simultaneously, Bill Hayden was ushering in a communist state at the same time as he was an SS Obenfuhrer.
The bills passed the joint sitting and became law. In 1975 the negotiations with the states proceeded for a Medibank agreement. Only the two Labor states signed on at the outset. The Senate continued its obstruction by blocking a levy of 1.35 per cent on income tax to fund the cover. The Government elected to meet the funding from general revenue. The last state to sign on was Queensland, led by the recalcitrant Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
On this measure, so important to his state, the Libs ganged up in Cabinet with disaffected Nats to roll their Premier. Before the end of 1975 all the states were in. Which was just as well as the Whitlam Government was about to complete its magnificent course.
Rodney Cavalier was a minister in the government of Neville Wran. He is a Labor historian and edits a political newsletter. View his full profile here.
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