Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the condolence motion of the Prime Minister. I knew John Wheeldon extremely well in his time in politics, but knew him less well later. It is one of the profound regrets in my life that it is in the nature of the job we have that we tend to fall out of touch with our friends. I have not been able to see much of him over the last five or six years, and I am the poorer for that.

I cannot begin to describe in this parliament what John Wheeldon was like and who he was, because there is no member of this parliament, in the House or in the Senate, who remotely resembles John Wheeldon. He was a politician of a completely different era, with a completely different standard of intellectual honesty and an absolute determination to be his own man and to speak his own mind. If you had put him in a focus group, you would have seen them completely destroyed within five minutes flat and banging on the doors to get out of the place. If you had told him that he had to confine his remarks to a seven-second grab, he would have boxed your ears. But he was capable of a seven-second grab. I remember him being interviewed by Syd Donovan after our defeat in the 1977 election. Syd, who was then being quite portentous about it all, said, ‘Senator, could you tell us why it is that the Labor Party lost this election?’ to which John Wheeldon replied in a similar tone of voice, ‘I suppose, Syd, that the primary reason was due to an absence of votes.’ He was a great balloon pricker in his time. He was never completely comfortable in parliament, and managed to talk himself out of it thoroughly by the end of it. He said of parliament:

When I first came into the Parliament, like most of us I suppose, being human, I used to achieve a certain small measure of ecstasy at seeing my photograph in a newspaper, even if the story which appeared alongside it consisted of a garbled account of something I had said or an allegation that I had been at a secret meeting plotting the overthrow of the leadership of the Labor Party when I had been in a different city from that in which the meeting took place. In fact, one often achieved a certain thrill at seeing one’s face on a television screen while one was being asked silly questions by a disc jockey with ideas above his station. But as the years pass the charm of that tends to wear off. I remember that at the height of one great controversy, when I think I was being accused of being an agent of the Chinese Communist Party—which some suggest I still am—a near neighbour, a prominent businessman, asked me whether I could take up some matter with Sir Charles Court because he knew that I was a Liberal member of the Legislative Assembly and would undoubtedly have great influence on him.

That quote epitomises the way in which John Wheeldon used to speak. As I said, there was a time in my life when if I saw John each month I would see him each week. I saw a great deal of him. When I started in politics one of my jobs on the state executive of the Labor Party was to make sure there were at least half-a-dozen speakers after John Wheeldon had spoken on every subject, because it would take you that long to wear down the destruction of your arguments by him and have some chance of winning a majority on the state executive.

One of the last things that he did in political life, I suppose, for which I am very grateful, was to vote for me in a preselection. John went through many metamorphoses as a politician. The Prime Minister has referred to his conversion from the Liberal Party to the Labor Party, and that was on the Communist Party Dissolution Bill. He believed that the attempt to ban the Communist Party was a direct attack on democratic liberties, which he strongly upheld. He then became a thorough-going and convinced intellectual socialist. He worked in a Fabian Society bookshop in London for a couple of years, and replacing him to work in that Fabian bookshop was Jomo Kenyatta.

John had an extraordinary array of friends internationally. He spoke and read French and German fluently, and if you went into his office there would be French and German magazines all over his desk. There would be English-language papers, but none of them Australian. He had an extraordinarily encyclopaedic comprehension of where the world stood, even if he had a particularly idiosyncratic analysis of it, and many conversions on the road to Damascus. Fierce anticolonialism, picked up in the 1950s, led him to be a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. Then his analysis of human oppression and colonialism led him to be a forthright opponent of the Soviet Union in his later years in politics.

As he went through these various metamorphoses, he did so to the great dissatisfaction of most members of the Labor Party, one way or another, in Western Australia and not a few in the federal parliamentary Labor Party. His career looks quite conventional when you see it on paper, as the Prime Minister read out. He had 16 years in the Senate and a couple of years as a minister. He was a very good minister in his time. I have a note from Graham Edwards, which I should read out. It says:

… though a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, he had an immense compassion for individual veterans. He helped me and other veterans.

Of course, as Minister for Repatriation and Compensation, he was in a position to do that. He served on many parliamentary committees. He was probably most proud of two of them—though he would have wanted to forget the time when he put in a minority report arguing for the legalisation of the use of marijuana. His last report in parliament was on human rights. It was one of the seminal reports produced by the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee and I do not think we have bettered it. Unlike these days, he wrote most of the report himself. I will put his conversion in politics in his own words, as I think the words bear a bit of thought:

I have had to make what John Foster Dulles would have called an agonising reappraisal. In my early days, I believed that there were a lot of things wrong with Western society as a result of capitalism. I still think that, but I also believe that those things are just as bad, or worse, in Eastern Bloc countries. I was never enamoured of the Soviet Union and I was one of the most vocal critics in the Senate of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And my stand against the Vietnam War was not taken out of sympathy for the Soviet Union. But it has become clear to me over the past several years that the Soviet Union is an imperialist power and that the danger it poses is greater than any other dangers. I do not think that the two superpowers are equally culpable for the threat to world peace. For a start, the US is subject to the internal pressure of its society.

Speaking about US bases, he said:

I have changed on that. I believe that the Soviet Union has designs on the rest of us and that the US is the principal obstacle to Soviet expansion. If other countries do not cooperate with the US, the chances of the Soviet Union being successful are increased.

One thing I can say about all the speeches is that absolutely none of them were read. Perhaps his second reading speeches on legislation were read, because it is necessary to do so, but they would have been the only speeches he read in this place. I also strongly suspect that he spoke without notes. I did see a set of notes prepared by John Wheeldon once. There were five words bound in a line—and they were his notes for a half-hour speech. He was an extraordinary performer in that regard. As Jim McClelland, one of his friends, said of him:

Wheeldon was one of the verbal pyrotechnists of the Whitlam era. In full flight in the Senate, speaking entirely without notes in flawless syntax on a subject such as the Vietnam War, his was a hard act to beat.

He was an extraordinary speaker. The Prime Minister had something to say about his attitude on the blocking of supply. I was not a member of the caucus then, so I do not know exactly what John’s position was. But he did say this of the Governor-General of the day, whom he had got to know well:

In my experience, I found him to be less than forthright.

That is about as mild as John ever got. I remember him describing one of my colleagues as ‘having the appearance of a soccer ball with scuffs’. He was not a fellow who, when he concluded speaking, operated on the basis that those about whom he was speaking ought to nevertheless leave the room feeling good about themselves. They invariably left the room feeling extremely bad about themselves and often feeling extremely bad about John. He was a one-off. He was an unusual character. Parliament was richer for having him and poorer when he left it. He did not leave politics. He became an active leader writer for the Australian newspaper. He wrote a great deal and put his encyclopaedic comprehension of foreign policy and politics to very good use. He had enormous affection for his family and for his wife, Judith, who will be grieving terribly today. He said this on his retirement:

I suppose it is pretty young to be voluntarily retiring from parliament, but one isn’t immortal. I am certainly not tired of politics, and it remains my main interest, but for some time I have not been enjoying it. In fact, I am not sure that I have ever enjoyed it really, spending 14 hours a week travelling between Perth and Canberra. I do not like being away from my family for long periods. I do not believe there is any great cause being argued in the federal parliament in which I am sufficiently interested to warrant spending the sort of life I am living.

He fought very hard to get that family. When he sought to bring Judith into this country, the entry was vetoed by ASIO and he was obliged to sit down with John Gorton and persuade him to allow his wife in. His wife’s parents had a background in the Communist Party in the United States. His wife subsequently became the principal of Abbotsleigh. I am not sure whether she is now.

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