Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased and very honoured to associate myself with all of these fine speeches today remembering my good friend and constituent Gough Whitlam. Gough Whitlam was always at pains to remind me that he was my constituent, addressing me generally loudly and at a distance as 'My Member, My Member', just to make it quite clear that I had certain obligations to him.

We are here also to extend our condolences to Tony, Nick, Stephen and Catherine and their families. It is a time of great sadness for the Whitlam family and for Gough's friends but it should also be a time of joy. Gough lived to a great age and he had a great life. He was a big man with a big vision for a big country. He was an optimist. He was funny. He was witty. He always said, 'Don't say I'm funny; say I'm witty.' Well, he was witty and funny. In all of that we should celebrate his life.

We know Gough Whitlam's government was not unmarked by error. It was a controversial time and I will say a little bit about the influence of that on the Labor Party in a moment. We have to remember that the economic arguments of those days have largely receded into history. The truth is that nobody on our side or on the Labor side would agree with Gough's economic agenda. We would not agree with Billy McMahon's economic agenda. Life has moved on, but what is remembered is the myth of Gough or, as Gough would say, 'the mythos of Gough'. What is that thread, that narrative that emerges from history out of the humdrum daily grind of political argument? What is it? It is an enormous optimism and all of us admire that, whether we voted for him in the seventies or our parents voted for him, or whether we approved of what John Kerr did or not, all of that recedes. What people remember of Gough Whitlam is a bigness, generosity, an enormous optimism and ambition for Australia. That is something we can all subscribe to.

As many speakers have said, Gough was a great parliamentarian. He loved this place—not this chamber so much as the one he served in. He loved this parliament but he was also an active citizen. He did not just make his political contribution while he was a member of parliament; he continued to make a contribution to Australian politics and to public affairs and to cultural debate throughout his entire life. He left the office of Prime Minister nearly 40 years ago, yet he has been an active voice in the Australian public debate ever since. He was, as the member for Watson and the member for Sydney recalled, very active in the Republican Movement, in the campaign for Australia to have one of its own as its head of state. I remember recruiting Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam to come onto the same platform and speak in favour of the yes vote in the referendum. I thought I would share with honourable members my recollection from my account of that time. I rang Gough on 8 July 1999 and I noted:

I spoke to Gough Whitlam today, or rather he spoke to me, for about 40 minutes. He is happy to speak for a yes vote and with Malcolm Fraser. Gough said, 'Malcolm, I'm tired of these professors, no, associate professors of Constitutional law theorising about constitutional crises. I know about constitutional crises.'

Interestingly one of the features of the republican model in that referendum campaign, as some members may recall, was that, while the President would be appointed by a joint sitting of both houses of parliament in a bipartisan vote, the President could be removed by the Prime Minister, but the President could not be replaced by the Prime Minister. The senior state Governor would fill that place and then there would have to be a bipartisan appointment of a new President. Both Whitlam and Fraser were of the view that, if that arrangement had been in place in 1975, Kerr would not have sacked Whitlam because both of them were of the view—Malcolm Fraser especially and perhaps with more insight—that the reason Kerr had sacked Whitlam was to pre-empt Whitlam sacking him—an interesting footnote to that history.

Gough was remarkably generous to everyone he dealt with. As the Prime Minister said, he was a very hard man to disagree with and an almost impossible man to dislike. He was full of arcane knowledge; the Prime Minister referred to his knowledge of ecclesiastical matters, and he had an extraordinary interest in genealogy—almost anybody's genealogy. If he learned one thing about your family—a third cousin or an aunt or a great-aunt—he would remember it and then remind you of it. He was very, very well informed about this. I saw this in action in 1986, when I called him as a witness in the Spycatcher trial to give evidence on behalf of my client, Peter Wright. I was hoping that Gough would be indignant about the evidence we had produced that the British security service, MI5, had been—without any legal authority at all—bugging all sorts of people in Britain, including Patricia Hewitt, who had been the secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties and was at that time Neil Kinnock's private secretary. She went on, of course, to become a cabinet minister and so forth. I tendered some evidence about this, and Gough immediately lit on Patricia Hewitt's name. He said, 'I know this one—Mr Kinnock's private secretary. I've known her all her life. I went to school with her mother. I've known her mother since I went to school with her in 1930. I've known her father since they were married in 1941. I've known her and her sisters and her brother her whole life.' He went on, and so I said, 'Do you regard her as a person likely to be plotting the violent overthrow of the British government?' Gough said, 'No. I've never felt myself at risk in her company.'

There has been a lot of discussion about Gough's regard for the great beyond. Gough is resolving his relationship with God as we speak, no doubt, but he was always very entertaining about those issues of the divine. I remember 25 years ago, when I was in business with his son Nicholas. Nicholas and Judy brought Gough and Margaret up to visit us at the farm in the Hunter Valley that I had inherited from my father some years before. Unfortunately, a fog had descended on this particular part of the country and you could not see anything. It was just white everywhere you looked; it was like being in a white cloud. I said to Gough, 'I'm really sorry. It's a nice view here but you can't see any of it.' He said, 'Oh, don't be concerned. I'm at completely at home. It's just like Olympus.'

We recognise that all prime ministers capture the attention of the Australian people. Not all prime ministers capture their imagination, and even fewer capture their imagination and retain it for so long. Gough Whitlam was able to do that because of his presence and his eloquence but, above all, because of that generosity of vision I spoke about earlier. He was an enhancer, an enlarger. He was not a mean or negative politician in the way, for example, that another great Labor leader, who also lived to a similar age, Jack Lang, was. Jack Lang was a great hater. Gough Whitlam is a great example to us. He obviously never forgave John Kerr, but look at the way he was able to be reconciled with Malcolm Fraser. That is a great example to all of us. We can learn from Gough Whitlam about the importance of optimism and the importance of having a big vision for our country. I might add that it is important to execute that vision with competence; but, nonetheless, think about the way he did not allow hatred to eat away at him. The reality is that hatred, as we know, destroys and corrodes the hater much more than it hurts the hated, and so many people in our business, in politics, find themselves consumed by hatred and retire into a bitter anecdotage, gnawing away at all of the injustices and betrayals they have suffered through their life. Whitlam was able to rise above that, as we saw in his cooperation and work with Malcolm Fraser on many causes—not just the republic. I recall at one point I was on the opposite side when they were busily campaigning to stop a group I was part of to acquire Fairfax. They had many unity tickets on different matters. Nonetheless, it is a great example for all of us not to be consumed by hatred.

Gough will never be forgotten. He will be given credit, I imagine, for many things that were equally or perhaps even entirely the achievements of others. I heard earlier that Gough Whitlam had ended the White Australia policy. I could just hear Harold Holt turning in his watery grave to hear that! Nonetheless, he was there at a tipping point, a fulcrum point, in our history, and he was able to embody and personify a time of change. By capturing our imagination with such optimism, he will always be a symbol of the greatness, the importance, the value of public life—an example to all of us. We can leave the political agenda to one side, we can leave the debate about his measures to one side and just remember that big, generous, witty, warm man—that giant—and, above all, we must remember that nearly 70 years of marriage, that extraordinary love affair. If Gough is in Olympus, I have no doubt that he is there with Margaret. I think that, in some respects, one of the things we can be happiest about today is the fact that that old couple are no longer apart.

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