Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

GK Chesterton once said:

Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

Progressives are at our best when our reforms draw out the golden threads of history. The notion that society is a contract between the past, the present and unborn generations is as powerful a guide for progressives as it is for those on the other side of politics.

No-one better understood the value of tradition than Gough Whitlam. When Prime Minister McMahon set the date for the 1972 election as 2 December, Whitlam noted that it was the anniversary of the 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon defeated the Russian and Austrian armies. It was, he said, 'a date on which a crushing defeat was administered to a coalition—another ramshackle, reactionary coalition.'

Gough knew his history. Visiting Australia in 1974, Gore Vidal was struck to meet a Prime Minister who took issue with the historical accuracy of Vidal's novel about the Roman Emperor Julian. 'It was,' Vidal later noted, 'an unusual experiment for Australia to choose as its Prime Minister its most intelligent man.' As Julia Gillard noted in her 2011 Whitlam oration, Whitlam, like his near namesake Whitman, could well have said, 'I am large, I contain multitudes.'

Gough Whitlam sought to change Australia but to do so from the standpoint of a deep understanding of the past. As he put it:

Rather than discard our authentic traditions, we want to restore and invigorate them. … Rather than overturn the true values of Australian society, we want to resurrect and foster those values.

Whitlam saw Australia not as a fearful fortress but as a proud nation with much to offer the world. He secured independence for Papua New Guinea and he cut Australian tariffs by 25 per cent—the beginning of the end for the old McEwenist policy of 'protection all round'. John Button said that Gough would often remark, 'When I opened China to the world.'

Gough Whitlam was no pacifist. The day after Pearl Harbor, he signed up for the Air Force, and he flew hundreds of reconnaissance, escort and bombing missions. But he knew the limits of our military action, and one of his first acts as Prime Minister was to withdraw our remaining troops from Vietnam, a conflict he described as 'disastrous and deluded'. Whitlam was proud of his nation, but he embodied the distinction that George Orwell drew between nationalism and patriotism. You can love your country, Orwell averred, without needing to claim it as better than all the others.

There was a central value that drove the Whitlam government. It was egalitarianism. Speaking in Ballarat in 1973, Whitlam said:

Egalitarianism—by whatever name we call it—is at the heart of the Australian tradition.

Whitlam agreed with Doc Evatt's view that 'Australian democracy was born at Eureka' and noted the 'auspicious coincidence' that the Whitlam government was elected the day before the 118th anniversary of Eureka. He put egalitarianism into action through universal health care, the Schools Commission, the World Heritage conventions, the Trade Practices Act, the Racial Discrimination Act, the land rights deal that led Vincent Lingiari to say, 'We're all mates now,' and sewering Western Sydney, which he said made us the world's 'most "effluent" nation'. He abolished imperial honours, and, as the Deputy Prime Minister noted last week, no-one would today imagine reintroducing knights and dames!

Paul Keating called the Whitlam government 'the resparking of Australian social experimentation', which was snuffed out prematurely with Gallipoli and Flanders. Whitlam's term in government was too short. If he had won in 1969—if Don's Party had had a happy ending—then Whitlam would have had three easy years to implement his social agenda. But his government had to face a major global crisis. It seems to happen to Labor governments. James Scullin was sworn in two days before the stock market crash. John Curtin was elected two months before Pearl Harbor. Kevin Rudd was elected a year before the global financial crisis. Gough Whitlam faced the oil shocks and the challenge of stagflation. Any analysis of that government's economic record must take the world economy into account. In Manning Clark's words, Whitlam was an 'enlarger', not a 'straitener'. Keating called him Fabius Maximus, Hawke called him Prima Donna Assoluta, and, yes, he is the only former Prime Minister with a prominent rock band named after him.

But he was always looking to do more. The to-do list he left us includes a republic, a human rights bill, fixed four-year terms and more work on the reconciliation journey.

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