Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure and privilege to be able to pay tribute to the life and work of Edward Gough Whitlam and to extend my condolences on behalf of the people of Wills to his surviving family members.

Gough Whitlam was a towering figure in Australian political life. I think he was the greatest man that the Australian Labor Party has ever produced, and I think that he was the most influential Prime Minister during the course of the past 50 years. To listen to the speeches from both sides of the House you get a sense of modern Australian political history being divided into before 1972 and after 1972.

He did this after enlisting in the RAAF during the Second World War, which was of course a very dangerous thing to do. My father's brother, John, after whom I have my middle name, did the same thing but did not return. In 1972 I was a year 12 student and I had a bright orange 'It's time' sticker on my schoolbag. I remember after the election one of my school mates said that he too was delighted that Gough had won the election but believed that Gough would not be able to abolish conscription or take us out of Vietnam any time soon. I was crestfallen by this Realpolitik but delighted when something like 24 hours later Gough's two-man cabinet did precisely that.

His leadership and vision for Australia were the key things that inspired me to join the Australian Labor Party back in 1974. That was against the run of play—because, of course, his government was thrown out in no uncertain manner in 1975. But I believe that his legacy has proved to be so longstanding that he can lay claim to being the most influential Prime Minister and political leader of our generation. It is such a monumental body of work that I cannot do it justice here, but I do want to mention a number of aspects to it.

The first is the introduction of free tertiary education, which made such a difference in the lives of so many young Australians. The more I look at this and the more I think about it the more I think that it was a mistake for us to move away from that. The second is Medibank, which of course was the predecessor of Medicare, which gave Australia quite possibly the world's finest health system in which everybody, rich and poor alike, has guaranteed access to high-quality healthcare. The third is environment protection. Gough took Australia into the realm of national environment protection, moving to protect the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling; introducing the World Heritage Convention to Australia and ratifying that; ratifying the Ramsar convention; and legislating for the National Parks and Wildlife Act. Another is the area of Indigenous affairs, with the passing of legislation to ban discrimination against Aboriginal people and establishing land rights and native title and returning land in the Northern Territory to the Gurindji people.

People will always draw on the aspects of someone's legacy that are consistent with their own views—and I am no different in that. I want to draw attention to the fact that, in 1974, he wrote that population growth was first amongst those issues which was leading to traditional forms of democratic government being under challenge. In July 1974 he said: 'I do not envisage any dramatic increase in our present population and, indeed, I would not wish to see one.'

No doubt he made mistakes, but the fact is that anyone who is Prime Minister makes thousands of decisions, and it is not possible to make thousands of decisions without doing that. You have to see his political circumstances against the background of coming to office after 23 years in opposition, bumping up against very entrenched forms of opposition in the public service and, indeed, right throughout Australian political life. You also have to have regard to his coming into office during that period of the OPEC oil shock in 1974 which generated unemployment and inflation throughout the Western world. Indeed, very few leaders who were unlucky enough to be in power at that time survived for very long after. He had titanic struggles with Malcolm Fraser. I can remember United States political commentators and analysts at the time remarking on the abilities of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser and lamenting the fact they did not seem to have people of comparable political stature or calibre in their own country.

The best thing we can do to honour Gough's work and legacy is to do everything that we can to protect it, whether it is access to tertiary education, access to health care, environment protection affairs or the rights of Aboriginal people. But more than all those things, we should seek to honour the idea of politics as an honourable profession. Gough Whitlam would never have dreamt of a political career as a stepping stone to a cushy corporate job, post-politics. The idea of taking on a job as a corporate lobbyist or company director would have been anathema to him. What he did was go into public life because he believed in the capacity of individuals and of governments to make a difference—to improve people's lives and leave an Australia which was improved for the better. It is often said that everything we achieve, we achieve by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. This was never more true than of Edward Gough Whitlam.

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