Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to remember Gough Whitlam, an Australian giant. I was born the year Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister. I was only three when he was dismissed so I do not remember his prime ministership, but I grew up surrounded by his legacy. I grew up around the corner from where Gough and Margaret lived in Albert Street, Cabramatta. The year I started kindergarten at Cabramatta Public School, Gough opened the extensions that his government had funded. The same man who poured sand into the hands of Vincent Lingiari helped pour the concrete that built Cabramatta Public School. Margaret helped out in the canteen. She also helped run the local pool where I learnt to swim. When I was not at school or not swimming, I was usually at the Whitlam Library on Railway Parade.

I am the first person in my family to finish school and the first to go on to university. In the Australia that existed before Gough, people like my mum and dad did not even think about going to university; you did your intermediate certificate and went off and got a trade or went to secretarial college. All of that changed with Whitlam. Australia changed. My mum tells me it was like switching from black-and-white TV to colour TV.

Gough's legacy surrounds all of us, from the national anthem to Medicare. It is hard to imagine Australia now without things like Medicare or multiculturalism, sewered western suburbs or trade with China. All of that started with Whitlam. In that sense, we are all Whitlam's children.

He was not perfect—far from it. He made a number of mistakes. But most of the things that he fought for were fundamentally right. The proof of that is that they have endured and that they are now largely bipartisan. It was not always that way. It is easy today to think of things like Medicare as a given, but they did not just happen through some form of political osmosis. They happened because of Gough, because of his persistence and perseverance. As Whitlam said in his 1985 John Curtin Memorial Lecture:

The most successful of my Government's reforms were the ones which were most strongly condemned at their inception, the ones which the Labor Party had to fight longest and hardest to muster first public and then parliamentary support.

There is a lesson for us in this. As Gough said in the same speech:

Persistence, patience, perseverance—these are the watchwords for Australian reformers as they take up their daunting task.

The last time I saw Gough was a few years ago, back in Cabramatta at the side of the old Cabramatta pool where Margaret used to teach. Concrete cancer had eaten away at the old pool and Gough was opening up the new Cabravale Leisure Centre. We started talking and Gough told me about his great regret. When he was in his 80s, Gough was advised to get surgery on his knees but he put it off. He told me that he did not have the courage to do it and he now regretted it, because he was stuck in a wheelchair. It is kind of funny because courage is not something that Gough Whitlam often lacked, and we are all beneficiaries of that.

In the 12th of his Philippics speeches, Cicero said:

The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.

I think that is an appropriate epitaph for a man who would have been as at home in the Roman Senate as he was in the streets of Western Sydney. Gough is gone, but the memory of his well-spent life lives on in the things he built, in the lives he changed and in the legacy he has left. He remade Australia, he extended our imagination and he left us a better country and a better people. After such a long and important life, well may we say: rest in peace.

See this speech in context