James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make some comments on the 50th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government. Indeed, that was more than 10 years before I was born, but there's no doubt that Gough Whitlam leaves an enormous legacy of good achievements and wary lessons for modern governments—particularly this Labor government—to take heed of.

Firstly, I acknowledge also that it's the 50th anniversary of my predecessor Ian Wilson winning the seat of Sturt back for the Liberal Party. I think it was the only seat the Liberals won at the 1972 election and, to be fair—nothing against Ian—that was on the back of a significant redistribution of the seat. However, it was recorrecting it back to the seat that he'd represented earlier before losing to a nice chap called Norm Foster. Norm Foster was the Labor member for Sturt for three years and then became a South Australian legislative councillor for the Labor Party. He resigned from the party to cross the floor and support the establishment of the Olympic Dam mine, which provides such an enormous economic bounty for my state of South Australia. The Labor Party bitterly opposed its development, but Norm Foster was prepared to leave the Labor Party over that because he understood the significant opportunity that Olympic Dam would provide, and has provided, to South Australia for the decades in between.

The Whitlam government did good things, but, of course, it was a short-term government. After being out of power for 23 years, the Labor Party came back for three short years. Bob Hawke was the one who said in interviews he's given that, in hindsight, whilst the Whitlam government did excellent things in social reform and in the wide variety of things they were focused on, credible, stable, strong economic management was not one of them. That was certainly what brought that government undone. In some ways, it was beyond just poor economic management. There was the spectre of ministers operating outside of the authority of the parliament, in seeking to raise, and commit the Commonwealth to, loans without the authority of the legislature. That authority is absolutely fundamental to our Constitution and the supremacy of the parliament and ensures that no-one can act in the name of the Commonwealth of Australia, particularly on financial matters, without the approval of the parliament.

Ministers in the Whitlam government, as we know—Rex Connor and Jim Cairns—sought to do exactly that. They sought to go out and raise billions of dollars of loans—that's billions of dollars in the seventies, I might add, so it was what, in the modern era, would be hundreds of billions of dollars—without the approval of the parliament and without, sometimes, the then Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Frederick Wheeler, even knowing about it. It was a very reckless time. My grandparents went into retirement; my grandfather retired in 1975. Unfortunately, the legacy of that Whitlam government, particularly on inflation—and there are some interesting parallels here—was a massive destructive force on the savings of Australians. The impact of inflation through the seventies, because of the recklessness of those economic decisions, was seriously brutal on retirees in this country.

It's an important watchword for today. With inflation tipped to hit eight per cent in the government's budget, this is really going to impact, as it did in the Whitlam era, the savings and the economic security of Australians—particularly Australians on fixed incomes who think that they have provisioned for their future. That will be pulled out from under them if inflation is let loose in our economy. That happened at the tail end of the Whitlam era.

It was three tumultuous years, with a lot of reform which I absolutely acknowledge has been excellent for the nation, including things that are enduring to this day, particularly in health and education. But I just hope the Labor government of today, in recalling and remembering the Whitlam government of 50 years ago, think about what they would do differently if they were a part of the Whitlam government and apply some of those principles to the government that they are a part of right now, because there are significant challenges and forces—economically, in particular—that are coming down the railway line to us in this country. We wish any government well in meeting those challenges. The Whitlam approach would not be the one I'd recommend. In fact, thinking very seriously about Bob Hawke's critique of the Whitlam government is what we'd love to see this government do to take on the challenges that this government faces, which are very similar to those the Whitlam government faced.

See this speech in context