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Gough Whitlam
Gough Whitlam Photograph: Whitlam Institute
Gough Whitlam Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Gough Whitlam remembered: Bill Hayden, Kim Beazley and others who knew him reflect on his life, his character and the huge impact of his policies on Australia

This article is more than 9 years old

From his biographer to his press secretary and his treasurer to modern figures in the Labor party, 18 prominent people discuss the the impact of an extraordinary man, who transformed the nation in the most turbulent of times

Jenny Hocking on writing Whitlam’s life

Professor Jenny Hocking wrote the two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History (2008) and His Time (2012)

Gough Whitlam’s sons Anthony and Nicholas sit on his back in a park c1950 Photograph: Whitlam Institute

In March 2006 I met Gough and Margaret Whitlam at the Naval and Military Club in Little Collins Street, Melbourne, where they had a ground floor room, easier for wheelchair and walking frame access. Their lack of pretension struck me at once, and so did the room. It was tiny, with a closely packed bed, television, and Gough and Margaret - two giants in Lilliput.

I had written to Whitlam earlier that year to say I was working on a biography and to ask whether he would be interviewed. The next morning my letter was faxed back to me with three words added in the margin in Whitlam’s hand: “Yes. Ring me.” Much later, buried in research, I reflected on this as typical. Hansard, documents, speeches, letters: no text was inviolate. The timing, 8am, was also typical.

Then nearly 90, he was already at his desk, magnificent view of Sydney harbour behind him, and in front a calendar full of events, speeches and audiences with political figures - friends and foes. He was like a father confessor. All was forgiven and a love of politics bound all. Following a visit from Malcolm Fraser, Whitlam mused: “Malcolm has improved!”

Margaret and Gough Whitlam. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

No biography is ever of the subject alone. A supporting cast emerges to carry the reader, enable the narrative and define the subject. Margaret Whitlam, an extraordinary woman, was the first person Whitlam rang when he arrived at the Lodge after Sir John Kerr dismissed him. It was too late, then, for Gough to act on Margaret’s feisty advice: “He can’t sack you, you’re the prime minister! You should have slapped his face and told him to pull himself together!”

A peculiar pleasure of writing the biography of a recent political figure is interviewing those who were there – family, friends, colleagues and, in Whitlam’s case, the subject. Interviews are humbling, enlivening, revealing and fraught with the frailty of human memory, especially when events deeply polarise.

Interviews with Whitlam opened up aspects of his life that were still largely unknown and which, I came to think, he would have preferred to remain that way. When he unexpectedly and vehemently expressed his view about his parents’ control over him and his sister Freda, he was at times emotional.

To me, the impact of his religious upbringing was obvious, yet Whitlam, a confirmed non-believer from the age of 11, was reluctant to concede it. We agreed to differ, and he accepted a biographer’s prerogative.

Biography is, at its research-led best, a forensic exercise through archives and documented history, tracing families, following leads, weaving towards a story of the life, always in hope of the exhilaration of an archival discovery. With Whitlam, I experienced it twice.

Whitlam’s grandparents. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

In the Melbourne Public Records Office there is a file headed “Prisoner: Henry Hugh Gough Whitlam”. This was Gough Whitlam’s grandfather who, at the age of 18, had been sentenced to four and a half years with hard labour in Pentridge prison for forging three cheques. It was an entirely unexpected finding. I never anticipated telling Whitlam something he did not already know. There was a moment of shocked silence before he abruptly changed the subject. Twenty minutes later he returned to it, saying: “Isn’t it interesting that in a single generation my family moved from one side of the law to the other.”’ Pure Whitlam - from education had come opportunity.

Later I received a call from Gough and Freda, together in Whitlam’s office, wanting to talk about “grandfather the felon”. The crime did not bother them, nor the one-time shame or possible social opprobrium. They wanted the answer to a deeply personal, poignant question: did I think their father knew of his own father’s criminality? Had the upright, staunch and demanding Fred Whitlam kept something from them? I realised that my answer would be seen as a judgment of their father. I pictured them sitting together in Whitlam’s office, old and vulnerable, waiting for my verdict over the speaker-phone. What could I say? In the tight Baptist circles that Henry Hugh Gough Whitlam had moved into with his marriage soon after his release from prison, it was possible that this had been a closely guarded secret – and yes, a secret even from their own father. It’s possible.

The dismissal is one of the most closely examined periods of our political history, yet there was another piece of the historical puzzle for me to find – the revelation that the high court judge Sir Anthony Mason had been in secret discussion with Sir John Kerr in the months leading up to the dismissal.

My news shocked Whitlam. He went unusually silent. He changed the subject and seemed not to respond. Then suddenly, and to nobody in particular, he said; “What can you do? What can you bloody well do?” I saw there were tears in his eyes.

We should remember Whitlam’s political achievements as the first leader to take the Labor party to successive electoral victories and as a prime minister who achieved an enviable record of reform in the face of unprecedented obstruction.

“The way of the reformer is hard in Australia,” he once said, but Whitlam’s own story shows us that it can be done. It is a dualism that even in his darkest moment emerges in his best-known and unscripted speech, from the steps of old Parliament House, “Maintain your rage, and your enthusiasm.”

Bill Kelty on union relations

Bill Kelty was secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions from 1983 to 2000 and a member of the Reserve Bank board from 1987 to 1996

Whitlam Labor council
The prime minister speaks to the Labor Council of NSW about the referendum to control prices and incomes in 1973. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

When I joined the West Heidelberg branch of the ALP at 16, two traditionalist, salt-of-the-earth unionists were also members: Stan Calder of the Timber Workers and Jim Simmonds of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. They invited me to attend the forthcoming Victorian state conference of the ALP.

The star was the aspiring Gough Whitlam – not union, not Left, out to take Arthur Calwell’s leadership, and if not a class enemy then at least a fellow traveller of the class collaborators. A man to be feared, for he owed the unions nothing, and consequently was not a union man.

It was a blustery Sunday afternoon as I sat in the upper deck watching his entrance, a typical Whitlam entrance – occupying the full frame, a regal air, a show of superiority. Dominating the lectern, he showed how big he was:

Comrades, I had a speech today prepared about the ALP, but as I chatted and talked outside, I realised that we do not yet warrant calling ourselves the Australian Labor Party. We are in reality two parties, the Labor Party for men, and the Labor assistants, stall attendees, tea makers and social club activities for Labor women. We cannot claim to be a Labor party until we are a Labor party equally for men and women. It is only then we will be a Labor party’.

The women stopped making the tea and everybody was quiet. Some, perhaps the majority, resented the attack, but everyone knew he was right. The party would never be the same again. This was the most inspirational Labor speech, the most inspirational speech, I had ever seen delivered. I went in there fearful and worried about the intent of Gough Whitlam if he won the leadership; I went out fearful and worried about the ALP if he did not.

When I went home and told my mother, who had almost single-handedly raised four children and who was equally suspicious about Whitlam, I knew what it meant for women when I saw the tears trickle slowly down her cheek. It choked off her cynicism and gladdened her heart.

The ALP for Gough Whitlam was bigger than the trade unions that constituted its core. This is not to suggest that he did not understand the history and importance of trade unionism, but, unlike Hawke and Keating, he was not of it. The great advantage was that he could paint on a much bigger canvas. The great disadvantage was that he was not earthed into the struggle of working people and their representatives. The advantage helped make him, and the disadvantage helped unmake him.

It would be churlish to dismiss the gains made for working people under the Whitlam government, including equal pay, annual leave loading, reduced hours in key sectors, a 6% improvement in real wages, the Trade Union Training Authority, and parental leave in the public service. However, the scope of the changes is almost indicative of the problem, for no nation has the capacity to absorb these improvements in a low productivity economy. The inevitable result was inflation (12%) and rising unemployment (to 6%). Gains in real wages substantially evaporated in the next few years.

Whitlam has to get some of the blame. He selected Clyde Cameron as minister for industrial relations, who, as his biography demonstrated, had no serious understanding of the forces at work in the wages system. Whitlam later appointed as minister Jim McClelland, who made a self-serving attack on militant union leaders, reviving memories of the ALP versus communist unions.

Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam in 1975
Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam in 1975. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

The Labor movement simultaneously had two leaders who could both claim greatness, Bob Hawke representing the ACTU and Whitlam the parliamentary Labor party. It did not work. Gough became concerned about Hawke’s political objectives, and Hawke was not convinced that Whitlam really understood the economy. Both were correct, but their conflict and preoccupation produced conditions for a great wages and prices explosion which blew Whitlam and the economy to pieces.

It was a sad ACTU Congress in 1975. Every delegate knew it would be Whitlam’s last as prime minister. Gough’s entry to the South Melbourne Town Hall was met with a few hisses, but for the most part silence. It was not until he reached the stage that a small proportion of the delegates rose to their feet. His speech was typical Whitlam - erudite, brave, a little critical of unions, but understanding.

It was a brilliant speech. Laurie Carmichael, who had become the butt of the Labor party criticism, was standing next to me. If there was anyone who should not have been clapping it was Laurie, for he had been unfairly pilloried by those in the ALP. However, at the end Carmichael said to me: “He deserved better than we gave him. Next time we will need to take more time to ensure that we can all digest the changes.” The Accord was essentially struck in that conversation.

Whitlam had cause to be bitter, but he never carried the bitterness with him. He must have pondered how long and how successfully he could have governed if he had had a better understanding of industrial relations, and the unions had had a greater commitment to his government.

Elizabeth Reid on Whitlam’s legacy for women

Elizabeth Reid was the first adviser formally appointed to advise an Australian prime minister on matters relating to the welfare of women and children, and later held senior positions in the United Nations development program

Gough Whitlam at Eagle Farm in Brisbane in 1969 Photograph: News Ltd/Newspix/Rex

The legends of the profound changes in Australia’s social fabric during the Whitlam years are usually told as feminist (or counter-feminist) narratives. And so, as I started reflecting back on my time with Gough, I too was thinking of it in such terms. I had arrived in his office as a fully clothed feminist and set straight to work to achieve the radicalising reforms that we thought were essential for Australian women, and for all Australians.

Our conceptual framework was framed in terms of reform and revolution, of patriarchy and sexism. Our strategic discourse was of the need for radical changes in attitudes about women, within society, and within women themselves, of achieving what we called the threshold reforms, reforms such as child care, access to education and training, health care, social services, and more that would make it possible for women to take decisions about their lives, and of setting free women’s creativity.

When Whitlam set out to write about the achievements of the Whitlam government 1972-1975, his conceptual framework used a language of representation, opportunities and rights, rather than the feminist discourse. He wrote:

It was natural that in our first term of government we set about restoring women’s rights and removing discrimination in all its social, economic or legal forms. We recognised for women that for women to take their place in society on a basis of dignity and equality it was necessary to remove discrimination and, beyond that, to meet the needs of women in overcoming handicaps. That was the theme of our social policy programs. There was much to be done and we acted accordingly.

Perhaps the most telling insight into his way of understanding policies for women is that in this book he discussed the most critically important threshold policy for women, childcare, in his chapter on education rather than in his chapter on women.

Whitlam believed that women had to depend on federal governments to secure their rights and improve services. He believed that the rights that women needed were those set out in four international conventions, reflecting Whitlam’s profound belief in the United Nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Whitlam’s deep commitment to the rights and representation of women did not arise during the time of his government. It had marked Whitlam’s political career. He felt that there was ‘an alarming history within the Labor party of ignorance and inactivity on women’s issues’ and set out to reform it.

Whitlam first began asking questions in parliament on the conventions and equal pay from 1958. Menzies ratified the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women in 1961, but refused to consider the other three, which concerned equal remuneration, political rights and employment rights. When Calwell and Whitlam proposed that the rates of pay for female officers of the Commonwealth Public Service should be not less than those of male officers performing equivalent duties, Menzies replied: ‘I am jolly well not going to do it.’

Hence when, in the run up to the 1972 election, the McMahon government proposed the establishment of a royal commission into the status of women, Whitlam was able to thunder, during an election speech: ‘You don’t need a royal commission into the status of women to know about the costs of child care. You don’t need a royal commission into the status of women to see whether they should get equal pay. You don’t need a royal commission into the status of women to see whether they should get equal employment opportunities for promotion and position. He continued, as quoted in Laurie Oakes and David Solomon: ‘I have in mind that there should be a woman appointed to a top diplomatic post overseas … There should be a woman appointed to the Arbitration Commission. There should be women appointed to those bodies which are concerned with the areas where women are among the major employees, such as the Schools Commission and a Hospitals Commission.’

The previous year, at the 1971 ALP federal conference, Whitlam had committed himself to a woman’s right to abortion: ‘… if a woman does not want to bear a child, she should not have to. I believe in abortion on demand.’

Gough Whitlam in 1973
Gough Whitlam in 1973. Photograph: The Guardian

The first reform for women of the newly elected Whitlam government was to apply to the Arbitration Commission to reopen its hearing on the Actu’s application for equal pay in federal awards. The Whitlam-Barnard government then removed the sales tax on oral contraceptives and placed them on the pharmaceutical benefits list.

The third reform for women that Whitlam mentions is my appointment as an adviser to him on matters relating to the welfare of women and children, in April 1973.

With the blindness induced by a passionate commitment to a revolution in the lives of women, I had no idea when I took up this position of how longstanding and how consistent had been Whitlam’s more cerebral personal and political commitment to the rights and dignity of women. Nor did I appreciate how profoundly different our ways of looking at the issues were.

One small anecdote illustrates our relationship. At one stage in the toing and froing between the Australian Defence Forces and the prime minister, it was stated that the Australian navy could not comply with a UN convention extending to women the right to accept and to hold public office on equal terms to men without any discrimination as there were no toilets for women on navy vessels.

A memo to the prime minister was sufficient to put an end to that discussion; it stated that Herodotus chronicles a woman admiral in the fleet of the Persian emperor, Xerxes, so they presumably found a way around this problem.

Before joining Whitlam’s staff, I had marched on the streets, attended consciousness-raising meetings, written articles, learned how to use a speculum, painted placards, drafted submissions, and more, as a part of the women’s movement. I did not recognise myself in the words that Whitlam used in his book to describe this women’s movement: ‘women’s groups throughout Australia launching energetic campaigns demanding equality of economic, social, political and sexual rights and improved government services.’

However, it was his commitment to just these rights and services that so changed our worlds.

Graham Freudenberg on Whitlam’s speeches

Graham Freudenberg was press secretary, then special adviser, to Gough Whitlam from 1967 to 1975

Whitlam addresses reporters after the dismissal on 11 November 1975. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

After more than 40 years working with Gough Whitlam on his speeches, the question I am still most often asked is: “Did you write that speech?”

It goes without saying that the question refers to Whitlam’s famous or notorious speech on the steps of old Parliament House, Canberra, three hours after he and his Labor government had been dismissed by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, on 11 November 1975.

My answer is an emphatic no.

I did not even contribute a thought to it. Unlike Whitlam himself, I had been in a state of mental paralysis since the moment he had told me at the Lodge at 1pm that he had been sacked – one of the “stunned mullets”, as veteran Labor MP Fred Daly described us.

More to the point, the content of the speech makes it clear that it was off-the-cuff. It was a spontaneous response to the reading of the proclamation dissolving the parliament, ending with the traditional words “God save the Queen”. Hence Whitlam’s opening words:

Well may we say “God save the Queen”, because nothing will save the governor-general. The proclamation which you have just heard read by the governor-general’s official secretary was countersigned “Malcolm Fraser”, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s cur.

Its endless repetition on TV on every conceivable occasion has ensured that this brief speech is the best remembered Whitlam ever made. In later years he often worried that he would be, like King Charles I, remembered mainly for having his head chopped off. Nevertheless, apart from the drama surrounding its utterance, the speech is an outstanding example of Whitlam’s qualities, style and approach. In many ways, it is Whitlam distilled. Given the circumstances, it conveys his presence of mind, his courage and resilience, his combativeness, his inventive if sometimes over-the-top invective, his creative use of official documents to make a case, and even his urge to educate his audience. All these elements of a characteristic Whitlam speech came together on the steps of old Parliament House on 11 November 1975.

The TV replays often leave out the last sentence of the speech, although it is the most important. It is also the most misquoted or misunderstood. He said: “Maintain your rage and your enthusiasm for the election now to be held and until polling day.”

Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Only the first the words are remembered; and for years it was wrongly held to describe Whitlam’s own attitude to his dismissal. In fact, this was the crucial moment of acceptance. It was meant not to fuel anger but to channel it. This was the moment when Whitlam on behalf of the Australian Labor Party laid to rest any notions that there should be violence, strike action or any response other than fighting a democratic election. It was a striking affirmation of his faith in parliamentary democracy at the moment it had been struck its cruellest blow.

Whitlam’s other most celebrated speech – the “It’s time” policy speech of 1972, with its opening “Men and women of Australia”, borrowed from John Curtin – could hardly be more different. Nothing off the cuff about this one. On the contrary, it was the longest in preparation of any political speech in Australian history, the distillation of all Whitlam’s work for five years as leader of the Labor party, with some of its ideas matured from his maiden speech in the House of Representatives in 1953. I merely had the job of bringing the material of a thousand speeches together.

The most important point about the “It’s time” speech is it drew faithfully on the Labor party platform as rewritten by Whitlam himself at the federal party conferences of 1967, 1969 and 1971. His rule was: “If you don’t like the platform, change it.” In his efforts to get the platform he wanted, Whitlam undertook severe battles within the party councils, particularly the federal executive.

In the lead-up to the 1972 campaign, when his colleagues asked what the policy speech might say, he would reply with some impatience, “Read the platform.” Kim Beazley Sr saw the connection in Biblical terms; he was only half joking when he told his cabinet colleagues in 1973: “The platform is the Old Testament. The policy speech is the New Testament.”

Whitlam signing a Memorandum of agreement Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Just as Bob Hawke was known as the great communicator, and Paul Keating will always be known as the great innovator, Whitlam was the great educator. All his speeches were designed to teach, and he felt a speech a failure if it had not left his audience better informed. He never talked down to his audience, whether at branch meetings in Fairfield or the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He abhorred platitudes and cliches and loved to pile detail upon detail to make a general point. True, as Oliver Goldsmith wrote of the greatest orator of all, Edmund Burke, “he kept on refining as others thought of dining”.

Parliament was his chief forum. He learnt his craft in what now seems a golden age of parliamentary debate. As a backbencher in 1974 he called for the recognition of the People’s Republic of China and warned the United States against following the French into defeat in Vietnam. After Sir Robert Menzies retired in 1966, he dominated the House of Representatives for the next decade.

Whatever ranking as prime minister history may accord him, Whitlam was far and away the greatest leader of the opposition and may perhaps be seen as the last truly great parliamentarian, equalled only by Menzies, Curtin and Deakin.

Race Mathews on Whitlam’s style

Race Mathews was Gough Whitlam’s principal private secretary from 1967 to 1972

Gough Whitlam on a trip to China in 1973 Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Gough Whitlam believed that the proper business of politics was to secure public consent for necessary change, through objective information from trusted sources.

I first met Whitlam at a Fabian Society meeting in early 1961, when I was the society’s secretary. Any impression I may have made must have been minimal, since he later vetoed my preselection for the Latrobe electorate at the 1963 election.

When he at last took over from Arthur Calwell as leader of the opposition in 1967, I was asked if I knew anyone who would be suitable to replace his private secretary, John Menadue, who had moved on to the position of personal assistant to Rupert Murdoch - or would I take the job myself? What followed was the most tumultuous and by far the most rewarding phase of my career. I loved him, and was in awe of his intellect and advocacy.

My assignment was to restore and extend the policy advice network that Menadue had established, and keep up the flow of information for Whitlam to refine the details of the policies whose broad nature in many instances was already clear in his mind.

Within Whitlam’s office, Graham Freudenberg wrote the major speeches and advised on foreign policy and our broad political strategy. Peter Cullen and later Richard Hall were our trouble-shooters, maintaining the office’s party and trade union links and dealing with the throng of interest groups who increasingly clamoured for Whitlam’s attention.

My field was principally domestic policy. It pained Whitlam that his staff had mostly chosen to educate themselves in unconventional ways, and were therefore – as he reminded us in moments of exasperation – “educational dropouts”. Even so, our deficiencies were not without their uses. When the embittered Calwell attacked Whitlam for having “an office full of long-haired academics”, Whitlam retorted that none of his staff were graduates, and one of them was bald.

Whitlam’s brand of wit – much of it gallows humour or self-parody – served him well as an antidote to adversity. Kept waiting for a car to take him to what was confidently expected would be his expulsion from the ALP by its federal executive in 1966, he exclaimed: “Is the tumbril ready?”. Whitlam was invited by his Senate colleague and then-president of the Queensland Rugby League, Ron McAuliffe, to kick off the 1974 grand final, at a low spot in his government’s fortunes. As he and McAuliffe walked to the centre of the ground they were greeted by a torrent of abuse and beer cans, which continued throughout the ceremony. “McAuliffe”, Whitlam remonstrated, on the way back to the pavilion, “don’t you ever again invite me to a place where you’re so unpopular”.

Whitlam Queen
Margaret Whitlam greets HRH Queen Elizabeth II with Hon Gough Whitlam QC in 1974. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

The preparation of a major domestic policy statement was usually complicated by Whitlam’s preference for putting off his responses to invitations until the last possible moment. The process of stalling or declining invitations was left to his staff – in particular his appointments secretary, Barbara Stuart – on the basis of a paradigmatic Whitlam directive: “You be the bastard.” The practice made good sense in that it made the best use of Whitlam’s time, but those who suffered most were frequently our best friends.

Whitlam’s policies mostly stemmed from central axioms, which he called his “insights”. A pack of system cards was carried around in his jacket pocket, so that “insights” could be jotted down as they occurred to him. For example, the best way to achieve a proper national health service was to establish a national hospital system. Government and parish schools should be made as good as the best private ones – and then better than them. There should be a Schools Commission and a Hospitals and Health Services Commission to ensure that outcomes were independently monitored and governments were properly advised.

Whitlam attached overriding importance to research, and insisted that policies should be justified in depth with facts. His chosen mechanism for acquiring authoritative facts was the parliamentary question on notice, which he made an art form. Copies of the daily edition of Hansard were indexed painstakingly in his handwriting with the page numbers and headings of ministers’ answers. In a large suitcase they accompanied him wherever we went. Before 1969, when much of our campaigning focused on seats in northern Queensland, Whitlam was a familiar figure for motel proprietors, annotating his Hansards by the side of their swimming pools in between making speeches and issuing press releases.

Staff members were acutely aware of the importance of questions generally and the suitcase in particular. Frequently they were the occasion for the monumental rages which, along with the laughter, punctuated our activities. Minutes after I had installed myself in my new Parliament House office in Canberra in 1967, the door connecting it with Whitlam’s office suddenly burst open. Whitlam emerged, shouting for me to produce from Hansard – a publication with which I then had no more than a nodding acquaintance – the answer to a question on notice about the DFRB – an acronym of which I had never heard, and which he did not explain. The shouting continued while I fumbled and failed to comply, and his face turned more and more purple, until a tactful intervention by another staff member defused the situation, and he vanished again behind the door.

I learnt that such episodes relieved his frustrations with the still largely inert majority of his parliamentary colleagues, and the shambles in which he had inherited the Labor party from Calwell, particularly in Victoria. It vexed him that opponents of party reform frequently disguised their grubbier motives with protestations of ideological purity. He told a party conference: “Certainly, the impotent are pure.”

The view in the office was that nothing personal was meant by Whitlam’s tantrums, and no offence could be taken. Outsiders did not necessarily see things in the same light. One notable outburst took place in the presence of Rex Connor – a man of formidable size and intellect, best known in the media of the day as “The Strangler”. Connor went white with shock, and remonstrated with Whitlam that he shouldn’t talk that way – and in such language – to whoever was on the receiving end. The effect was instant. Whitlam shifted targets, and abused him.

That was precisely the sort of situation his staff dreaded. While the term “minder” had not at that stage been coined, vigilance was needed to keep Whitlam out of the troubles in which his temper would otherwise have landed him and to maintain basic civilities between him and his caucus colleagues. If you could not foresee that a person would irritate him and avoid it, you acted as a lightning-rod yourself. It was usually better than having to pick up the pieces the next time there was an important vote in the caucus, or something else was needed from a colleague who had been needlessly alienated. Better still, the eruption might direct itself to something inanimate, as on the occasion when he tore off the sun visor of a Commonwealth car on a back road somewhere in Queensland, and flung it into the bush.

Whitlam’s political career invites us to recall the words of Robert Kennedy: “Some see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say ‘Why not’?” Australians are accustomed to having their votes sought through their purses and pockets. It is Whitlam alone in the memories of most of us who has addressed himself uncompromisingly to our consciences and intellects.

Patricia Turner on Indigenous affairs

Patricia Turner, an Arrernte and Gurdanji woman, was deputy secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (1989) and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (1991-92). She was chief executive of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander commission from 1994 to 1998.

For Aboriginal people across the country, Gough Whitlam was our giant among former prime ministers. He was the first leader to campaign so openly for us. During his short term in office he and his government made momentous decisions to include Aboriginal people within the fabric of the nation.

In 1972 I was working in the then department of interior, native welfare branch. The prevailing values and the approach taken within that bureaucracy were still anchored in assimilation policy.

But for several years change had been coming: the Freedom Rides; the bark petition to Parliament House from the Yolngu people of Yirrkala, and later their legal action against Nabalco for mining their country; an Aboriginal tent embassy erected on the lawns opposite the old Parliament House in Canberra.

Most pastoralists were not happy when in 1968 the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) led a campaign for the payment of award wages to Aboriginal stockmen on cattle stations. Many Aboriginal stockmen were sacked. This caused a sizeable migration of families off the pastoral leases and their traditional lands and onto the existing Aboriginal reserves. The migration also forced people of different language groups to live together. This caused friction and serious conflicts which in some cases remain today.

The paternalistic native welfare regime was seriously challenged. The facilities on the reserves were totally inadequate to service the existing residents, let alone accommodating the new influx of families. I believe that Gough knew the native welfare branch was incapable of meeting these needs and he created the department of Aboriginal affairs to implement the new policy of self-determination.

Gough visited the tent embassy and promised that when elected he would legislate Aboriginal land rights. He kept his word, at least in the Northern Territory, where he had Commonwealth authority – state governments jealously protected their power over land administration matters. With input from the central and northern land councils, which were set up after the Woodward royal commission’s first report in July 1973, Commonwealth legislation was drafted.

Gough personally gave land title deeds to the Gurindji people, and on that day Merv Bishop took his famous photo of Gough pouring a fistful of dirt into Vincent Lingiari’s hand.

Gough Whitlam helps plant a millenium tree and bury a time capsule on the anniversary of the ‘Dismissal’ Photograph: AAP

The administration of Aboriginal affairs was tested at its centre, in Canberra. My late uncle, Charlie Perkins, was speaking out about the appalling living conditions visited upon our people across the nation. This brought the relationship between Charlie and the then minister for Aboriginal affairs, Jim Cavanagh, to breaking point. Gough, as a strong supporter of Charlie, tried to reconcile them over a meal. His efforts did not resolve their conflict. While Gough had publicly stated that he thought Perkins’s public condemnations about the living conditions of Aboriginal people generally were reasonable, Cavanagh would have none of it. Charlie was stood down for a year and returned home to Alice Springs.

Gough also created the Aboriginal Loans Commission, the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission and the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC). The NACC was the first opportunity for Aboriginal people to elect their own representatives to a national committee to directly advise the federal government.

On the day of Gough’s dismissal I had just dropped around during my lunch break to see my uncle Charlie. We were both shocked and dismayed at the story leading the ABC news. We knew it was going to be a very different ball game in Canberra for our people and our country. We knew the mining lobby was much better resourced than we were and their might was brought to bear on the Fraser government in getting the amendments to allow mining on Aboriginal land. Nevertheless, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, while amended many times, has stood the test of time and it has served our people in the Northern Territory very well.

Gough knew his job was to lead people. He would not be dragged down by widely entrenched racist views. He was clear about his commitment to improve our lives and give us long overdue recognition.

David Malouf on the arts

David Malouf, novelist, poet, short story writer, librettist and playwright, served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council from 1973 to 1975

Renoir exhibition at the Australia National Gallery 1987 Photograph: Whitlam Institute

The arrival of the Whitlam government towards the end of 1972 created a new surge of energy and optimism among Australian writers and artists. Some of this was carried over from the liberation and protest movements of the late 1960s, of which the new government was itself a product, but much of it was a response to the style of the man himself, Gough Whitlam, and to the promise it offered – It’s Time – of a new era.

Gough was in every way a language man and actor. Highly cultivated, he was not afraid of appearing superior – even when he opened one of his highly theatrical performances with the characteristic formula “Men and women of Australia”. He had a flair for the kind of magisterial phrase that catches on and is remembered. His quips may not have been quite so spontaneous as the actor in him made them appear, but they were mostly, one suspects, his own, and were intended as much for the pages of history as for the quick headline. The surprise was that he brought the same large-scale eloquence and referential wit to more personal encounters. His was a style that demanded an audience, even of one.

He was a devoted classicist. Quotations from Greek and Latin authors came easily to him and the classical world provided a ready model of what a contemporary society might aspire to if it was fully alive to the possibilities, even in Australia in the 1970s.

He also had a more than passing acquaintance with later history, and had discovered there that great nations, whatever achievements they may make in the realm of social justice and order, are most richly represented by the works they leave to be wondered at, and imitated, by those who come after. What we think of first when we have Italy or France or Spain in mind is not the various areas of power they once occupied but the writings of Dante, Cervantes, Moliere, Balzac, the paintings of Titian and Velasquez, mediaeval and Renaissance tapestries, the monuments of Florence and Venice and Rome, and in a later period the films of Renoir or Fellini. It was in the light of this understanding, like a latter day Maecenas or de Medici, that Gough moved early in 1973 to establish the Australia Council on the urging of Nugget Coombs and Jean Battersby, and more indirectly of Les Murray and Rodney Hall and others. It followed an earlier initiative of John Gorton.

The Australia Council was established at arm’s length from interference by any minister, fully funded, and with freedom to become whatever it would. Practising artists in each field, literature, music, theatre, craft, the visual arts etc, made up its boards, with peer assessment in the distribution of grants and fellowships. The Literature Board had a previous incarnation, the Commonwealth Literature Board, to guide it; the others started afresh and would develop, or divide, as they saw fit. Only later would we understand that the council was not to be a group of artists’ “soviets” but a bureaucracy like any other, and that artists and public servants belong to different cultures.

The early days, of the Whitlam era and beyond, were heady and fast-moving in the style of the man himself. But it was not only the Australia Council that accounts for the extraordinary affection for Gough and his party that marked the artists’ rallies at the Sydney Opera House in support of his re-election in 1974 and the failed attempt of a year later.

That affection sprang from the Whitlams’ regular appearance, either together or separately, at exhibitions, book launches, theatre and opera performances and concerts as part of a close community for whom the new Australian plays they saw at the theatre, the new music they heard, the books they read were essential to the excitement of the moment and to what appeared then to be a new national consciousness. It was a community to which Gough’s own contribution had been essential, and which he, and especially Margaret, continued to be part of long after his moment of executive power had passed.

Jenny Macklin on women and welfare reform

Jenny Macklin was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments from 2007 to 2013, and deputy leader of the opposition from 2001 to 2006

Gough family
Gough Whitlam with his family who all meet for the first time in ten years in 1973. Photograph: Hulton archive

Not many of us wore We Want Gough badges in Wangaratta in 1974 as I lined up to cast my first vote. Gough had brought the voting age down from 21 to 18 just a year earlier, and my friends and I – like many other idealistic young Australians – were swept up in the feeling that finally our time had come. Change was here.

Reducing the voting age to 18 was just one of many changes that put my generation at the centre of the Australian political debate. Gough’s government spoke to young Australians in a way that governments never had previously. They cared about us, cared about our future. It was a heady time for those of us who wanted a more open and equal society.

I didn’t know it at that time, but during the short and tumultuous years of the Whitlam government, the changes Gough put in place were the precursor to much of the policy reform I would enact as a minister in a future Labor government.

Gough was the first prime minister to make it clear to young feminists like me that we could be and do all that we hoped for. One of the first acts of the Whitlam government was to reopen the Equal Pay case, leading to significant improvements in wages for women. In its first week in power, it removed the Commonwealth sales tax on the contraceptive pill and made it available through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Gough outlawed discrimination on the grounds of pregnancy, and introduced paid maternity leave for Commonwealth employees. In 2011, I introduced Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme, knowing it was Gough who had started the ball rolling on this important reform.

His advocacy on behalf of women never ceased. At the ALP national conference in 2000, as I was defending the rights of single and lesbian women to have access to IVF treatment, I recalled one of Gough’s unforgettable lines - in this case about my adversary on this issue, Joe De Bruyn: “the only Dutchman who doesn’t like dykes.” Gough was well into his 80s by then, but sharp as ever.

As minister for Indigenous affairs, I was acutely aware of the pioneering work Gough delivered for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. His government paved the way for Aboriginal land rights with the implementation of the 1965 International Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, later incorporated into Australian law through the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975. It was this Act that enabled Aboriginal people to put their land rights arguments before the courts.

Photo taken by Gough Whitlam at Yirrkala mission, 1944 Photograph: Whitlam Institute

In the second Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture in 1997, Gough spoke passionately about the need to change the constitution to acknowledge Aboriginal people. Today, we are building support for a referendum to do just that and I was proud to introduce the Act of Recognition in 2013 as one of the first firm stepping stones on this journey. Gough always said that his first political campaign, in 1944, was conducted on Aboriginal land in the cause of reforming the Australian constitution. During the war he was based at Gove, and at nearby Yirrkala he saw discrimination against the local people first hand. Gough continued his campaign for the rights of Indigenous Australians throughout his life, and so now must we.

The Whitlam government delivered greater fairness to pensioners, by increasing pensions to 25% of average weekly earnings, and extended the Australian social contract to another of the most marginalised groups in our society – people with disability.

Legislation for a national rehabilitation and compensation scheme was before parliament when the Whitlam government was removed in 1975. It was abandoned by the Liberals. People with disability had to wait for another Labor government, almost 40 years later, before they would finally get the support they deserve. As minister for disability reform in 2013, I was able to legislate Australia’s first National Disability Insurance Scheme. Funding for this transformative scheme will come in part from an increase to the Medicare levy. This levy has its origins in the Whitlam government’s creation of our universal health insurance system, then called Medibank, now Medicare. The battle to create Medibank, so fiercely opposed by the Liberals and the Australian Medical Association, led to the double dissolution of parliament in 1974.

Gough was the embodiment of Labor’s commitment to creating a fairer, more inclusive and just Australia. I am so glad that as a young country girl I was able to cast my first vote, and build on the legacy of a man who had such a profound influence on our country.

Steve Bracks on regional policy

Steve Bracks was premier of Victoria from 1999 to 2007

Whitlam cabinet
The Whitlam cabinet on the steps of Parliament House, Canberra, 1972 Photograph: Whitlam Institute

As an 18-year-old in Ballarat in 1972 I could join, but not vote for, the Australian Labor Party. After 23 years of conservative rule, the new Labor prime minister, Gough Whitlam, got rid of the minimum voting age of 21, and much more over the next three years. Many of these changes would endure, and shape how Australia saw itself.

There was the establishment of the Social Welfare Commission, the Children’s Commission and the Schools Commission, and 55 inquiries, many of which resulted in landmark reforms. Among the policy initiatives that endured are community-based child care, community health centres, the school dental service, single parent benefits (which considerably reduced adoption levels), needs-based school funding, the Technical and Further Education system, the handicapped children’s allowance and paid maternity leave.

The Whitlam government was the first in Australia to talk about welfare in relation to rights and entitlements and not in the paternalistic terms previously used. Delivery of this agenda was not always easy, with often hostile state and local governments and a federal bureaucracy that was not used to change at this pace or on this scale. But Whitlam had “The Program” for this also, in the shape of new regional delivery mechanisms.

The regional councils for social development (RCSD), crossed state boundaries and each had an elected council overseen by the Australian Electoral Commission. Many initiatives grew out of these councils.

I was later to head the RCSD successor, the Regional Consultative Council in Western Victoria, a further legacy of the Whitlam reforms.

These regional mechanisms, alongside a vigorous decentralisation plan through the new Department of Urban Affairs, were part of a ground-up policy push from Whitlam for the ultimate abolition of the states, to be replaced by strong regional councils. Without control of the Senate, Whitlam could achieve these initial aims only through administrative fiat. Gough Whitlam had no peer when it came to reform and change. He modernised Australia while embodying the notion of a fair go.

We are a better nation as a result.

Frank Brennan on international law

Frank Brennan is a human rights lawyer, professor of law at the Australian Catholic University and adjunct scholar at the Australian National University College of Law

Gough Whitlam on a visit to Washington Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Addressing the United Nations general assembly in 1974, Gough Whitlam proclaimed, “We are all internationalists now – by necessity.”

As a young man, Whitlam was greatly influenced by his father who, as Australian crown solicitor, did much to encourage ministers to contribute to the formulation of the key international human rights instruments. During his second world war service in the RAAF, Whitlam saw first hand the living conditions of Aboriginal people in north Queensland and Arnhem Land. As a Labor backbencher he studied closely the deliberations of the International Labor Organisation, especially ILO 107, the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention, finalised in 1957, which was the first attempt to codify the rights of indigenous peoples and the obligations of nation states. By the time he became prime minister, Whitlam was convinced that international standard-setting could help Australian governments improve the coverage of the rule of law, furthering human rights and protecting cultural and natural heritage.

Within a fortnight of Whitlam becoming prime minister, his government had signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. His government ratified the World Heritage Convention, which provided the basis for the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983, introduced by the Hawke government after its election pledge to save the Tasmanian wilderness, stopping the damming of the Franklin River.

Ten years after losing government, Whitlam wrote, “My government set out to spread the knowledge of international law in Australia and to increase Australian support for institutions of international law.”

In this task, he was ably assisted by attorney general Lionel Murphy and solicitor general Sir Maurice Byers QC. Whitlam was convinced that international arbitration and court proceedings could be developed to ensure peaceful resolution of disputes even in politically complex situations. He took great pride in Australia subjecting itself to the full reach of international dispute resolving processes. The high point was Australia’s appearance at the International Court of Justice to prosecute the nuclear test ban against France.

Whitlam was justly proud of wanting to see his country as an exemplary international citizen, fully and appropriately engaged with international legal processes setting decent international legal norms.

Anthony Whitlam stands between Gough Whitlam QC and father Justice Dovery, KC Photograph: Whitlam Institute

He was also particularly proud of the resolute action taken in relation to racial discrimination in the dying days of his government. Parliament passed the Racial Discrimination Act, which received the royal assent on 11 June 1975. The government was then able to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination on 30 September 1975. The constitutional validity of the Act was tested in the High Court after the Queensland government declined to transfer the Archer River pastoral holding for the benefit of an Aboriginal citizen, John Koowarta. The High Court found by 4-3 that the Queensland minister’s action was contrary to the Act, which was upheld as a valid exercise of the Commonwealth’s external affairs power. Whitlam regarded this decision as “the great precedent”.

“It had become more and more obvious to me that the best and perhaps the only hope of achieving comprehensive and contemporary standards of human rights in Australia was through international conventions,” he said.

After his retirement from Unesco, Whitlam continued to lecture about the value and reach of international law. He would often prime and badger Labor backbenchers such as Daryl Melham with draft questions for ministers based on Australia’s international legal obligations. Whitlam once said, “It must be conceded that in such matters I have shown both prescience and patience.”

Lindsay Tanner on the economic legacy

Lindsay Tanner was minister for finance and deregulation in the Rudd government from 2007 to 2010

The state manager and director of G.J Coles, supermarkets director and mayor of Liverpool are at the store checkout with Gough Whitlam. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

In October 1975 I watched Gough Whitlam deliver the Chifley Memorial Lecture at Melbourne University. I was recovering from serious illness, and so weak that I couldn’t open car doors or walk faster than a shuffle.

It was early in the constitutional crisis, and I was a passionate, committed activist in the university’s ALP Club. I was intensely absorbed in the deepening political morality play – a visionary, progressive government being removed unfairly and illegally by conservative forces.

Even though I had lost significant ground in my studies because of my illness, I dedicated the vast bulk of my time and effort over the ensuing couple of months to the Labor cause. My final exam was on the afternoon of 12 November, the day after the dismissal. I spent the morning at a demonstration at the City Square, and discovered to my consternation when I turned up at the Exhibition Building that the exam was closed book. I scraped through, but I really didn’t care. There was only one thing that mattered, the titanic political struggle that I had a small role in. I worked full-time on the campaign over the next five weeks, performing all the endless mundane tasks that are at the heart of any election campaign.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but this experience had the effect of hardening my political passion into a lifetime commitment. There were many others of my generation similarly galvanised. And it all ultimately revolved around a single, extraordinary figure: Gough Whitlam. All my idealism, my dislike of the prevailing conservative, provincial mediocrity in Australia, and my anger at the authoritarian social structure that affected so many people, all found their expression in one political leader. It was with some feeling that I acknowledged this in my first speech to parliament in 1993, and made special reference to that 1975 Chifley Memorial Lecture when I had the privilege of delivering the same lecture more than 30 years later.

Because of the extreme manner of his removal, Whitlam and his government have been demonised by conservatives ever since.

One small statistic illustrates how much this has descended into outright fiction. The Whitlam government – ostensibly a byword for skyrocketing debt – is the only government in modern Australian history that had zero net debt throughout its entire term in office. Its budget management was, contrary to conservative mythology, relatively unadventurous, producing one surplus and two deficits.

Whitlam’s economic legacy is nothing like the shambles that is claimed. Coming to office at the tail-end of a prolonged boom, his government was caught largely unawares by the first oil shock, and the global stagflation which flowed from the American decision to fund the Vietnam War by borrowing.

The Whitlam government did make some serious mistakes, such as allowing wage inflation to take off in 1974. But it also initiated some important economic reforms, such as the 25% tariff cut, the creation of the Industries Assistance Commission, the separation of Australia Post and Telecom from the old Postmaster-General’s Department, the takeover of some state railways, and investment in urban development. Much to my surprise, I discovered the Expenditure Review Committee that occupied so much of my attention as a minister had been established by the Whitlam government in early 1975.

For all the idiocies of the Khemlani affair, no money was actually borrowed. The massive expansion in the public sector in the Whitlam era was financed not by borrowing but by the growing tax receipts fuelled by high inflation.

When historians look through the partisan bluster and vilification and consider Gough Whitlam’s contribution, they will conclude that his modernising program fundamentally changed Australia for the better.

A final story to illustrate the biting, self-referential humour for which Whitlam was famous. My late friend Shane Maddick was talking to Whitlam at a fundraising barbecue. Whitlam suggested they move to avoid the barbecue smoke. The awestruck Shane’s only response was, “Good idea, Gough”. Whitlam responded, with his characteristic exaggerated intonation: “That, comrade, is why I am prime minister, and you’re getting smoke in your eyes”.

Patrick Dodson on Whitlam the reformer

Patrick Dodson, a Yawuru man from Broome, Western Australia, was the inaugural Chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation

Gough Whitlam with an Aboriginal man at Wattle Creek in 1975.
Gough Whitlam with an Aboriginal man at Wattle Creek in 1975. Photograph: National Archives of Australia

Sometimes Gough Whitlam’s aspirations seemed as big as the continent itself. A nation that both preached and practised distributive and restorative justice. A nation free from the injustice of its colonial and xenophobic past.

While the enduring image of this great man will be, for many, his defiant speech on the steps of Old Parliament House on 11 November 1975, for me it is the photograph of him pouring sand into the hands of Vincent Lingiari as a symbolic gesture of the Australian government’s transfer of land title to the Gurindji traditional owners.

His commitment to recognising the traditional land title of the First Peoples of Australia began the process of unravelling the injustice of the past that the high court in the 1992 Mabo decision described as a “history of unutterable shame”. That process has a long way to go but there can be no turning back. Gough Whitlam could be considered the implementer of the Nation’s best aspirations and goodwill that motivated and underpinned the successful 1967 referendum.

Perhaps his greatest gift was to implement the vision he inspired so many to believe in. He made it happen with a will so lacking in today’s polity. He, and the government he led, attempted to build a nation where the wealth was returned to the people and not extracted into the hands of the powerful. Where justice would be seen and experienced in our own backyard so that we could build our nation and no longer hold the skirt hem of another.

Gough Whitlam’s vision and reform agenda was beyond the capacity of this nation to fully appreciate during his lifetime but it will continue to burn as “the light on the hill” for future generations.

After he retired from political life he continued to campaign for justice and to educate his fellow countrymen in this nation’s potential. On the privileged occasions that I met him and spent time with him I felt embraced by his humour and conviviality. Mr Whitlam was a giant among people in every respect but in essence he was a welcoming and inclusive man and it was those human qualities that drove his politics and inspired a nation to believe it could change.

He made being Australian an honourable virtue, in the sense that we were no longer some second-class British subjects. We did not have to be jingoistic or monarchists but true, fair dinkum Australians, workers in the fields of justice to make the nation, and maybe the world, a better place. Government was there as a vehicle to make that happen, not stifle or oppress that spirit of justice and right.

Chris Staniforth on young impressions

Chris Staniforth was a young graduate clerk in the prime minister’s department during the final year of the Whitlam government. He had his feet up on the PM’s desk when a friend called to tell him the government had been sacked.

Gough Whitlam in RAAF uniform Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Gough Whitlam was a very tall man. His bearing as he walked through the office made him seem taller. To the junior staff, whose company I kept, he was imperious. His occasional quotations from Cicero would really cement the power differential. He did not suffer fools and was exacting, both of the quantity and quality of work expected from his inner circle of advisers. When the prime minister annotated a draft cabinet document it would regularly be rushed to the chap in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who had done Latin at school.

Whitlam unleashed a surge of energy and optimism. History will hear, even from those like me who played extremely modest parts, of the belief he conveyed that the good in us can prevail over mean-minded self-interest, and that there was a better future to be built on fairness.

Anthony Albanese on education

Anthony Albanese was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, and Leader of the House from 2008 to 2013

Gough Whitlam with babies in Goulburn Photograph: Whitlam Institute

I was the nine-year-old son of a single mother on the pension when Gough Whitlam took office.

For me and hundreds of thousands of other Australians, Gough’s legacy will always be personal. I have a vivid memory of my history teacher, Vince Crow, coming into my year 7 classroom and announcing “our government has been dismissed”. Just days later I joined many fellow students of St Mary’s Cathedral high school in skipping class to attend the Maintain the Rage Rally in what was our playground, the Domain in Sydney.

The anger among my family and friends at the Dismissal was such that it was impossible to believe the Australian people would not correct this injustice by voting Labor in the subsequent election. Of course that was not meant to be, and the idealism of a very young supporter was dashed.

Whitlam had ended 23 years of government during which conservatism was a refuge for those who could not imagine a better Australia. In my neighbourhood in Sydney’s inner west, Whitlam provided real hope for battling Australians.

Gough transformed Australia from a place where a person’s prospects depended on their parents’ income, to one where merit determined their opportunities. Previously, if you wanted to go to university, you had to have the money to pay fees upfront, or hope to win a scholarship. Universities were full of the unworthy rich – people with limited academic capacity but deep pockets.

Gough, who came from a comfortable background himself, abolished university fees and introduced means-tested financial assistance for students from low-income families.

Our society is stronger because the pool from which we draw our best and brightest is much larger than it was before Gough. But for this reform, I doubt that I would have gone to university. Nor would many of the people I have worked with over the years, such as Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan.

Today’s professions are filled with people who will tell you they were the first children in their families to go to university.

It has become fashionable lately for conservatives to reject the notion that Whitlam’s reforms opened up universities, arguing that Robert Menzies did so by offering commonwealth scholarships. That analysis is wrong.

Whitlam changed the culture. He made an education an entitlement, not a privilege.

Kim Beazley on inclusion

Kim Beazley is Australia’s ambassador to the United States. He was leader of the Labor party from 1996 to 2001 and 2005 to 2006. His father, Kim Beazley Sr, was minister for education in the Whitlam government

Whitlam with Mao Zedong in Beijing, China Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Gough Whitlam created a different Australia. He melted frozen national attitudes on sectarianism, race, the reach of the national government and the character of our culture. His foreign policy initiatives gave Australia a distinctive voice in global politics.

Until Gough we Australians loved to define ourselves by exclusions. You weren’t sufficiently white. You weren’t sufficiently English-speaking. You weren’t sufficiently Protestant. You weren’t sufficiently Empire. Or, alternatively, you weren’t sufficiently working-class or sufficiently Catholic. Gough’s view was we should look at things differently. Whatever racial, ethnic, cultural, social background we had, we had the opportunity to work at being Australian, and Australians with opportunities and choices, in a country where aspiration was admired and encouraged.

In the lead-up to 1972, Gough drove a parliamentary Labor party of brilliant oppositionist dissidents into disciplined policy work to prepare for national government. He introduced the shadow cabinet into Australian politics. He created workable ideology, spurning decades of beloved assertions about the meaning of socialisation. These assertions had no practical value but in preselection processes they compelled candidates to have a simple ideological view. Preselectors had a smug sense of authority, but the public perceived a bunch of prats.

Gough substituted a real organising principle: equality of opportunity. In his 1969 election campaign, when in defeat he built the base for victory in 1972, he said:

We of the Labor party have an enduring commitment to a view about society. It is this: in modern countries, opportunities for all citizens – the opportunity for a complete education, opportunity for dignity in retirement, opportunity for proper medical equipment, opportunity to share in the nation’s wealth and resources, opportunity for decent housing, the opportunity for civilised conditions in our cities and towns, opportunity to preserve and promote the natural beauty of the land – can be provided only if governments, the community itself acting through its elected representatives, will provide them. And increasingly in Australia the national government must initiate these opportunities.

It is hard to do justice to the complexity and breadth of the Whitlam agenda. His expansive view of section 96 of the Constitution, the power to direct grants to the states for federally-determined purposes, gave the federal government a finger in every policy pie. The dramatic expansion of federal involvement has been decried and amended since, but it remains largely unscathed. It is so ubiquitous few would see it as a Whitlam legacy.

Three other Whitlam contributions are similarly obscured.

First, education was critical in Gough’s view of opportunity. My father was his education minister. Though he and Gough clashed from time to time, Dad realised he had been given an extraordinary mandate for reform and the funding to do it. Every sector was reformed. Sectarianism, alongside race, had been to that point the most disfiguring feature of Australian society. Now it is almost completely obliterated. Treating all students equally, whatever their parents’ preferred school sector, eliminated a burning sense of injustice. It enabled the debate to be about education, not identity.

Second, multiculturalism. It was the Holt government that abandoned the White Australia policy, but by the time Whitlam had finished, most thought he did. He gloried in its elimination. He made multiculturalism a reality in every aspect of immigration legislation and infused it in every aspect of social policy. His predecessors had presided over the referendum that enshrined Indigenous voting rights. Again it was Whitlam whose policies established depth to the unique value of Indigenous culture. Much remained unsettled, but he firmly placed on the agenda the need to settle it.

Paradoxically, policies that recognised the value of different cultures and redressed sectarianism inculcated unity. I remember a surprised Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, telling me in about 2001 after a tour of Australia that he could find no Irish people there. Unlike the United States, with its heavily Irish-identifying enclaves in New York, Boston and Chicago, Australian culture subsumed difference. We had, in Adams’s view, repeatedly adjusted ourselves to allow difference to be incorporated in our view of what it was to be Australian. He wouldn’t have thought that if he had toured in 1971.

Gough Whitlam in China
Whitlam in Beijing’s Forbidden City. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

Third, a distinctive voice in global politics. I was at the ALP federal executive meeting which received Zhou Enlai’s invitation for Whitlam, then opposition leader, to visit China. Gough was hesitant. He and others believed that Labor would have won the 1969 election but for last-minute doubts about the ALP’s capacity in national security. Whitlam went to China just before US president Richard Nixon’s announcement of his own visit. He was the first prime minister to recognise that strong alliance commitments and support for the West still permitted space to develop an independent Australian regional and global personality.

An environment of no confidence in the longevity of his government meant change was conducted at a frantic pace. It was too much for so staid an electorate and it could not work in Australia’s fiscal environment. Yet it is very difficult, 40 years on, to find much of Whitlam’s agenda that has been completely suppressed. We are a different country, and at least some of that change is his legacy.

John Cain on Labor party reform

John Cain was vice-chairman of the Victorian branch of the ALP from 1973 to 1976 and premier of Victoria from 1982 to 1990

Whitlam Lang
Whitlam at the state funeral for former NSW premier Jack Lang. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

In the mid 1960s, I saw Gough Whitlam as the salvation of the Labor party. I was like many forlorn Labor supporters in Victoria. The party had gone through three schisms in 40 years – 1915, 1931 and 1955. The last was unarguably the deepest and nastiest, driven by a combination of the Cold War and sectarianism.

The extremism of the warring factions that resulted from the Split was boundless. Catholic families broke up over it. The Labor party became electorally uncompetitive.

Whitlam knew that to make Labor electorally viable he needed to take on the party and somehow heal the wounds of many years. People who believed in a fairer, more egalitarian and just society had to come together again. He knew that a collection of parochial state branches could not masquerade as a national party. Rules and conduct had to change.

Whitlam recognised what needed to be done and he resolved to fight for the changes needed. Like one of his predecessors, John Curtin, in the 1940s, Whitlam took on the party.

Whitlam saw Labor as a vehicle for change. He did the policy work, analysis and presentation. He fought the party controllers obsessed with factional power plays and intra-party patronage.

His speeches at Victorian Labor conferences in this cause were powerful, forthright and courageous. He embraced, and was embraced by, a small group of Victorian party members who for years had openly opposed those who ran the state branch. I was one.

Whitlam came to my house and spoke to those members. At the time it was a brave thing for the Labor leader to do. Whitlam recognised, and said, that the Victorian branch was an obstacle to Labor forming government in the national parliament. He had to convince the factional controllers that the Victorian branch must change. That he did so was one of his great achievements, because it enabled so much else.

Whitlam was a towering figure in Australian politics. He spoke with authority and conviction, handled television with style and did not let media pressure affect his performance. He had presence. He would have made an ideal candidate in US presidential politics.

No other political figure changed Australia so much in so short a time as Gough Whitlam. Often, they were changes that made you reflect, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?

Bill Hayden on the grand gestures

Bill Hayden was the minister for social security and treasurer in the Whitlam government, and governor-general from 1989 to 1996

Whitlam with the Queen in October 1973. Photograph: Whitlam Institute

The big man has gone this way for the last time. Gough Whitlam is dead and with his passing politics, as once excitingly captured in the big frame, is no more.

He did everything of importance on a dramatic scale: universal health insurance, financing public hospitals, education at all levels (including private), the arts, foreign policy, which for so long enjoyed bipartisan support, and on and on.

He was audaciously inspired by the challenges of public office. “I want the grand gesture, like Disraeli buying the Suez Canal,” he would declare, eyes glistening with the excitement of big challenges.

He would curtly dismiss obstructions to national progress and, it could be fairly added, to personal glory. For him personal glory was something as great in achievement as it was unselfish in its pursuit. It would be crafted and refined by monuments to humanity, the sorts of things that were a historical statement illustrating how the times cared for a people and the way they lived. He would create the beginnings of a shining city on the hill for the benefit of humankind – and during our lifetimes, not in some dubious afterlife.

Labor loved it, for Labor lived by ideals and would bear great electoral casualties, pain and setbacks fighting for what it believed was right. Some examples from Labor’s rich hoard of history: the party’s formation under a gum tree at Barcaldine in Queensland by a group of horny-handed bushworkers in 1891; the divisiveness of the conscription issue during the first world war; the conflict over a Keynesian float out of the Great Depression by treasurer Theodore, a former Queensland prospector ahead of his times and opposed by reactionary financiers; opportunistic anti-communist legislation from a conservative Coalition government which put basic rights in peril in the 1950s; the turmoil of a nation riven by the Vietnam war; and, most spectacularly of all, the country’s greatest constitutional crisis, 1975 and all that.

Gough looked to the future with a large inspirational vision. With the power of an accomplished orator’s imagery he created new constituencies for Labor. This is a skill Labor needs to reacquire.

He met obstructive forces with counter-force. At his most formidable he resorted to the expedient of “crash through or crash”, a tactic which always prevailed until 1975 when Gough was confronted by two other able, physically imposing and determined men. One was a scion of a western Victoria blueblood grazing family, the other a former chief justice of New South Wales who had succeeded above his working class background by sheer outstanding intellectual ability. Malcolm Fraser would not yield ground in his parliamentary confrontation with Whitlam. Sir John Kerr, the ringkeeper as it were, was forced to act by events he did not control.

Gough was politically disabled by unfolding events of that period, but the record does not support many of the adverse claims made about the Whitlam government. Its first and second budgets were surpluses. The third was a hand-over deficit from Jim Cairns. There was also inflation and unemployment, serious problems then experienced globally and greatly contributed to by global forces. Prime causes of the problems included: irresponsible wage settlements extracted by the ACTU leadership; Opec oil price spikes; and the United States paying for the Vietnam war and its Great Society welfare program by prodigiously printing money, as it has been doing recently with who knows what adverse consequences later.

The Whitlam government’s policies were dead centred on people. It initiated the single mother’s benefit. I could not imagine the Whitlam government paring deficits by bleeding single mothers and causing stress to their infants, a mean and unworthy course for Labor. Of course slash welfare bludging, but first zero in on the undeserving rich in the corporate sector. End the fuel subsidy and other concessions for plutocratic mining companies. A nice little kitty worth a cool $5bn!

Whitlam’s policies were good social democratic ones. The problems were with the pace of their implementation and the uneven quality of certain ministerial management.

Gough was a wonderful man to work with. Everything about him was big; not just physically but the openness and generosity of his nature, the warm enthusiasm with which he could embrace new ideas and encourage others to pursue fresh thinking, the breadth and depth of his interests, the colourful range of singeing expletives he held in reserve for times of tension. But if you were doing your job he was no meddler.

To the extent I made any achievement in public life I owe a big debt to the lessons I learnt practically from Gough. A great Australian, a former colleague, now sadly departed.

Mark Dreyfus, MHR for Isaacs, is a former Labor attorney general and current shadow attorney general

Gough Whitlam brought about great and sweeping reforms to the laws of our nation, establishing changes that have transformed public life.

Whitlam, a successful lawyer himself, was driven by a fierce sense of justice. In 1973, he abolished the death penalty for all federal offences.

Working closely with his attorney general, Lionel Murphy, Whitlam also created the first national scheme of Legal Aid. Legal Aid now forms one of the pillars of access to justice in our country, with independent Legal Aid Commissions, jointly funded by the states and the Commonwealth, operating in every Australian jurisdiction.

The Law Reform Commission, the Institute of Criminology, and what became a general federal court are also parts of Whitlam’s legal legacy.

In 1975 Whitlam brought in the Racial Discrimination Act, a pioneering piece of legislation that embodies modern Australia’s opposition to racism and bigotry. Whitlam established the Woodward Royal Commission into Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory, and its reports paved the way for the Aboriginal Land Rights Act.

As well as national trade practices legislation, Whitlam and Murphy also worked to modernise family law in this country, establishing no-fault divorce, authorising civil celebrants, and in 1975 enacting the Family Law Act.

Whitlam’s legal reforms are remarkable for breadth, for speed, but most of all for the fact that despite strident and at times hysterical opposition to what he was implementing, the value of these reforms has not been seriously questioned in the forty years since.

Gough said to me in the chamber of the House of Representatives on the day of my swearing in “It’s good to have a QC in the caucus again”. I hope I have lived up to his expectations, and will continue to do so.

More on this story

More on this story

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  • Greens' use of Gough Whitlam image offensive, says Anthony Albanese

  • Gough Whitlam's memorial left lingering sadness, despite the cheers and soaring oratory

  • Anthony Albanese says Greens' use of Gough Whitlam image is offensive - video

  • Gough Whitlam memorial service: Noel Pearson pays tribute to 'old man's legacy' – as it happened

  • Whitlam believers booed and cheered, and politics’ beating heart was revealed

  • Gough Whitlam and It's Time: what happened to the political campaign song?

  • Whitlam's memory was demonised by conservatives to excuse his dismissal

  • Noel Pearson speech celebrates Gough Whitlam's achievements - video

  • Gough Whitlam memorial service: host of former prime ministers join mourners – pictures

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