The Dismissal: Where Were You on November 11, 1975?

By Sybil Nolan

The dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government on November 11, 1975 was stunning news to most Australians, whichever side of the political divide they inhabited. Many people on first hearing that the Governor-General had sacked the Prime Minister and appointed the Opposition leader as caretaker in his place, simply refused to believe it.
Shockwaves from the Dismissal generated profound political and personal ripples, particularly in the lives of those who had come of age in the 1960s and ‘70s. For some, it was a marker of what had been gained and lost in those remarkable years of change. For others directly involved in events, it was a battle to the political death over principles and power.
Here, thirty prominent Australians recall the events of November 11, 1975 and the days and weeks that followed. From Bob Ellis to Bob Hawke, Lindy Morrison to Frank Moorhouse, Michelle Grattan to David Kemp, they take stock of those times with a mixture of passion, pride, regret, scepticism and humour.
In this new edition, a foreword by editor Sybil Nolan considers the dual perspective this collection provides: people’s original memories and the views they had in 2005.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522869224

Book preview

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Many people contributed to the writing and making of this book. In addition to those credited in the text, Penelope Debelle assisted by identifying Steve Spears and Peter Davis as possible inclusions, and compiling their contributions. Louise Adler, Kathy Bail, Dale Budd, Glyn Davis, Jenny Hocking, David Kemp, Frank Moorhouse, Marg O’Donnell, Tracy O’Shaughnessy, Mike Steketee and Russell Robinson also made useful suggestions. At a time when she was already busy getting another book to the printers, Jenny Hocking took on the task of writing a scholarly introduction to the book. Phil Campbell enthusiastically embraced the concept of designing a text and cover that harked back to the heady days of the seventies without revisiting the daggier aspects of the times, and Eugenie Baulch performed an impeccable copy-edit.

Chronology

Foreword: A Festival of Democracy

This anthology was published ten years ago to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government on November 11, 1975. Starting near the centre of the action at Parliament House in Canberra, and moving out past the demonstrators assembled on the building’s front steps, the collection gathered up the scattered voices of participants and observers, from battle-hardened politicians and staffers who played their parts on that day to students in the nation’s schoolyards; from mothers feeding young children in the kitchens of quiet suburbs and country towns to poets and anarchists gathering in their favourite bar in Balmain; from public servants, journalists and academics in the capital cities to those completely isolated from events: a novice in a Jesuit seminary, a farmer and fisherman on a lonely island, and even a group of expatriate Queensland artists, musicians and activists who marched down Fleet Street in London in protest.

The words on the book’s cover unambiguously declared that the Dismissal had been the defining political event of a generation, and as numerous contributors showed, this was true enough for Australians on the Left. For many who had come to maturity during conscription and the Vietnam War, the Dismissal was the final proof of conservative perfidy. For their younger sisters and brothers and cousins still at high school, it was (let’s be honest) an exciting moment of political awakening. In what sort of democracy would a prime minister turn up for work one sunny day only to find that he had been let go from the job of running the country by an unelected representative of the British Crown? (Outrage! To the barricades!)

The anthology was also articulate testament to sentiment on the other side, not only the views of the pragmatists for whom the Loans Affair was the last gasp, but also of diehard conservatives who thought that Labor should not be in office. As well, there were Liberals for whom the events of November 1975 were a source of deep regret, partly because of their certainty that at the next election Malcolm Fraser would have become prime minister in his own right. These marginalised members were a reminder of socialist historian Harold Laski’s observation that romanticism is inherent in liberalism. The episode curdled their political faith, temporarily at least. As Jenny Hocking suggests in her introduction, the dissidents worried that the Opposition’s willful blocking of supply could harm Australian parliamentary democracy and diminish a Fraser government’s legitimacy.

The decision to republish this volume in its original form was a response to the death of Malcolm Fraser in March 2015. With his passing, the last of the key players involved in the Dismissal left the public stage. The former governor-general Sir John Kerr had departed early, in 1991. Gough Whitlam, the man Kerr had sacked, endured until October 2014, just five months before Fraser.

Gone too were some notable voices that had contributed to this volume: John Button (1933–2008), Pamela Bone (1940–2008),Ken Wriedt (1927–2010), and Steve J. Spears (1951–2007). All in all, then, it seemed right to let this book of personal accounts stand unrevised, as a snapshot taken when the leading combatants had not yet passed into history, and when public memory of the Dismissal was still strong.

In a sense it was a double exposure, a collective account of the event itself and of the way it was remembered three decades later by the Australians who had lived through it. Re-reading that account now, I am struck by the degrees of passion and belief that animated the 2005 volume. It was a celebration of the health of Australian democracy. How much has changed in ten years. Now such faith in parties and political leaders seems quaint.

Introduction: History by Numbers

Jenny Hocking*

History casts us into competing narratives. The more contested the history, the straighter the narrative. Contested history does not deal well with nuances, contradictions and ambiguities; any deviation risks fracturing the narrative and unsettles its certainty. Impervious to counter point, each polarised position becomes a claim to truth rather than a search for it and turns back on itself, viewing the episode, its prelude and its aftermath through its particular, distorting prism.

The dismissal of the Whitlam government is deeply contested history in which grand themes, a compelling narrative, arrant characters and circumstance collide. Thirty years later it continues to agitate and aggravate as few episodes in Australia’s political history can. Our attitude to it is taken as a marker for our attitude to politics, to reform and even to the nature of Australian democracy itself. The event that is ‘the Dismissal’ represents more than the mere unprecedented exercise of vice-regal prerogative in the act of dismissal of the Whitlam government. The Dismissal encapsulates the hopes and the disappointments of a brief, exciting moment in Australian politics. From the restless demand for change in the 1960s to its uneasy accommodation and dissipation in the 1970s, this is the story of an era.

Frequently overlooked in this story, passionately and tightly argued in so many works already, has been the personal recollection and reflection. This collection presents a combination of memoir and reminiscence, of speculation and calculation, that moves away from political argument towards introspection. These snapshots, from those who were there, those who cared and those who now wonder what all the fuss was about, cast a personal light on the Dismissal, revealing snippets that would otherwise remain hidden and reminding us why this event continues to excite.

The election of the Labor government on December 2, 1972, brought an end to twenty-three years of continuous conservative rule, an event which in its own way was as dramatic as the exceptional manner of that government’s demise on November 11, 1975. The Dismissal incorporates the trajectory of the Whitlam-led Labor Party: the policy reviews, the organisational party reform, the inexorable momentum for change captured by the election theme ‘It’s Time’, the scale and speed of reform that saw the House of Representatives pass more legislation in the government’s first term than any other since Federation, the refusal of the Opposition to accept its own changed status, the disregard for constitutional convention, and the endless Senate obstruction that saw the Senate reject more legislation in the government’s first term than in any other term of federal parliament. The Dismissal is now part of our pop culture, its established images and iconography bursting out from tea towels to looped sound bites (‘Well may we say …’) and conveying a settled meaning with the ease of caricatured history. It boasts its own television mini-series, countless books, the Dismissal tour at Old Parliament House, postcards and T-shirts. No doubt The Dismissal: The Musical is yet to come. Whitlam himself has passed into popular culture, better known to a new generation as the guy in the Leggo’s ad than as a former prime minister.

Gough Whitlam entered federal parliament for the Australian Labor Party in 1952, in a by-election for the NSW seat of Werriwa. He joined a parliamentary party hopelessly riven by the animosities and sectarianism that would soon erupt in the self-destruction of the party’s great Split of 1955, in which the aggressively anti-Communist members in Victoria left the party, bringing down the Victorian Labor government of John Cain Sr in their wake.¹ Whitlam tried to avoid, as much as a New South Wales Labor man could, these internal animosities and obvious factional alignments. He described himself as a ‘Christian fellow-traveller’ and sought to distance himself and the party from the virulent effects of that lasting bitterness and division. Yet the seeds for some of the discord within his own government can be found in the unresolved outcome in New South Wales of the Labor Split twenty years before. Following the 1955 Split, the Sydney barrister John Kerr allowed his membership of the Labor Party to lapse. Kerr could no longer identify with the party, which he later described as now ‘firmly in the hands of its own left wing of which I was an opponent’.² Such was Kerr’s identification with the splinter group permanently fractured from the official Labor party, that in 1957 he declined an invitation, put forward at a meeting attended by B. A. Santamaria and others, to head the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).³ Despite his reluctance to become involved in structured anti-Labor politics, Kerr shared the view that ‘it was important to prevent the Labor Party from ruling whilst it was in the hands of the left wing’.⁴

On December 2, 1972, the DLP’s sole intent, to keep the Labor Party from office, finally collapsed and Gough Whitlam became prime minister with the election of the first Labor government in twenty-three years. The ALP won a majority in the House of Representatives with a swing of 2.64 per cent and a net gain of eight seats, but it faced a hostile Senate. The Upper House is by design electorally unrepresentative, with each state having the same number of senators regardless of population. In 1972 there was still no representation at all for voters of the Northern Territory and the ACT, and the sitting senators moreover had all been elected some years earlier, in 1967 and 1970. From this stemmed the awkward reality that the Senate of 1972 in no way reflected the rapidly changing social and political outlook of the Australian electorate evident in the election result of 1972. It was scarcely unusual for an Australian government to have to work with a Senate it did not control. This had been the case for twenty of the years between 1913 and 1975, and between 1949 and 1975 the government commanded a majority in the Senate for only eight years.⁵ The new government could rightly feel secure in the knowledge that no government’s budgetary Appropriation Bills had ever been blocked in the Senate despite the non-government parties frequently having the numbers to do so, and knowing, furthermore, that it had a clear mandate to govern. Yet from its earliest days the new government faced an Opposition that would not acknowledge the validity of the election result and which set about a clear and determined strategy of Senate obstruction. This strategy was first enunciated by the Opposition leader in the Senate, Senator Reg Withers, in early 1973 with his description of the election of the Whitlam government as the result of the ‘temporary electoral insanity’ of the Australian electorate.⁶ By October 1973, Withers had formalised in a memorandum to the Opposition leader Billy Snedden the precise strategy for a conservative reoccupation of the government benches that would be implemented two years later: to defer the Senate vote on the Appropriation Bills in order to intensify pressure on the Governor-General to dismiss the government.⁷

Of all the claims that would be levelled against the Whitlam government, this fundamental and immediate denial of its electoral legitimacy was the most incongruous. Since Whitlam’s election as party leader in 1967, the party platform had been comprehensively revised; every policy had been argued, debated and publicly disseminated, reflecting the importance of Whitlam’s ‘doctrine of the mandate’ to the party’s strategy for electoral success. Whitlam was determined that with the party renewed by a strongly reformist policy agenda, the full platform—‘the Programme’—would be debated as widely as possible to allow the party to assert confidently a mandate for change once in government. Whitlam’s notion of the ‘mandate’ was specific: more than mere electoral success, it implicitly demanded action; the mandate was ‘not just a permit to preside but a command to perform’. With every major policy platform extensively argued and publicly debated, there could be no denying the legitimacy of both the new government and the series of reforms it then sought to implement. The election of the Whitlam government was the end point of a six-year strategy of party reform, of policy development and of electoral persuasion.

Nevertheless, it was this unassailable legitimacy that was continually and from the outset denied by both the conservative Coalition, now in unfamiliar Opposition, and by the anti-Labor DLP. The long period of conservative government had generated an impatience with the vagaries of democratic decision-making and an expectation of power that did not easily recognise electoral change.

The campaign slogan ‘It’s Time’ captured the energy of a renewed party, demands for political and social progress, and the inevitability of change. In late 1972, with final votes and leadership positions still to be determined, Whitlam formed a duumvirate with his deputy Lance Barnard, assuming all twenty-seven ministries between them, Whitlam modestly taking thirteen to Barnard’s fourteen. It was a stunning symbol that things were different now, of a dynamic government that anticipated and was ready for change. These early days of the duumvirate were in no way merely symbolic. Forty decisions were taken including the release of conscientious objectors from prison, the withdrawal of remaining troops from Vietnam, and the reissuing of a passport to Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who had been effectively exiled from his own country during the Cold War.

By 1973, with his government already setting a remarkable pace of reform, Whitlam’s earlier pessimistic view of the constitutional limitations on Labor’s policy platform appeared to have confidently turned. He spoke of his government as ‘an activist government’ and of its ‘programme for change’, no longer cowed by anticipated constitutional limitations which had bound Labor to minimal reformism since the High Court’s disallowance of the Chifley government’s bank nationalisation legislation in 1948. ‘The Constitution’, Whitlam declared, ‘is not an alibi’, and the government moved confidently in areas where it had previously been wary to go.⁸

The Whitlam government was to become, despite its hastily shortened tenure, Australia’s most reforming Labor government. Its key reforms included: the introduction of free