8

Going it alone

c. 1967–92

On 20 January 1966, R.G. Menzies retired after more than sixteen years of continuous service as
prime minister. The Queen had already honoured him with an exclusive knighthood, the Order of the
Thistle. To this was soon added the even more exclusive title, unique for a colonial, of Lord
Warden of the Cinque Ports. In 1973, long after his retirement, the imperial Japanese government
conferred on him the Order of the Rising Sun (First Class) for his services to Japanese-Australian
friendship. Critics and admirers agreed it was only fitting that the erstwhile “Pig-Iron Bob”
should end his days loaded with overseas honours.

When at a Canberra dinner for the Queen in 1963, he had quoted the couplet:

I did but see her passing by

And yet I love her till I die

Some had questioned his good taste, but none his sincerity. Before the bungled Anglo-French attack
on Suez in 1956, he had allowed himself to be appointed chief spokesman to Egypt’s President Nasser
for the British, French and other governments deeply interested in the use of the canal. In one of
his last speeches in the Australian parliament, he went a little out of his way to proclaim: “it is
well known that I am British to my boot-heels”. Indeed he was both deeply British and deeply
conservative. During the first decade or two of this century, Australia and New Zealand were the
most “advanced” democracies in the world. Intelligent travellers came here to study welfare state
measures in much the same way as they now visit Sweden or Denmark or China to see possible shapes
of the future. By the time Menzies retired in 1966, Australia, in this respect, had fallen far
behind Britain and many other European democracies. Full employment and unprecedented prosperity
continued, but a growing number of people were questioning the out-of-date assumptions on which the
Liberal-Country Party governments’ domestic and foreign policies had rested for so long.

At the time of federation, belief in the innate and absolute superiority of British blood and
institutions seemed, at least to most British people, merely common sense. By 1966, as we have
seen, many white people in Australia, as elsewhere, had begun to wonder whether they had the right
to guide, govern or coerce black, brown and yellow people “for their own good”. During the long
Menzies reign, the government did practically nothing to recognise the full humanity of Aboriginal
Australians. Preparations for the independence of Papua New Guinea proceeded slowly and, it often
seemed, unwillingly. South Africa’s racist policies, condemned by world opinion, were supported by
Australia to the point where Menzies was fondly christened “Oom Robert” – Uncle Bob – by the
Afrikaaner nationalist press. The “white Australia” policy continued – in fact, if not in public
proclamations – as the basis of our immigration arrangements.

With Menzies’ departure from public life, there departed also the old white Australian assumption
that Britain, still “Home” to many conservative people, was the centre of the whole world, not
merely of the British Empire, recently renamed the Commonwealth of Nations. It was obvious to
thoughtful Australians, if not at once to all politicians and public servants, that thenceforth we
had increasingly to make our own decisions. Unthinking reliance on British advice or tradition
would no longer serve. We had, however reluctantly, to begin learning to go it alone.

Among Menzies’ last deeds as prime minister were two with long-term consequences he could hardly
have foreseen. Late in 1964 his government passed an act by which liability to military
conscription for overseas service in peacetime was imposed on young Australian males between the
ages of 20 and 22. Then on 29 April 1965 he announced that his government had decided to send a
battalion of diggers to help the growing American military intervention in Vietnam.

On Sir Robert’s retirement, the Liberal Party immediately elected to replace him its deputy leader,
Harold Holt. The 59-year-old “young Harold”, as Menzies called him, had been his protégé and
heir-apparent to the party leadership for many years. A fellow Victorian and prefect at his chief s
old school, Wesley College, Holt had been a member of all cabinets since 1949 while other men, who
might have posed a threat to Menzies’ leadership, were persuaded to accept more secure positions
elsewhere. Thus three able ministers for external affairs left politics: Percy Spender was sent as
ambassador to Washington in 1951, eight years later becoming a judge, and then president, of the
International Court of Justice at the Hague; R.G. Casey retired to the British House of Lords in
1960 and became Australia’s governor-general in 1965; and Garfield Barwick became chief justice of
the High Court of Australia in 1964. Holt had been an astute and successful minister for labour in
several of Menzies’ governments before being promoted to treasurer. Sociable, straightforward and
something of a playboy in private life, Holt had more of the common touch and was less conservative
than his old chief. He reshuffled some portfolios, but retained in office all members of the
previous cabinet.

Nothing much seemed to have changed, but, despite Liberal-Country Party victories at the next two
general elections, the conservative forces had lost internal cohesion and much electoral appeal. It
seemed that the parliamentary Liberal Party could produce no leader with the political sagacity and
commanding prestige of its old master. Sir John (“Black Jack”) McEwen, the Country Party leader,
might have saved the day for conservatism, but the Liberals would not countenance the idea of
handing over the prime ministership to the junior partner in the coalition. So Holt was left to
modify some of Menzies’ old policies and to pursue others more vigorously. Like the next two prime
ministers, Gorton and McMahon, but emphatically unlike Menzies, he looked to Washington, not
London, as the centre of the universe and fount of all good things.

One of his first acts was to ease slightly the conditions under which non-European residents in
Australia could be naturalised and, unlike Menzies, he made positive efforts to cultivate good
relations with some Asian governments: yet at the same time he committed Australia even more firmly
to total, uncritical support of America’s “anti-communist” crusade in Vietnam and elsewhere. In
March 1966 he announced that Australian forces in Vietnam would be increased from 1500 to 4500 men
and that the relieving battalions would include conscripted national servicemen. A few months
later, at a state dinner in Washington, he promised President Johnson that Australia would go “all
the way with LBJ”. Even among the majority of citizens who agreed with the government’s foreign
policy, many deplored the sycophantic tone of his remark. Menzies, they felt, would never have been
so undignified; but there was worse to come.

Holt arranged for President Johnson to visit Australia a month before the general election of
November 1966. Naturally Arthur Calwell, leader of the Labor opposition, and others charged that
the first event was designed to influence the outcome of the second. Perhaps it did. The
president’s train included 400 American journalists and photographers, plus an unknown but great
number of secret policemen, spies and security guards. The Australian poet Dorothy Auchterlonie
satirically compared the visit with an imperial Roman triumph in tributary territory.2 Vast and
vociferous crowds choked the streets, sometimes bringing the presidential cavalcade to a halt. At
one point Johnson turned aside from acknowledging the cheers long enough to put a patronising arm
round the shoulders of the smirking Holt, whom he drew forward with the condescending words, “Look!
This is your prime minister!” But not all the noise and grimaces were made by supporters of the
war. The president’s car was spattered with red paint symbolising blood, and more than once brought
to a halt by hostile demonstrators lying across the roadway in the path of the procession. The
Liberal premier of New South Wales, Robin Askin, earned some notoriety by loudly urging his
chauffeur to “drive over the bastards!”3 The community was deeply and bitterly divided.

For the Democratic Labor Party, the Liberal and Country Parties and most of their supporters, the
issue was simple. The Australian way of life was based on private enterprise, “white” blood and
Christian traditions. They held it to be self-evident that these things were threatened by
international communism, particularly Asian communism, and that they could be defended only by
almost unconditional dependence on a great “white” power. Therefore Australia must fight shoulder
to shoulder with her “ great and powerful” friend to contain communism in Asia, for only thus could
she be assured of the protection of a grateful America in some future crisis. Labor supporters and
a rapidly increasing number of young people, students, artists, intellectuals and even business
people seeking profitable trade with communist countries, dissented vigorously. International
communism, they believed, was a mythical monster, since events daily demonstrated tensions between
the major communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, as great as any between either country and
the United States. The Vietnamese “enemy” was as much nationalist as communist, and Vietnam and
China had been enemies for millennia. In any case, by intervening against popular national
movements in Asia, Australia was earning the enmity of her neighbours and so undermining her own
long-term security. Finally, we and the Americans were clearly the aggressors in an unequal and
unjust war condemned as such by practically the entire weight of world opinion. During the election
campaign Calwell emphasised opposition to the war, and to conscription for overseas service, as
central issues: yet he was an old-fashioned type of Labor man, more racist in his outlook than many
of his Liberal or Country Party opponents. To young voters he seemed to belong to a past,
provincial age, while Holt presented a much more sophisticated “swinging” image. The DLP warned
that the “red” peril had become “yellow” also. All parties stressed the need for development of
Australia’s northern areas. In November 1966 the conservative coalition was returned to power with
its greatest majority since 1949. The new House of Representatives contained sixty-one Liberal,
twenty-one Country Party and forty-one Labor members.

With his stewardship thus endorsed, many looked to Mr Holt for new initiatives. Early in 1967 he
gave his blessing to a move whereby the Senate took up the American practice of appointing select
committees to inquire into specific problems. Political observers generally agreed that this step
both produced useful results and helped to revitalise the second chamber. Then in May the
government put to the people two referenda for amendments to the constitution. The first, which had
long been shelved by preceding governments, sought Commonwealth power to legislate for Aborigines
and to abolish apparent constitutional discrimination against them. It was easily carried: no other
referendum in history has been assented to by every electorate in every state of the Commonwealth,
though pessimists noted that the “no” vote was highest in those electorates containing a large
number of Aborigines. The other referendum sought power to alter the “nexus” or constitutionally
fixed ratio of approximately one to two, between the number of senators and members of the House of
Representatives. To this question most citizens answered “no”, as they usually have in Australian
plebiscites.

The result of the referendum of 1967 marked the beginning of a new era in relations between black
and white Australians. It did nothing immediately – or for some years afterwards – to improve the
unspeakable conditions in which most Aborigines had long lived, but it did for the first time
recognise them in law as full and equal citizens of the Commonwealth, and it showed politicians and
other timid people that the great majority of white Australians regretted their ancestors’ genocide
of so many Aboriginal tribes, and so would support governmental measures designed to help
Aboriginal advancement. From this time onwards more and more black Australians took part in public
agitation for the basic human rights so long denied them. Tribal Aborigines in the north and west,
reserve and mission-dwellers, “fringe-dwellers” near the country towns and partly assimilated
people in the city slums all began to make their presence felt by the whole white community. Decent
whites did what they could to help, as they always had done, but for every one Daisy Bates before
1967 there were a dozen after that year like “Nugget” (H.C.) Coombs, the greatest public servant
Australia has known, who devoted his “retirement” to advocating Aboriginal land rights and the
signing of a treaty between whites and blacks. Don Dunstan, Labor premier of South Australia, in
1976 appointed to the governorship of that state a distinguished Aborigine, Pastor Sir Douglas
Nichols. More importantly, Labor governments in South Australia and New South Wales passed laws
making it a criminal offence to discriminate against a person in any way because of his or her
race. Up unti11990, however, no such laws had been passed by Liberal-Country Party governments in
Queensland or Western Australia – where most Aborigines lived.

Despite the modest kudos it gained from having sponsored the “Aboriginal referendum”, the federal
government’s standing was continuously underminded by internal divisions, by bitter disagreement
with its Country Party component and above all by its increasing commitment to a doctrinaire and
outmoded foreign policy. The British government announced the withdrawal of all but token forces
from the Indian Ocean and Southern Asia, but this only strengthened Holt’s belief that Australia’s
military presence in the area should be increased. On 17 October 1967, when it had already become
obvious that American public opinion was swinging massively against the war, Holt announced that
his government would send another 1700 men, a tank squadron and several more helicopters to
Vietnam, bringing the whole Australian force up to about 8000 men. Two months later, on Sunday 17
December, he was drowned in the surf near Portsea in his native Victoria. His friend L.B. Johnson
and other heads of state came to the memorial service. The prime minister had always kept himself
physically fit, working hard and playing hard. He entered the surf alone on a wild day, watched by
a woman friend on the beach, and was never seen again. Some thought it shocking that the leader of
the government could ever be unaccompanied by a retinue of aides and security guards, but other
Australians felt a measure of gladness, despite the tragic circumstances, that they dwelt in a
country where even the prime minister might still live his own private life, at least at weekends.

As deputy head of the coalition, Sir John McEwen, leader of the Country Party, was sworn in as
prime minister for a few weeks while the Liberal parliamentarians contended for the vacant
leadership of their party, and so for the prime ministership. Partly because McEwen let it be known
that Country Party members would not accept office under Holt’s deputy leader, William McMahon, but
partly for other reasons, the Liberals chose their Senate leader, John Grey Gorton, as Holt’s
successor and he duly replaced McEwen as prime minister on 10 January 1968. Subsequently he was
elected to the Lower House as the member for Holt’s vacant Victorian seat.

Born in Melbourne in 1911, the new prime minister was a product of Geelong Grammar School and
Brasenose College, Oxford. As a fighter pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War
II, he had served with distinction in Britain, Singapore, Darwin and Milne Bay. He had been
severely wounded and was to carry the scars for the rest of his life. His face, reconstructed by
plastic surgery, expressed at once toughness, good humour and devil-may-care challenge. When to
this were added his height of 6 foot 2 inches (or 188 centimetres in the metric mensuration being
introduced at the time), his rather gangling gait, casual dress and easy manners, it is easy to see
why he was nicknamed “Jolly John” and why he possessed far more electoral appeal than any of his
party rivals. It is doubtful whether any of them could have mixed as easily with his fellow
citizens in street or pub as Holt had done and Gorton was to do.

On a nationwide television program a few days after his election to the Liberal leadership, he
consciously contrasted himself with Menzies by saying, “Well, you might say I am Australian to my
boot-heels”. And indeed he was a nationalist and a centralist, but it was precisely these qualities
which before long were to destroy his standing, not with the voters, but with his own party. In
Australian history it is the Labor Party which has generally stood for Australian nationalism,
while the more conservative non-Labor parties have just as generally – and naturally – stood for
loyalty to, and dependence upon, the “mother country”, or its surrogate overseas. As the
conservative scholar, Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, wrote after the following election of 1969 when the
Gorton government’s majority was cut dramatically:

the party of ex-colonial loyalists with no mother country to be loyal to is in a state of moral
crisis and political paralysis ... there seems to be nothing to replace the old, shrewd,
imperial-colonial patriciate of the Menzies era.4

This was true, but Gorton and his conservative successors were plagued by problems more intractable
than their own state of “moral crisis” and “political paralysis”. A few months after he came to
power, a worldwide youth revolt was both signalled and symbolised by an abortive revolution in
Paris in the northern hemisphere spring of 1968. Students at the Sorbonne and other European
universities protested vigorously at centuries of intolerable neglect and bad teaching. One eminent
history professor boasted of supervising the work of fifty-six PhD students – in one afternoon a
week for approximately half of each year.5 The students in Paris were joined by other groups of
young people and then by trade union and radical political organisations. President De Gaulle
surrounded the capital with army tanks and for a time it seemed possible that Paris would again
lead the world into revolution. No such thing happened of course, but the “Paris Spring” did
influence fashions and attitudes among young people all over the world. In Australia during the
long Menzies regime and until 1968, young people voted on the average far more conservatively than
their elders: after that time they voted far more radically.

Students at universities and colleges of advanced education led the youth revolt. Professors and
lecturers, who for a generation had deplored the conservatism and conformism of their charges, were
suddenly disconcerted by students who refused to sit for traditional examinations, conducted
anti-war and anti-racist demonstrations and, worst of all, addressed their mentors familiarly by
their first names as though they were equals. Thousands of young Australians who had grown up to
take for granted full employment and a measure of affluence, began to ask what it was all for.
Young men began wearing long hair and beards. Both sexes dressed in the same drab or colourful
clothes, or in few or no clothes at all. Consumption of marijuana, rather than of alcohol or
tobacco, became a popular symbol of sophistication and liberation. For some members of the new
generation, these manners were fashionable, for others they were merely outward signs of a serious
questioning of assumptions on which society seemed to rest.

Many of them came from comfortable, conservative, middle-class homes. Freed of the need that had
bound their ancestors to worry about earning a living, they asked what was the point of affluence
in a world where warfare, greed and injustice still seemed to be accepted by constituted authority
as part of the natural order of things. Some merely “dropped out” of conventional patterns of
living: but a great many challenged traditionally hallowed policies far more directly than previous
generations of young radicals had done. Often sceptical of the value of political action, the “new
left” believed passionately in “confrontation” politics. By physically demonstrating – in schools,
universities, government offices and the streets – their disapproval of war, racial discrimination
and authoritiarianism, many believed they would hasten the day of “revolution”. Few observers
shared this belief, but the “youth revolt” did demonstrably help to speed up the rate of change
within the existing social structure.

At his first press conference on 17 January, Gorton declared that no more Australian troops would
be sent to Vietnam and gave a “doveish” impression on the issue. However, when the Vietcong
launched their Tet offensive at the end of that month, he declared that Australia would fight on
with America to the end. Then some of his ministers made most bellicose statements about the
bombing of North Vietnam on the very eve of President Johnson’ s announcement on 31 March that he
had ordered a bombing halt in the North, and that he would not be standing for re-election. Gorton
was told of the first decision only on the same day it was announced to the world, and he learned
of the second when he heard it on the radio. He and his government were embarrassed and angered by
this cavalier treatment at the hands of their great ally, yet they continued, not without some
vacillation on the prime minister’s part, to be “more royalist than the King” on the issue. In May,
legislation to put more teeth in the National Service Act was introduced into parliament. The major
result was to provoke more massive demonstrations of dissent by trade unionists, students, creative
artists and others opposed to the war. Then Gorton was again angered by his distant patron in
Washington.

On 1 November 1968, President Johnson announced the cessation of all military action against North
Vietnam. This time the Australian government was apparently informed, though hardly consulted on
its views, only about twenty-four hours before the public statement. The American ambassador in
Canberra had previously invited Mr Gorton to call in at any time. At some time after midnight, and
after attending a Canberra press gallery dinner as guest of honour, he did so, accompanied by his
press secretary and a 19-year-old woman journalist. Others present were his private secretary, Miss
Ainslie Gotto, his host the American ambassador and an American attaché. The visitors stayed for
about two hours, practically the whole of which time was spent by the prime minister and the woman
journalist in private conversation apart from the others. There was a great furore when the facts
were made known early in the New Year by a Liberal back-bencher, Mr Edward St John. Some surmised
that Gorton’s rudeness had been deliberate – that he had set out thus to make plain his displeasure
with the Americans’ way of doing things – but even these apologists conceded that his choice of
means was an unfortunate one. Others agreed with the righteous Mr St John’s statement in
parliament, that the incident exhibited a “standard of conduct” totally unacceptable in the
nation’s leader. Most, however, to judge from public opinion polls, were favourably impressed by
his casual and spirited behaviour.

By May 1969, when Mr Gorton made his pilgrimage to Washington, all had apparently been forgotten
and forgiven once more. Like Holt on an earlier occasion, he seemed to be over-awed and confused by
the physical embodiment of American wealth and power. At a White House dinner he promised President
Nixon that Australia would “go a-waltzing Matilda” with her great and powerful friend, a remark
which drew derisive criticism even from conservative sections of the Australian press.

Thus by the time of the October 1969 general election, Gorton’s suitability for leadership of the
Liberal Party was being questioned by more and more of its members both inside and outside
parliament. Despite, or because of, his vacillations, he seemed less than wholly and uncritically
committed to the American alliance, and his free-wheeling, impulsive, individual style of governing
struck many of his colleagues as too high a price to pay for his electoral appeal. During the
campaign his minister for foreign affairs, a Western Australian named Freeth, hinted at the
possibility of opening discussions with Russia about collective security in the Asian and Indian
Ocean regions. No non-Labor spokesman since World War II had ever dreamt of entertaining such a
thought, though by 1969 Britain had prepared to leave the region and America showed some signs of
doing likewise. Gorton seemed, though equivocally, to be endorsing Freeth’s initiative. In addition
to his other troubles, he had developed a curiously repetitive, qualified and convoluted style of
speaking, which was as hard to follow as it was easy to parody. A month before the election this
led the North Sydney branch of the Liberal Party to resolve:

We are of the opinion that our party, which cherishes the right of all members to freely express
their views, cannot afford to be led by one who neither expresses his views clearly, nor appears to
accept the official platform.

When preferences had been allocated, the coalition government’s majority was reduced from forty
seats to seven. Freeth was among the defeated Liberal members. Gorton was narrowly re-elected as
party leader, but from this time on it seemed clear that he would sooner or later be displaced.
Indeed, the minister for national development, an old schoolfellow from Geelong Grammar, Mr D.E.
Fairbairn, a few days after the election publicly refused to serve under Gorton in the new cabinet.

During 1970 the prime minister lost further ground in the party room by pressing for national
control of Australia’s sea bed. This was a matter on which the Commonwealth constitution had
nothing specific to say, since no one at the time of federation could have foreseen that rich
fields of offshore oil and natural gas would one day be discovered and exploited. The government
introduced legislation to give the Commonwealth clear sovereignty over the sea bed to the limits of
the continental shelf. Gorton strongly backed the proposals, but was opposed by the state
governments, by many of his own back-benchers and by the right-wing group in his own cabinet. The
bill was shelved. The non-Labor parties have generally, though not always when in office in the
states, been stronger advocates of state rights than have their opponents. In connection with this
issue, Sir Robert Menzies, the retired Liberal elder statesman, damaged his reputation as a
constitutional lawyer by claiming that “federalism”, or support for state rights, was what
distinguished the Liberal creed from “socialism”, or strong central government. Thus Gorton
alienated the support of more and more of his own colleagues.

In January 1971 he and William McMahon, the deputy party leader and minister for foreign affairs,
flew to Singapore to attend a Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference. However, they made the
journey in separate aeroplanes, stayed on different floors of the same hotel and reportedly had no
communication with each other, except at some plenary sessions of the conference. The minister for
foreign affairs had the greatest difficulty in finding out what took place at heads of government
sessions.

On 8 March Mr Malcolm Fraser, nicknamed “the Prefect” by his colleagues, resigned as minister for
the Army, telling parliament next day that Gorton had been disloyal to him and that,

the Prime Minister, because of his unreasoned drive to get his own way, his obstinancy, impetuous
and emotional reactions, has imposed strains upon the Liberal Party, the Government and the Public
Service. I do not believe he is fit to hold the great office of Prime Minister, and I cannot serve
in his Govemment.6

This was the end. At a meeting of Liberal Party parliamentarians on 10 March, two back-benchers
moved a motion of confidence in Gorton’s leadership. Thirty-three members voted for and
thirty-three against the motion. With creditable grace, Gorton gave his casting vote against and
ceased to be leader of the party and the government. McEwen having withdrawn his ban, the meeting
then elected McMahon as party leader with Gorton as his deputy. The new cabinet was announced on 21
March.

Born in Sydney in 1908 and educated at Sydney Grammar School and the University of Sydney, William
McMahon was – except for the “Labor rats”, Cook, Hughes, and Lyons – the only Liberal Party prime
minister in our history who was not a Victorian. A graduate in both Law and Economics, he had
earned a good reputation as treasurer in the Holt government and had competently handled other
portfolios; yet he was not of the stuff of which leaders are made. Diminutive in stature and
slightly built, he had sharp and yet mouse-like features which were a cartoonist’s delight.
Deafness handicapped him in parliamentary debates, but even more at press conferences or on the
hustings. He was a good party man who, unlike his predecessor, set out to compose differences and
smooth over difficulties; but it seemed that these qualities, which brought him to the leadership,
were not those needed to exercise it effectively. Sharpness, tact and a perspicacious nose for the
sources of power were not enough in his new role. His twenty-one months as prime minister were
characterised by procrastination, indecisiveness and counter-productive efforts to please
everybody, including the Democratic Labor Party, on the conservative side of the house.

The point is well illustrated by his appalling relations with Gorton. Having been instrumental in
the deposition of the former Liberal leader, McMahon made him minister for defence in the new
cabinet, but forced his resignation from office five months later on the stated ground that press
articles by Gorton had breached “basic principles of Cabinet solidarity and unity”. Gorton soon
afterwards referred to the prime minister as “Billy the Leak”. Next time the two men spoke, in May
1972, it was reported that McMahon approached Gorton in the House when the bells were ringing and
said, “John, I’d like you to sit and talk to me during the division”. “Go to buggery,” replied the
former prime minister. Questioned later about the incident, Gorton was reported to have said,

Well – it was a bit of a journalistic beat-up, but it was near enough ... He put his arm around me.
And I don’t like that. I don’t like anyone putting their arm around me. And some are worse than
others.7

It seemed that each of the three Liberal successors to Menzies was doomed to be progressively less
effective than his predecessor. During 1971 the bill to give the Commonwealth control of the
continental shelf was again brought forward and again shelved, because of dissension within the
coalition, as happened yet again in 1972. Following President Nixon’s announcement of America’s
withdrawal of her land forces from Vietnam, McMahon announced that Australia would follow suit, but
naturally he received little credit for an action which had palpably been forced on the government
by events beyond its control. Then, like his predecessors in office, he was severely embarrassed by
a sudden switch in American policy.

In July, E.G. Whitlam, leader of the federal Labor opposition visited China, and had a public
exchange of views with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese prime minister. For twenty-three years, faithfully
following the American lead, Australian governments had refused to recognise diplomatically the
existence of the Chinese mainland regime. McMahon, not the man for bold initiatives, denounced the
Whitlam visit in unmeasured terms, claiming that he had put “personal notoriety before the national
interests”. A few days later the world learned that President Nixon was about to visit Peking and
that his personal envoy, Henry Kissinger, had been there making the preliminary arrangements at the
same time as Whitlam; but this time the loyal Australian allied government had not been given even
a hint of what was afoot until after the event. This untoward incident did not visibly inhibit
McMahon when he made his pilgrimage to Washington only three months later. At a state dinner in the
White House he surpassed his two predecessors in incoherence, if not also in obsequiousness.
Menzies, one felt, must have writhed at the manner, if not the matter, of these performances.

In the winter of 1971, a racially selected South African football team, “the Springboks”, visited
Australia and almost everywhere provoked massive demonstrations by students, trade-unionists and
others deeply opposed to racist policies. Mr Bob Hawke, president of the Australian Council of
Trade Unions, promised that boycotts would prevent the tour from proceeding and Mr McMahon promised
to use the Royal Australian Air Force, if necessary, to see that it did. The tour did take place
and RAAF planes were not used, but a good deal of police violence was, particularly in Queensland,
where the Country Party premier of the state, Mr ]oh Bjelke-Petersen, declared a “state of
emergency”.8

McMahon contemplated calling a general election in the belief that his stand on “keeping politics
out of sport” would win many votes, but events during the tour made this a doubtful hypothesis.
With the approach of summer, plans were mooted for a tour of Australia by an all-white South
African cricket team. This time, the prime minister sought advice from the Australian Cricketing
Board of Control. Its chairman, Sir Donald Bradman, a national sporting hero and in private life a
conservative stockbroker, replied firmly that politics should indeed be kept out of sport as was
notoriously not the case in South Africa, and that Australian sportsmen could help their white and
black brethren in that country only by banning tours of racially selected teams. The government
quietly accepted this advice but its paternalistic and laissez-faire attitude to race questions
caused it further trouble.

Black Australians, as we have seen, were no longer content to be left alone. Some of them, recently
counted as citizens for the first time in 180 years, set up an “Aboriginal Embassy” in tents on the
shaven lawns in front of Parliament House in Canberra. They swore they would stay there to
embarrass the government until it granted them  “land rights” or until a new government was
elected. They did remain for many months until the government was reduced to the indignity of
gazetting a special ordinance to give itself legal power to have them removed.

However, Mr McMahon’s troubles were most threatening in the very area where he was supposed to
possess expertise – the state of the national economy. Ever since the great depression of the
1930s, Australian voters had demanded of all governments the maintenance of full employment. In the
belief that business prosperity depended heavily on consumer spending power, employers were often
quite as sensitive on the subject, as were employees. Thus, when in 1961 unemployment had been
allowed to rise briefly above 2 per cent of the workforce, the conservative coalition (then led by
Menzies at the height of his powers) had barely avoided defeat in the December elections of that
year. Yet unemployment figures rose towards the end of 1971 and by July 1972 exceeded 2 per cent.
Though this was a wonderfully low unemployment rate by American, Canadian or British standards, it
was certainly a politically disastrous one in Australia, and despite repeated emergency measures
and a spate of optimistic government forecasts, the figure remained in this vicinity right up till
the general election.

Harassed by Labor on their left, by their DLP and Country Party allies on the right, and at odds
amongst themselves, many Liberals became desperate. The election could not be postponed beyond the
end of the year and successive public opinion polls spelt their doom. Faced with such impressive
prime ministerial ineptitude, many remembered Gorton’s strengths and forgot the not inconsiderable
weaknesses which had helped to put him out of office. On the first Tuesday in November 1971, when
he appeared at the Melbourne Cup, he received from the members’ stand a spontaneous ovation of the
kind usually awarded by Australians only to successful horses, jockeys or athletes. A “Get Gorton
Back” committee sprang up, but when it came to the sticking point most Liberal politicians felt,
probably correctly, that yet another change in leadership with the elections only months away would
do their prospects more harm than good.

McMahon deferred until the last possible moment both the date of the poll and its public
announcement. Before and during the campaign he shunned press conferences and “live” television
appearances almost entirely – at first sight a puzzling course of action, but one which many of his
strongest supporters applauded, such was his apparent genius for making verbal blunders when giving
an unprepared speech. On 2 December 1972, the people of the Commonwealth elected a Labor government
to power for the first time in a quarter of a century. Nothing became McMahon’s prime ministership
like his leaving of it. Late on that Saturday night when the electors’ verdict was quite clear, he
bowed out before the television cameras with a degree of dignity not conspicuous in him on so many
other great occasions.

There were many reasons for the Labor victory, not the least of which were the glaring incapacity
of their opponents and the apparent threat of rising unemployment. Many people, too, felt that,
after twenty-three years of non-Labor rule, it was time for a change of government to preserve the
healthy functioning of democracy; and Labor capitalised on this feeling with the slogan “It’s
time”. Another factor which favoured Labor’s victory at the polls was the growth of the women’s
liberation movement. Neither the movement nor a much more tightly organised body, the Women’s
Electoral Lobby, declared support for any political party but, because Labor was seen as the party
of change and innovation, it undoubtedly gained a great many women’s votes. More importantly, from
this time onward women began to take a much more active part in all political parties, both inside
and outside parliament. In 1981 the National Conference of the ALP, meeting in Melbourne, resolved
that for the future at least 25 per cent of all state delegations to this supreme governing body of
the party must be women and, more vaguely, that by the end of a ten-year period at least 30 per
cent of Labor parliamentary seats should be occupied by women.9

Contrary to the dictum of the Biblical preacher, the women’s liberation movement was something new
under the sun. Since time began, women in nearly all cultures known to us were treated as
second-class people, not fully human in all respects and certainly not equal, either in rights or
capacities, to the mighty males. In Australia for 50 000 years, black women were exploited and
abused – were in fact regarded as a form of property by the men of the tribes. For nearly 200 years
white women were treated in much the same way, though men often disguised this fact from themselves
by acting chivalrously towards women, that is, by patronising, condescending to, and making
allowances for the supposedly innate deficiencies of the “weaker vessels”. It is appropriate
therefore that the book which launched the movement for the liberation of all women, and the
recognition of their equality with men, should have been written by an Australian. In 1970 an
expatriate Australian lecturing in English literature at the University of Warwick, Dr Germaine
Greer, published The Female Eunuch.

There had of course been earlier books about women’s place in the modern world, books like Simone
de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, and there has been a spate of books on the subject since, but none of
them was as well written, as influential or as devastatingly accurate in getting to the heart of
the matter as The Female Eunuch. None of those written earlier could have been, because Greer’s was
the first major work to follow the widespread use of contraceptive pills. In the late 1960s, for
the first time in human history, by abolishing the terrifying fear of unwanted pregnancies, “the
pill” made it possible for women to exercise their sexuality as freely and fully as men had always
done. Germaine Greer urged women to do just that – and to enjoy the consequent growth in
self-respect and self-confidence which is rapidly according them at least equality with the other
half of humanity. Many Australian women were quick to join the movement and most, except the most
conservative, were more or less strongly affected by it. By 1968 sociological surveys showed that
most Catholic women were using the pill despite the stern exhortation to the contrary issued by the
Pope in July. Bishop Muldoon of Sydney, in newspaper interviews, stressed that the Holy Father’s
words, though not infallible and therefore not absolutely mandatory in this instance, were “only
one step removed” from infallibility. This subtle male theological exegesis prompted Michelle
Cronin, “a Catholic mother of two little children” to write to the Sydney Morning Herald seeking
clarification. It sounded, she wrote, “like being one step removed from being pregnant. As any
woman knows, that is very, very different from being pregnant”.10

At the 2 December 1972 poll, Labor benefited also from the fact that conservative policies on
foreign relations, race and associated questions, above all on the Vietnam War, had been overtaken
by events. The world situation, public opinion, even the “conventional wisdom” of the time had
changed, but the stance of the parties supporting the government had not. On most issues the
Country Party, and even more the Democratic Labor Party, whose support was crucial to the
government, were far to the right of many Liberal members. For example, Australian governments for
many years had managed to negotiate the sale of enough wheat and wool to communist countries,
especially China, to keep many Country Party voters solvent, if not always prosperous; yet these
same governments opposed official recognition of mainland China even after Nixon’s embarrassing
volte-face. The vast majority of white Australians, as shown by the 1967 referendum of this
subject, had long believed that they and their ancestors were guilty at the very least of 180
years’ culpable neglect of the Aboriginal Australian people:11 not so the Democratic Labor party.
During the election campaign, senator J.A. Little put forward that party’s view of the matter in
terms that managed to be at once irrational, obscure and reactionary. He said:

Nobody who has fairly considered the history of this country could say that the Australian
aborigines, any more than the animal species of this disappearing continent before the white man
came, would have survived through to this generation, had it not been for the intervention of the
white people, bringing the knowledge and the skills of Europe with them which enabled them to
tackle the deteriorating environment of this country and make of it what it is today.12

Labor promised that, if elected, it would abolish fees at universities and other tertiary
institutions, and spend a great deal more money on primary and secondary education, while
abolishing, or scaling down, financial grants to wealthy private schools. Thus the Labor Party,
without sacrificing its trade union base, broadened its policies to attract support from large
numbers of middle-class liberals (with a small “L”) and young people, students, artists,
nationalists, intellectuals, white-collar workers and professional people, and even a number of
businessmen dissatisfied with the Liberals’ management of the economy. More than any other person,
the man responsible for this transformation was Edward Gough Whitlam, who had succeeded Arthur
Calwell as federal leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party early in 1967. Son of a senior
Commonwealth public servant, Whitlam was born in Melbourne in 1916, and brought up in Canberra and
Sydney. Educated in both state and private schools, he graduated in Arts and Law from the
University of Sydney, and served during the war as a flight-lieutenant in the Royal Australian Air
Force from 1941 to 1945. After a brief but successfu1 career at the bar, he entered the federal
parliament in 1952 as a member for the safe Labor seat of Werriwa in Sydney’s outer suburban area.

Whitlam was something of a classical and historical scholar. He read widely and used both the
written and spoken word clearly and persuasively. He had a ready and devastating wit, as many an
interjector found to their cost. An imposing 193 centimetres (6 feet 4 inches) in height, and with
a commanding presence, he looked the part of a prime minister. Indeed, it was often remarked that
he established a sort of moral domination in the house of representatives while he and his party
were in opposition, especially during the McMahon government’s tenure of office. His wife Margaret,
daughter of a distinguished judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, was quite as intelligent
as her husband and probably even better at relating to all kinds of people. Certainly no other
Australian prime minister ever had such a publicly active and helpful spouse. With all these great
gifts were joined two notable weaknesses. Like Menzies, with whom he was often compared by friend
and foe alike, he too easily exhibited a broad streak of arrogance, or at best of unpleasant
complacency. The other weakness was peculiarly his own. In rare moments of stress or frustration,
he was apt to lose his temper, lashing out blindly at opponents with word and gesture and, for the
moment, quite reckless of the consequences.13 Thus in September 1965, as deputy leader of the
opposition, he was speaking in the house to an amendment to a government repatriation bill. The
Labor amendment sought to extend full repatriation benefits to Salvation Army personnel who had
served in the armed forces. With questionable taste, Mr Whitlam challenged the then minister for
external affairs, Mr Paul Hasluck, to deny justice to his Salvation Army parents by opposing the
amendment. Hasluck replied, apparently too quietly for the speaker to hear him, “You are one of the
filthiest objects ever to come into this chamber”; whereupon Whitlam threw the contents of a glass
of water in the minister’s face. Both men then complied with the speaker’s demand for apologies.

Within a few hours of the time when the overall national electoral verdict became clear, Whitlam
and his deputy leader, the Tasmanian Lance Barnard, were sworn in respectively as prime minister
and minister for foreign affairs and as minister for defence by the governor-general, Sir Paul
Hasluck. History does not record whether reference was made to parliamentary water sports on this
occasion. Not until preference votes had been allocated and the final result determined in all
seats could the Labor Caucus meet to select the full cabinet, which was sworn in on 19 December
1972, after what some sourly called the duumvirate had begun giving effect to some of Labor’s
election promises. A new wind, which most found invigorating but some alarming, blew through
Canberra’s corridors of power. It may be doubted whether there is a precedent in the history of
British-style democratic governments anywhere for the promptitude with which the new government
implemented so many of its campaign promises.

Within a month of election it had ended the lottery of conscription for military service and
released gaoled draft-resisters, negotiated an exchange of ambassadors with China, abolished race
or skin colour as a criterion of Australia’s immigration policy, banned racially selected sports
teams from our soil, begun planning a new deal, including the grant of land rights, for the
Aboriginal people, revalued the Australian dollar upwards, set about the reform of the national
health service and of the divorce laws, moved to support equal pay for equal work for women,
increased unemployment monies paid to the state governments, banned the slaughter of the nearly
extinct Australian crocodile and the export of its skin and of kangaroo skins, steeply increased
subsidies to the arts, put the contraceptive pill on the medical benefits list and abolished what
Mrs Whitlam happily referred to as the “entertainment tax” on it, and abolished the excise, first
introduced by the Gorton government, on unfortified wine. It also abolished the conferring of
knighthoods and other British titles, as the Canadians had done a generation earlier, and
instituted instead the Order of Australia whose members were to take precedence over holders of all
other decorations whatsoever. For a time many Labor supporters were almost equally amazed and
delighted, while opponents were seemingly bemused, by the authority, the confidence and the speed
with which the new government set about making up for its twenty-three years in the wilderness.

In the nature of things, this euphoric situation for Labor could not continue indefinitely. Not all
members of the complete Labor cabinet, elected by caucus two weeks after the election, worked
together as harmoniously as Whitlam and Barnard had done. There were signs, quickly suppressed,
that after twenty-three years of implementing Liberal-Country party policies, some senior public
servants were less than happy and efficient in the service of their new masters. The situation was
particularly bad in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) – a secret police body
supposedly responsible to the new attorney-general, Senator Lionel Murphy, and to the prime
minister. On 16 September 1972, under the previous government, bombs had been detonated outside
Yugoslav tourist agencies in Sydney and sixteen innocent bystanders had been seriously injured. The
criminals were widely believed to belong to a Croat terrorist organisation, the Ustashi, which had
collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, but the Liberal attorney-genera1, Senator Ivor
Greenwood, vehemently asserted that his ASIO spies denied the existence of any Croatian terrorist
organisation whatever in Australia. Six months later, in March 1973, the Yugoslav prime minister
was to visit us. Concern for his safety, and worry about ASIO’s ability to see sedition on the
right after so long a period looking for it on the left, increased Murphy’s worries. Then he found
that the head of ASIO had met secretly with other senior departmental heads and come to an
agreement that no statement would be made by any of them in such a form as to contradict official
statements made by a department under the previous government. Murphy would have been unpardonably
naive not to suppress this grossly disloyal behaviour in the chief spy. Accordingly, with a party
of Commonwealth police, he made an unannounced early morning visit to ASIO headquarters in
Melbourne, seeking more evidence of its insubordinate and dubious manoeuvres. Murphy’s attempt to
enforce proper constitutional behaviour among his subordinates was painted by the news media as a
wild-eyed attack on the “security services”.14 Douglas Anthony, deputy leader of the opposition
parties, made in this connection the astounding statement that the security services ought not to
be responsible to any politician or, presumably, to anyone but themselves. The whole episode was
labelled by the media, “Murphy’s raid”. It was the first, but by no means the last, indication that
some conservatives were prepared to tear up the constitution and to undermine democracy itself in
their efforts to regain power.

The government’s greatest constitutional problem was the fact that its members constituted only a
minority of the upper house. Again and again the majority of Liberal, Country party and DLP
senators amended or rejected bills, embodying Labor legislation which had been explicitly promised
in the prime minister’s policy speech. One of these bills sought to establish a minerals and energy
authority with power to exploit oil and other minerals in the national interest. Conservatives
naturally saw this as an attack on the sacred principle of private enterprise. Two other rejected
bills sought to set up a comprehensive national health service, to be financed from taxation, along
the lines of the British and New Zealand health services established about a quarter of a century
earlier. These bills were attacked by medical trade unions (professional associations), and
rejected by Opposition senators on the same ground. The third group of bills sought to make the
electoral system more democratic, or at any rate more equal, as promised in Whitlam’s policy
speech. Under the existing system the number of voters or persons in federal electorates could vary
by up to plus or minus 20 per cent of the average figure. This had long meant in practice that on
the average city electorates were very much larger than country ones – so much so that in some
cases a city person’s vote could count for little more than half as much as a country dweller’s. In
senate elections the position was worse. In 1901 there had been no federal capital territory, and
only a handful of voters in the Northern Territory, and so the constitution made no provisions for
them. By 1974 Canberra’s population was about 160000 and the Northern Territory’s population was
approximately half that number. To many it seemed anomalous, not to say undemocratic, that all
these citizens should have no vote for the Senate and none in national referenda: yet the
Opposition rejected bills designed to rectify the situation because it seemed likely that their
enactment would be disadvantageous to the Country Party.

There was much talk of going to the people again through the medium of a double dissolution. Labor
leaders felt confident, but in the end it was the conservative opposition parties which forced an
election for both houses of parliament. After its defeat in the 1972 general election, the Liberal
party had lost no time in dismissing McMahon from its leadership; however, his successor, Mr Billy
Snedden, at first seemed hardly more impressive. He apparently shared with most other opposition
politicians the belief that the electorate wanted them back on the treasury benches. To a degree
they appeared to believe their own rhetoric, as when they declared that the Labor government had
antagonised the United States and other old friends by recognising China and withdrawing troops
from Southeast Asia; but since the United States was itself engaged in the same manoeuvres, few
voters were impressed.

So in April 1974 Her Australian Majesty’s loyal opposition behaved more like a gang of fascist
thugs than responsible politicians in a democratic country. They threatened to use their Senate
majority to withhold supply to the government. Not even in the depths of the great depression, when
the state of Australia was incomparably worse, had the opposition-controlled Senate even
contemplated such a step. Many constitutional lawyers held that the fact that the Senate had never
blocked supply during the whole seventy-four years of its existence established a binding precedent
and proved that it had no power to do so. Yet Snedden’s henchmen in the upper house carried the
threat through to the point where Whitlam was virtually forced to seek a double dissolution
eighteen months before an election should have been necessary. The immediate reason advanced was
that the DLP leader, Senator Gair, had just accepted from his political opponents, the Labor
government, an appointment as Australian Ambassador to Eire. Of course, the government had hoped to
gain another Senate seat as a result of Gair’s resignation. Most people thought the incident
reflected more discredit on the new ambassador than on the government, and that it certainly
constituted no crisis of any sort, let alone one sufficiently serious to justify refusal of supply.

In any case, the incident was virtually forgotten during the ensuing election campaign. The prime
minister again called on the governor-general, Sir Paul Hasluck, and asked him to dissolve both
houses because of the Senate’s failure to pass the electoral, health and minerals authority bills.
Whitlam announced that the election would be held on 18 May. Labor appealed for “a fair go” on the
grounds that the Senate had obstructed the will of the people. The Opposition parties concentrated
on inflation, which had risen to the rate of 14 per cent per annum in the past year. Labor
spokesmen replied that Australia’s inflation rate was falling more rapidly than those in all but
one of the fourteen most comparable “advanced” countries of the world, and that this improvement
was due to the two revaluations of the Australian dollar, to the courageous 25 per cent tariff cut
and to other salutary but unpopular measures the government had taken. Both Snedden and Anthony,
the Country party leader, appealed to the nation to return the country to its “right course” by
electing them, but they were not able to agree so convincingly on other policy matters. When the
tumult and the shouting were over, Labor was returned with the loss of only two seats in the House
of Representatives and with twenty-nine out of sixty seats in the Senate.15

On the same election day, in a signal demonstration of the triumph of hope over experience, the
government put no fewer than four referenda to the people. One sought to change the constitution so
that the Senate elections could regularly be held on the same days as those for the House of
Representatives. The second sought to give citizens of the Northern Territory and the ACT a vote in
referenda and to allow constitutional changes to be made by a majority of all voters and a majority
of voters in three of the six states, instead of four. The third sought to write into the
constitution a provision that in federal and state elections all electorates should be
approximately equal in population so that votes would be of approximately equal value, and that all
houses of parliament should be directly elected by the people. The fourth sought power for the
federal government to grant money directly to local government bodies, previously an exclusively
state government function. As usual, all four questions were decisively negatived.

By mid-1975, the Labor government had brought about some important changes in Australian life which
were likely to be enduring. The “white Australia” policy, at least in its historically rigid and
insulting form, had been ended. Justice for Aboriginal Australians was unlikely ever again to be
completely neglected as it had been in the past and Papua New Guinea had become an independent
nation. Women’ s legal and social rights had been increased.

It was less likely that the abolition of tuition fees in tertiary educational institutions and the
tax-funded, comprehensive national health service, Medibank, would survive future conservative
assaults. A private members’ bill, drafted by Lionel Murphy, and supported by most Labor, some
Liberal and no Country Party members, had greatly simplified the divorce law. It recognised only
one ground for divorce – irretrievable breakdown of a marriage. Political and “moral” (i.e. sexual)
censorship had been almost abolished and the sniff of the wowser muted everywhere except in ]oh
Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland. Finally, Australian foreign policy was unlikely to revert to the
unquestionably subservient neo-colonial stance it had held for so long under the Liberals. The
American alliance would continue; but future governments of any complexion were more likely to
continue the nationalist Labor policy of cultivating good relations also with other powers,
particularly those in Asia. Despite these achievements, the government’s electoral support declined
during the year as inflation and unemployment rates increased. In March the Liberals deprived Labor
of its greatest electoral asset by deposing the disastrous Billy Snedden and installing Malcolm
Fraser to lead them. A vicious press campaign smeared the government with allegations of corruption
in its attempts to raise overseas loans. Not a penny had changed hands improperly, but much of the
mud stuck to its target. Then many political gangsters on the conservative side of politics, to
bring down the government they hated, began flouting the traditions, conventions and precedents on
which democracy itself depends.

One Labor senator died and another, Lionel Murphy, retired to the High Court. By long-established
convention they should have been replaced by party colleagues, formally nominated by the
governments of their respective states. Instead, the premiers of New South Wales and Queensland
disgraced themselves and their office by appointing “neutral” or anti-Labor senators to the
temporary vacancies. The governor of Queensland, Sir Colin Hannah, flagrantly breached the ancient
tradition that the Crown must be seen to be politically impartial with a grossly partisan and quite
gratuitous attack on the federal ALP. Finally the LCP Senate majority again broke precedent by
deferring consideration of supply bills. The government began to run out of money for essential
services.

Under the vaguely defined provisions of the written constitution, the new governor-general, Sir
John Kerr, could have resolved the crisis in a number of ways. By all known rules of precedent and
tradition in Westminster-style government, he should have resolved it on the advice of his prime
minister. So far from doing that, he actively deceived Whitlam and other senior ministers as to his
intentions, was seen to be conspiring with the Leader of the Opposition, and then dismissed the
Whitlam government on 11 November.

The manner of the dismissal suggests that the Queen’s representative harboured inner qualms about
the legality, not to mention the honourableness, of his own actions. Before administering the
coup-de-grâce from a prepared ambush, he took great pains to get in writing the support of the
Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, the Right Honourable Sir Garfield Edward John
Barwick, like himself and so many other prominent citizens, a product of Fort Street Boys’ High
School. As the Liberal Party’s MP for Parramatta from 1958 to 1964, Barwick had served Menzies in
succession as Commonwealth attorney-general and minister for external affairs. His elevation to the
High Court was seen by some political observers as one more instance of Sir Robert’s adroitness in
kicking rivals upstairs before they could challenge him for the party leadership. By others it was
seen simply as the fitting culmination to the career of an eminent jurist who would, of course,
magically put off a lifetime’s political prejudice the moment he put on his judicial robes.

On the day before the dismissal, this man lunched at Admiralty House with the governor-general,
secretly and contrary to specific advice given him by Whitlam. He was asked first whether it was
constitutionally proper for the governor-general to seek advice from the chief justice. Though this
was a political or historical query on which the Constitution has nothing whatever to say, and was
not a legal question, Barwick unhesitatingly answered, “Yes”.

Kerr then asked Barwick whether his proposal to sack, without warning, his chief adviser the prime
minister was consistent with his powers and duties under the Australian Constitution. Again the
highest legal authority answered yes because, he said, “A government having the confidence of the
House of Representatives but not that of the Senate, both elected Houses, cannot secure Supply to
the Crown.” This too was not a legal judgment, but a doubly political one. First, the government
was still in fact securing supplies to pay government contractors, public servants and so on.
Second, even if it had been true, inability to obtain supply from a recalcitrant upper house is no
reason for resignation or dismissal of a prime minister. As Geoffrey Sawer, sometime Professor of
Law at the Australian National University, wrote:

On no previous occasion in Britain, Australia or any British-derived parliamentary system has the
Monarch or a Governor-General dismissed a ministry having a majority in the Commons,
Representatives or similar House, because that ministry has been denied supply by the Lords, Senate
or similar House.16

Throughout their lunchtime discussion, both judge and viceroy assured themselves and each other
that they were guided purely by legal, not political, considerations. Manifestly they were not.

The events of Remembrance Day 1975 were widely spoken of as “Kerr’s Coup” and respect for the
vice-regal office and its incumbent slumped disastrously. Opinion polls showed that most people
strongly disapproved the Senate’s blocking of supply, and Kerr’s departure from the high traditions
of his office. “Nugget” Coombs, the great public servant, and Patrick White, the literary genius,
resigned from the Order of Australia since Kerr was its head. Not all Australians behaved with such
dignity, however. The newly installed Liberal-Country Party government soon restored the
distribution of British honours to Australian life. One of the first new knights created in 1976
was Sir John Egerton, previously for twenty years better known as Jack Egerton, president of the
Queensland Trades and Labor Council. His notion of human dignity differed from that of Coombs and
White and that held by James Cook two hundred years earlier. To receive his imperial bauble, he
knelt subserviently, in the traditional manner, at the feet of the egregious Kerr.

It is ironic that all this frenetically larrikin behaviour by the conservative parties and the
viceroy for whom at this time they and their leader, Malcolm Fraser, professed such profound
respect, was quite unnecessary to their purpose – the grasping of power and perquisites for
themselves. Throughout the year, unemployment had gripped well over 4 per cent of the workforce, a
situation far worse than anything Australians had known since the great depression of the 1930s. At
the same time the rate of inflation had climbed to an unprecedented 15 per cent per annum. Either
figure alone would have been enough to secure the defeat at the polls of any Australian government
elected since 1943. When at the general election following the coup, the Liberal-Country party
candidates promised to cure unemployment and inflation, they were returned to power with massive
majorities in both houses.

Thoughtful people, including many who usually voted Liberal, were appalled at the irony of events.
By ignoring 150 years of tradition and precedent, and choosing to act on the one possible
interpretation of the written document which most favoured the conservative forces, Kerr had, in
the words of one newspaper correspondent, “procured the prostitution of the Australian
constitution”. British and Australian legal tradition itself assumes that the popular vote, at an
election subsequent to the dismissal of a government by the sovereign or her representative, either
confirms or denies the legality of the vice-regal action. In fact, though most voters held Kerr’s
coup in abhorrence, they voted the Fraser government into power for quite other reasons.

One of the new Liberal-National party government’s first actions was to restore the superphosphate
bounty, a subsidy to farmers which, in the last year before its abolition by Labor, had been worth
about $5000 to the new prime minister. Malcolm Fraser was the first of a new generation of prime
ministers, too young to have been eligible for service in World War II. Born in 1930 into a wealthy
Victorian Western District family and educated at Melbourne Grammar School and Oxford University,
Fraser was nicknamed “the Prefect” by his political friends and “the crazy grazier” by his enemies.
After the 1975 election, most people called him “Big Mal” or “Mad Mal”. His long, thin, lugubrious
face reminded many cartoonists and writers of “one of those po-faced, top-hatted idols on Easter
Island”. Tall, lean and disdainful in manner, he spoke with a pseudo-English upper-class accent
that infuriated many ordinary people and ensured his continuing personal unpopularity with the
electorate; yet the success of his policies ensured his continuing domination of his party and the
country.

His cabinet made huge cuts in every kind of expenditure except defence and incentives to business
and farming interests. In an apparent effort to recompense governors-general for the onerousness of
their duties, salaries and expenditure incidental to the governor-general’ s office were increased
in the Fraser government’s first budget by an astounding 171 per cent. Funding of the most
notorious secret police body, ASIO, which seemed to have helped in the coup, was also increased
vastly.

By contrast, spending on less privileged sections of the community was cut heavily. Despite
promises to the contrary, the Medibank health scheme was effectively dismantled. Real salaries and
conditions in the public service worsened. Less and less government money was available for
kindergartens, schools and universities, but more and more for the already wealthy private
secondary schools. Those whose needs were greatest – Aborigines, the unemployed, the poor, the
sick, the old, women and children – suffered most.

In spite, or because, of these drastic measures, the economy continued to be as sluggish as it had
been under the Labor government. In fact the unemployment rate, 4.4 per cent when Fraser had been
made prime minister by the governor-general in November 1975, was 5.8 per cent two years later in
1977. This record alone would have ensured electoral disaster for any Australian government before
the coup, but most previous governments had not had to cope with inflation. According to figures
supplied by the World Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the inflation rate
for 1977 had fallen slightly – to 13.1 per cent – but the government claimed that the true figure
for the calendar year would be 9 per cent. In either case, the Liberal and National Parties could
claim to have brought inflation under control, even at the cost of increasing unemployment. Fraser
decided to call a general election a full year before it was due and before unemployment grew
worse. In New Delhi in February 1975 Sir John Kerr had publicly said that a governor-general should
not grant an election to a prime minister unless he could “be satisfied that Parliament [had], in
fact, become unworkable”. In view of this, would he, could he, asked some ingenuous citizens, grant
a double dissolution to the government with a massive majority in both houses? Only these few were
surprised when, despite his Delhi pronouncement, he obligingly granted a double dissolution that
Fraser wanted purely for party political advantage.

On Tuesday 1 November 1977, Gold and Black won the Melbourne Cup. By tradition, not by force of any
legal document, the cup was presented to the owner of the winning horse by the governor-general.
Dressed ridiculously, as he always was in public, in a full morning suit and gleaming top hat, Kerr
was driven once round the Flemington racecourse to acknowledge, as his predecessors had done for
three-quarters of a century, the good-humoured cheers and banter of the crowd. Instead he was
greeted by a storm of boos, jeers and hooting which rose in intensity until he reached the more
refined air of the members’ stand. There his progress was marked by a mingling of muted abuse and
tepid applause. After the race, when he lurched down the steps of the grandstand to present the
Cup, jeers and catcalls drowned out the applause, and much of Kerr’s rambling, emotional and rather
incoherent speech. To most of the six million people watching on their television screens it seemed
painfully clear that the Queen’s representative in Australia, the man whose prime function it was
to embody the dignity of the nation, was querulously drunk. Next day, in the Upper House at
Canberra, Senator Walsh (Labor) said:

Any public servant who appeared, in discharging his duties in public, drunk would face disciplinary
action ... I wish to know what will happen to the Governor-General because of his disgusting
drunken performance at Flemington yesterday.17

The deputy president of the Senate forced Walsh to withdraw his words, though he and all other
speakers did not attempt to deny the truth of the Western Australian senator’s statement. The prime
minister, it seemed, no longer had any great respect for his benefactor, but having, like
Shakespeare’s Caesar, attained the upmost round, he scorned “the base degrees by which he did
ascend”. He terminated Kerr’s appointment and sent him to a post as Australian Ambassador to the
United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in Europe. But this well-paid
sinecure was too much even for many Liberal politicans. A storm of public protest resulted in
Kerr’s being left in exile, like Joseph Furphy’s hero, “unemployed at last”,18 but not unprovided
for.

Five weeks after the most remarkable Melbourne Cup in our history, the federal election of 10
December 1977 resulted in a resounding victory for the Liberal-National Party coalition, which won
eighty-six seats to Labor’s thirty-eight. Those watching on television saw Gough Whitlam, with his
customary dignity, announce his resignation from the leadership of the ALP. The government’s huge
majority had been confirmed, the prime minister’s political judgment vindicated, and the country
replaced firmly on what he kept calling the “right” and “appropriate” course. Most electors
apparently shared his insouciance about the miseries of the unemployed, provided only that
inflation continued to be reduced or at least controlled. However unpopular he personally might
remain with the people, his standing and his authority within his own party and the coalition
rivalled those of Menzies at the height of his powers. The new parliament was allowed to run its
full term and Malcolm Fraser’s leadership of the nation was again endorsed in October 1980. It is
time to ask why. What positive benefits of his five years of government were perceived by the
electors, to most of whom “the Prefect” sternly dispensed such nasty medicine?

It is important to notice first that the bitter physic kept on coming. For six years in real terms,
that is in terms of the purchasing power of money whose value decreased in that time by almost
half, every budget found less than its predecessor for all those areas of national life humane
people thought most worthwhile. The real value of payments to the aged, the sick, to widows and
deserted wives, to war veterans, the unemployed and others in need, fell year by year. So did the
amount of money made available to schools, colleges of advanced education and universities with the
inevitable result that redundant teachers, and students who left understaffed institutions without
finishing their courses, helped to swell the ranks of the workless. Not only formal educational
institutions were affected. The Whitlam government had spent as much money on direct and indirect
subsidies to literature, painting, the other arts and research of all kinds as had long been spent
on such things in Canada and other civilised countries. Year by year, Fraser’s government cut back
spending in these areas too and even on that sacred cow of national life, the CSIRO. Payments to
tertiary students, artists and others were reduced annually – again in real terms – while more
stringent means tests and other qualifying conditions reduced the number of beneficiaries. Free
medical and hospital care, except for the very poor, was abolished, while the cost of these things
rose steeply for everyone else. A wide range of community health centres, childcare services,
women’s shelters and rape crisis centres had been established during the three years of federal
Labor rule: these curtailed their activities and sometimes closed altogether as the parsimonious
government tightened the financial screws.

Boat-loads of anti-communist Vietnamese refugees, “the boat people”, kept arriving at Darwin and
other northern ports. This made greater than ever the need for organisations devoted to helping the
assimilation of immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds, bodies like the Good Neighbour Council
set up in Arthur Calwell’s day, but less and less money was devoted to such purposes. Black
Australians suffered most, as they had done for 190 years, from the latest conservative reaction
among the whites. The Whitlam government had established a government department and a host of
minor instrumentalities to advise and help Aborigines. These bodies were by no means exempted from
Fraser’s general policy of curtailing spending on all forms of social welfare.

Again, then, what benefits were perceived by the majority of Australians who continued to vote for
the Liberal-National Party coalition, despite such massive provocation to a contrary course?
Undoubtedly the main motive was control of inflation. Standing at about 15 per cent a year when
Fraser was ushered into power in 1975, by the time of the 1980 election this figure had fallen to
about 10 per cent – where it seemed likely to remain. This was no doubt a pitifully small
achievement compared with the “normal” situation between 1955 and 1970, but it was impressive
compared with the “normal” inflation rate from 1972 to 1975 – and with the contemporary “norm” in
other advanced countries. Drastic reduction of government spending on everything except defence and
police spying may have had little to do, in fact, with controlling inflation, but the government
certainly believed it had and most electors, including many who were personally badly hurt by the
policy, obviously believed so too.

Secondly the government retained its traditional support from big business, farmers and graziers by
exercising a politic and relative generosity in these areas. Tax concessions, incentive payments
and other forms of encouragement to the mining and prospecting industries actually increased, and
this government initiative may in fact have contributed substantially to what was known as the
resources boom during the Fraser years. Vast quantities of coal, iron, aluminium, oil, uranium and
other ores were dragged out of the continent and shipped overseas, thus strengthening greatly the
Australian currency and balance of payments position. Again the government, and most of the people
who elected it, were certain that this boom was somehow good for Australia. Others protested that a
great and rapidly growing part of the ownership of the mining industry was in foreign hands, and
that it could not be good to give away most of the national estate to foreigners at
bargain-basement rates. In July 1981, even the senior public servants in the treasurer’s department
were worried to discover that six billion dollars of foreign capital had been invested in Australia
in the twelve months just ended, as against something over one billion in the previous year; but
“Big Mal” was delighted with the praise just heaped upon him by his properly grateful American
business hosts.19

Nevertheless, Fraser’s performance abroad won him a kind of grudging respect even from those most
opposed to all he did at home. Like Menzies and Whitlam, but unlike Holt, McMahon and Gorton, he
conducted himself with dignity in public, especially during his obligatory pilgrimages to
Washington. Furthermore, his foreign policy, unlike that of every previous conservative prime
minister, was at least intelligible and even intelligent. Though he fully shared the paranoid
delusions about the USSR of most “Western” leaders, he did not, as they did, lump all communist
powers together as parts of a malign and monolithic force. On the contrary, one of his first
actions after the 1975 election was to make a visit to mainland China to cement good relations with
that country. Millions too respected his outspoken abhorrence of racist ideology. Detractors might
suggest this attitude sprang from the fact that his mother was a Melbourne Jewess, or that he
believed Russian communism would take over majority black African areas if the indigenous people
did not; but there was no doubt of Fraser’s passionate sincerity. He spoke freely of “the obscenity
of racism” and at a Commonwealth conference in 1979, to the consternation of many who had voted for
him, Fraser was instrumental in securing, peacefully, majority black rule for Rhodesia under its
new name of Zimbabwe.

He did nothing, however, for the black people of Australia, particularly for those unfortunate
enough to live in Queensland or Western Australia, states controlled during the Fraser years by
Liberal-National coalitions. In the remote Kimberley district, for instance, though black
Australians were no longer butchered by policemen as they had been only fifty years earlier,20 they
were still exploited, abused and sometimes disfranchised by the conservative state government. The
Western Australian state election of February 1977 showed that, despite all the progress that had
been made since the Aboriginal referendum of ten years earlier, the most vicious form of white
Australian racism was still active among those who considered themselves the best people in the
country. On polling day, the white Liberal cabinet minister, Alan Ridge, defeated the black Labor
candidate, Ernie Bridge, by 1784 to 1691 votes. In May, Bridge appealed to the Court of Disputed
Returns which, in due course, laid bare a story of Liberal Party fraud and intimidation which would
have been quite incredible anywhere in Australia in 1977 – except in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s
Queensland and Sir Charles Court’s Western Australia.

Before the election, Liberal supporters feared that the Labor candidate might win. So, at
considerable expense, Ridge and the state Liberal party, with the connivance of some government
officials, sent five lawyers to the Kimberley electorate with instructions, in effect, to prevent
as many black citizens as possible from voting. At some polling booths the Liberal lawyers bluffed
local officials into accepting their interpretation of the meaning of the Electoral Act, a meaning
which of course had the effect of denying the vote to many Aborigines. At other places the lawyers
or their friends treated would-be Aboriginal voters to such vast quantities of alcohol that they
could not walk into the polling booths. At still other places local white supporters of Ridge
simply intimidated Aboriginal voters.

The most appalling part of the story is that, when the court had given its findings, neither Ridge
nor any of the other Liberals who had conspired to subvert the democratic processes of their state
was punished in any way. Not only that, but the government of Sir Charles Court immediately brought
forward a bill to amend the Electoral Act in such a way as to rob many illiterate Aborigines of the
vote altogether. Not all the conservative politicians in the house disgraced themselves. Four of
six National party members crossed the floor to vote with the Labor members against the amendments.
One Liberal, Dr G.T. Dadour, without casting his vote, left the Chamber with the moving words,  “I
know I have to live with myself for probably another 10 or 20 years”. Then the speaker, Mr Ian
Thompson, gave his casting vote with the “No’s” to defeat the amendment. At the subsequent
by-election, held under the old rules, Ridge was returned honestly to the seat,21 but at the next
general election of 1980 he was decisively defeated by the Labor candidate, Ernie Bridge,
Aboriginal station owner, stockman and country music singer.

Despite the best efforts of those who regarded themselves as its best people, times were changing
in the Kimberley district much more than was evident in the nation as a whole. By seeking to reform
too much too fast, the Whitlam government had scared conservative voters and back-stage
powerbrokers out of their scanty wits. Swinging voters too had been badly frightened – if not by
Labor efforts at reform, by the panic surrounding Kerr’s coup. So people elected the Fraser
government to give them, above all, not change or reform of any kind but respectability and
stability; and for seven years the prime minister almost succeeded in his avowed ambition, to
govern so quietly that political news would be replaced in the headlines by sporting intelligence.
One of the few events to break the post-prandial political torpor of that time occurred in the last
week of Apri1 1980.

The nationally respected Melbourne Age reported on Saturday 29 April that the chief justice of the
High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick, had, without declaring his interest, been sitting in judgment on
cases brought to litigation by wealthy corporations in which Barwick’s own private family company
had shares. Mundroola Pty Ltd had been incorporated in 1946, apparently as a means of reducing
Barwick’s income tax payments by making over a large sum to his two children. In 1973 his wife
owned 850 shares in the company, her son Ross, her daughter Dianne and her husband Garfield one
each. An old friend of the already eminent QC, Mr Leslie James Thompson, held “4000 deferred
non-voting and non-management shares”. Thompson also became chairman of Ampol Petroleum and a
director of Brambles Ltd and the “sugar, chemicals and mining conglomerate CSR”, all companies in
which Mundroola had made lucrative investments. In the fifteen-year period to 1980, Sir Garfield
(as head of three- or five-judge High Court benches) heard six appeals from the three companies on
matters ranging from personal injury damages to income tax assessments. The appellant companies
lost four of the six cases and won two. No one ever alleged that the chief justice, in hearing the
cases, had acted other than impartially, but the media and Labor members of parliament did ask
persistently why he had not declared his interest or possible conflict of interest. Four years
earlier he had, in another case, emphatically declared his agreement with the ancient rule of
British Law that: “A judge should not sit to hear a case if in all the circumstances the parties or
the public might reasonably suspect that he was not unprejudiced and impartial.” Over the weekend,
many thought that the chief justice would be forced to resign, but he easily avoided that course by
breaking another venerable rule of law – delivering judgment on his own case. He pronounced himself
innocent of a misdemeanour of which he had never been accused. When parliamentary sittings resumed
on Tuesday morning, the prime minister tabled a letter from Barwick which, with mind-boggling
disingenuousness, stated,  “I feel sure that no informed and fair-minded person would have honestly
thought that my views might have been influenced by the fact that my adult children beneficially
owned shares in the litigant company.” As though God had spoken, the political tempest stilled. No
one had the bad taste to ask why Sir Garfield’s “parties [to the case] or the public” had silently
been transformed into one “informed and fair-minded person”, or why his long letter so resolutely
refrained from mentioning even the appearance of any possible conflict of interest.

During the spring and summer of 1982-83, the auspices showed that Fraser’s conservative coalition
government seemed to be on its last legs. To an unusual extent it was hoist on its own petard. In
1980, to discredit its political enemies according to ALP spokespersons, the government appointed
F.X. Costigan QC, a one-man Royal Commission, to inquire into the affairs of the notoriously
corrupt Painters’ and Dockers’ Union. Costigan’s report confirmed that indeed many petty and some
murderous criminals were to be found among the union’s members, but that their activities were
sometimes directed by great, rich and powerful persons not hitherto suspected of criminal
associations. Prominent among the latter were white-collar criminals who had conspired to rob poor
shareholders, to cheat the government of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxation and to enrich
themselves by nefariously ingenious schemes to circumvent the letter of the law regulating public
companies. The most lucrative and widespread plan was known as the “bottom-of-the-harbour” scheme,
though no one supposed that it was used only in Sydney. It worked like this:

A company that made great profits in a given financial year thereby rendered itself liable for the
payment of a large tax bill. A single director, or close-knit body of directors who themselves
owned the great majority of the company’s shares, would then send the company to the bottom of the
harbour. That is, they would transfer its assets to other companies, owned or controlled, through
intermediaries, by themselves, so that when the tax bill arrived the original rich concern would
have been reduced to a bankrupt, empty shell.

Costigan reported that “gross negligence” [or criminal collusion] in the crown solicitors’ office
had helped the number of identified deep sunken companies to increase from twenty-seven in 1973 to
1412 in 1982. In particular, the deputy Crown solicitor in Western Australia had, whether by
negligence or design, delayed the launching of prosecutions for over two years. Another officer in
Perth conducted a call-girl service using the Crown solicitor’s office phone number in
advertisements for clients. His more fastidious wife used their home address for that of over a
hundred asset-stripped companies of which she had been made the nominal secretary. The government’s
embarrassment was compounded by the revelation that three senior officials of the Western
Australian branch of the Liberal Party had been prominently engaged in the tawdry company-stripping
business. They were Sydney Corser, a former chairman of the party’ s Finance Committee, Sir Victor
Garland, formerly a cabinet minister who had been kicked upstairs to London as Australian high
commissioner, and Denis Horgan, the current chairman of the Western Australian Liberal Party. The
last named delivered the unkindest cut of all to his comrades. In an apparent effort to convince
the viewers, or perhaps himself, that the law, not he and his fellow deep-sea divers, was wrong, he
wept copiously on Richard Carleton’s ABC television show.

Fraser sought to contain the political damage by denouncing the tax cheats’ greed and promising to
bring down retrospective legislation to recover the money from everyone who had gained in the past
seven years from bottom-of-the-harbour schemes, but this merely provoked a more damaging split in
the party. Many Liberals felt their three Western Australian colleagues had rightly earned praise,
not obloquy, for engaging in such extraordinarily private and enterprising behaviour. The proposed
legislation was amended and watered down by dissident coalition members until an almost toothless
bill was passed with solid Labor support at the end of October; but by then the government’s
position had weakened so much that Fraser began to meditate calling an early general election
before economic trends became worse still. W.G. Hayden, leader of the ALP since Whitlam’s
resignation in the wake of Kerr’s coup, did not seem a dangerous opponent. Born in 1933 and
educated at the Brisbane State High School, he was a police constable before being elected MHR for
Oxley in 1961. Despite his Queensland police background, his integrity was absolute and
unquestioned. He had done more than anyone else to rebuild the parliamentary Labor Party and
enjoyed the universal respect of its members. It is not too much to say that even his political
enemies liked the man. Perhaps he was too ordinarily decent for the jungle of party politics and
lacked the cunning so necessary to ambitious politicians. Perhaps that is why his own party both
rejected him as leader on the eve of the election and made him Governor-General long afterwards on
16 February 1989. In any case, Fraser sensed that the continuing rise in unemployment figures and
the inflation rate were less threatening than the extraordinary popularity of the Labor member for
Wills, R.J. Hawke.

Born in 1929 at Bordertown, South Australia, son of a Congregational minister and nephew of a Labor
premier of Western Australia, Hawke grew up with the conviction that he was destined to become
prime minister. With the Western Australian Rhodes Scholarship behind him, he returned from Oxford
with that university’s BA, LLB and BLitt degrees and the reputation of being a good cricketer and a
great drinker. In 1958 he became resident officer and legal advocate to the Australian Council of
Trade Unions and then president of that body from 1970 to 1980. Throughout that decade, without
being seen to produce any very tangible gains for those whose dues paid his salary, he became a
leading charismatic figure on the national stage by settling, at the last minute, every serious
strike in the country – largely on the employers’ terms. Thus he entered parliament in 1980 as the
darling of almost every floating voter, that 20 per cent of lower middle class and upper working
class citizens who agree on nothing except that their hatred of strikes is a sure measure of their
own virtue. It is hardly surprising that in March, three years later, he displaced Bill Hayden as
leader of the parliamentary Labor Party and became prime minister. It happened like this.

After the “bottom-of-the-harbour” scandals, opinion polls showed that the conservative coalition
was losing support. Another poll taken in July 1982 showed that 43 per cent of voters thought Hawke
would make the best prime minister, 22 per cent thought Fraser and 12 per cent Peacock, deputy
leader of the Liberals. Lionel Bowen, the Sydney suburban lawyer who was deputy leader of the
parliamentary ALP, earned a left-wing ovation at a party conference by telling delegates that, as
far as he was concerned, “charisma” was only a fancy brand of soap; but Hawke’s amazing popularity
with the public continued to increase. Because it seemed clear to the prime minister that his
chances of retaining power could only get worse with time, on 3 February 1983, Fraser, with some
difficulty, obtained the governor-general’s assent to an early election. He probably did further
damage to his prospects by announcing that the federal electoral rolls would close forty-eight
hours later, a move which effectively disenfranchised thousands of new, mainly younger voters.

On the same day Senator John Button, ablest of the Labor politicians, and Bowen, one of the least
distinguished, pressed Hayden to hand over the leadership to Hawke. Hayden complied, remarking
acidly that in the existing circumstances even “the drover’s dog” could not help but lead the ALP
to victory. And so it proved. With consummate political skill Hawke promised practically nothing
more specific than what was implied by the ALP’s campaign slogan, “Bringing Australia Together”.
Backed in the House of Representatives by seventy-five Labor members to the fifty mustered by the
conservative Opposition, the new prime minister was hailed by many as “the Messiah”, by others as
“the drover’s dog” and by most, shortly after, as “Mr 70 Per Cent”, an allusion to the fact that
for nearly a year more than 70 per cent of those surveyed by the pollsters strongly approved of his
prime ministerial performance.

So sweeping was the ALP’s victory that Doug Anthony, leader of the National Party and deputy prime
minister for many years of coalition governments, resigned from parliament and left politics a few
months later. In the resulting imbroglio for leadership of the National Party, Ian Sinclair, member
for New England and Anthony’s deputy, was pitted against opponents who included a Queenslander
urging extremely right-wing policies. Some months prior to this, when criminal charges of which he
was later acquitted had been pending against him, Sinclair had publicly claimed that two prominent
Sydney racing figures had told him at lunch that he could have the charges dropped by making a
large donation to the funds of the New South Wales Labor Party. The ALP government of that state
had promptly appointed Mr Justice Cross as a royal commissioner to inquire into Sinclair’s
allegation. Five days before the National Party leadership ballot was to be held, Judge Cross had
reported that Sinclair’s allegations were “simply untrue”, and that “the Spanish Inquisition would
not have convicted the Devil himself on the sort of defective answers and evidence Mr Sinclair gave
to support his allegations”. The member for new England, nevertheless, was elected leader of the
National Party.

Under parliamentary privilege, when the House resumed on the last day of February, Sinclair
attacked Judge Cross for denying him (Sinclair) “natural justice” and for “getting the evidence
wrong”. In the ensuing verbal brawl, Hayden, the new foreign minister, declared that Sinclair “had
the personality and public morals of a cashiered sergeant-major from the New South Wales Rum
Corps”, and that while Cross had an unblemished career stretching over twenty-five years, Sinclair
was “a malicious liar and a total stranger to the truth”.22

Barely a month after the election of 5 March, and before parliament had met, people were regaled by
the most polished and successful public relations campaign ever mounted by an Australian
government. It was called the National Economic Summit, and it had been signalled by Hawke long
before he achieved party leadership. During the second week of April a tripartite conference,
chaired by the new prime minister, “bringing Australia together”, met on the plushly padded green
baize seats of the House of Representatives. Eight cabinet ministers, all state premiers and five
or six other government representatives, about thirty big businessmen and delegates from employer
organisations and a rather larger number of leading trade union figures debated national economic
policies in a strangely theatrical spirit of comradely love and co-operation. With the predictable
exception of Queensland’s egregious premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, all participants agreed to a few
pious expressions of good intentions. The twin problems of unemployment and inflation should be
addressed simultaneously, not in tandem. In return for the unions’ promise to exercise restraint in
their wage demands, employers undertook to recommend that their companies’ shareholders should
accept lower dividends.

In the event, real wages and the number of strikes per annum did decrease significantly, but, not
surprisingly, corporation profits and dividends did not. Neither did unemployment figures or the
inflation rate. Gradually, painfully, it dawned on traditional Labor voters that “their” government
intended to retain power by implementing coalition policies more efficiently (not to say
ruthlessly) than the conservatives had ever been able to do. As millionaires like Alan Bond, John
Elliott, Rupert Murdoch and Christopher Skase swallowed up thousands of smaller companies in a
hundred takeovers, the rich became richer and the poor became poorer. Neal Blewett, Minister for
Health, did establish the Medicare scheme, which paid 85 per cent of the basic medical costs of
anyone not too proud to use it, but it was hard to identify any other measure clearly benefiting
the many rather than the few. Smaller public hospitals were closed while the number of beds and
services was cut back in many larger ones. Spending on education at all levels was scaled down even
more savagely than it had been under the Fraser governments. Heavy fees were reimposed upon foreign
students at Australian universities and a so-called “service-fee” of $250 a year was levied on all.
Expenditure on pensions and other social services was cut dramatically. Public servants
administering the dole to workless people were ordered to inquire more searchingly into the
eligibility of recipients.

Most unemployed people were young, but the government also determinedly attacked the living
standards of those who had come to the end of their working lives. For the first time in our
history, lump-sum superannuation payments were taxed and a stringent means test was imposed on the
old-age pensions of all over 70. A capital gains tax did nothing perceptible to the naked eye to
reduce the wealth of the rapidly multiplying number of millionaires, but hit very hard the
relatively trifling investments of employees, professionals and small-businesspeople. The same
groups were hurt most by the fringe benefits tax; and while the government talked incessantly of
income tax cuts, those that were implemented always, in real terms, benefited the very rich more
than the average or poor citizen. All these hard-line, right-wing policies were strongly backed by
the second most powerful man in the cabinet, the Treasurer Paul Keating, a flinty-eyed,
street-fighter type of politician, and they were justified by exactly the same rhetoric as
conservative governments had always used.

Restraint, especially in government spending, was the surest means of curing inflation and was good
for what right-thinking people called “the economy” and what radical malcontents called big
business. This was especially so when private investment was encouraged by tax reductions and other
incentives. As Australian industrialists made more profits, they would hire more workers and so
reduce unemployment. So much for the rhetoric. In fact Hawke and Keating found, as Fraser had done
before them, that the only part of this pie-in-the-sky plan that actually worked was that the rich
did usually get even richer. They should have been grateful, but weren’t. Habitual conservative
supporters can rarely bring themselves to vote Labor, even when it has manifestly done more for
them than their own politicians did when in power; similarly, habitual Labor voters can rarely
bring themselves to vote for the National or Liberal Parties, even when their own party has
manifestly ignored ALP policy and sold them down the river. When Hawke called a premature general
election on 1 December 1984 before his party’s stocks grew even worse, the result was determined by
the same middle-of-the-road, floating voters who had voted the year before for the party of him
whom they had rightly perceived as Australia’s champion strike-breaker. They sent the ALP back to
power in Canberra, but with a sadly reduced majority. As Bill Hayden said to his great leader, the
drover’s dog had done it again but he was a bit clapped out this time.

After the election, as before it, public approval of the prime minister and his party continued to
plummet. Under the misnamed policy of “pragmatism”, the government encouraged massive foreign
investment in Australian industries and did all it could to please banking and big business
circles. Those ingenuous souls who had always believed that the ALP had something to do with
idealism, with Chifley’s “light on the hill”, were appalled. To them it seemed that, more and more
frequently, Hawke, Keating and Co. backed away from the implementation even of those longstanding
Labor policies which would have been popular with the electorate. Thus they quickly gave back Uluru
(Ayer’s Rock) and its accompanying tourist development to the traditional Aboriginal owners; but
thereafter, in metalliferous outback areas, Aboriginal interests appeared to come a bad second or
third to those of multinational mining companies. In flat defiance of ALP policy and majority party
sentiment, the government facilitated the mining, shipment and sale to the highest bidders of
uranium ore from Roxby Downs and elsewhere. Even the party’s resolutely anti-racist stance was
compromised. In March 1984, one of Australia’s most distinguished historians, Professor Geoffrey
Blainey, addressed the Warrnambool Rotary Club. His speech made headlines all over the country and
weakened the politically bi-partisan approach to immigration which had ruled since the time of the
Whitlam government. In essence, Blainey claimed that too many Asians, particularly Vietnamese, were
coming to Australia and too few Britons and other Europeans.

Blainey’s speech had the effect, though perhaps not the intention, of making racist views
respectable. Thousands who shared them but bad remained silent for a decade hastened by word and
deed to propagate race hatred again. Among them were some members of the federal Opposition. On 8
May, one government backbencher, Lewis Kent, a Yugoslav by birth who had lived through the Nazi
occupation, grew so warm that he climbed over the benches to assault some of the more provocative
coalition speakers. Shouting “Dishonest racist bastards!” he was restrained and led out of the
Chamber by the government whip. While no ALP spokesperson was heard to support the new anti-Asian
drive, the government, very quietly, did change administrative practices in the Immigration
Department so as to bring in more Europeans and fewer Asian settlers.

In August 1986, the re-elected government’s popularity quickly plummeted when an opinion poll
showed its approval at 40 per cent compared with 50 per cent of the Liberal-National opposition. A
month earlier, even the approval rating of the prime minister, “Mr 70 Per Cent”, had fallen to 38
per cent. Mainly because of a massive overseas trading imbalance, the value of the Australian
dollar fell to US$57.15. Inflation and unemployment obstinately remained almost as high as they had
been under Fraser in 1983. The treasurer, Paul Keating, complained truly but quite unavailingly in
the New York Times that the Australian government was “getting all the right things done in the
economy” yet was “getting kicked to death” by international trading conditions quite beyond its
control.23 Politically the government sustained more pain – if not more damage – from the kicks of
some of its own members who ought not to have been beyond its control. In flat defiance of party
policy, for the sake of $100 to $200 million in export income, cabinet allowed the resumption of
uranium sales to France. Bob Hogg, senior adviser to Bob Hawke, resigned in protest and Senator
Joan Childs observed sadly that the decision was “yet another example” of the government’s failure
to carry out party policy. Less convincingly, the deputy prime minister, Lionel Bowen, argued that
those who wished to leave uranium in the Australian earth were helping the Opposition to turn “safe
Labor seats into marginal ones”. In fact, pacifists, reformers and “progressives” of all kinds felt
betrayed by the government, but sadly sure that Opposition policies on such issues would be even
more unpalatable.

To demonstrate their disillusion with the government, or perhaps with “the system” or life itself,
some self-styled “feral women” camped on the lawns in front of Parliament House. When three Liberal
women members of the Upper House and a brave (or foolhardy) male colleague, Senator David
MacGibbon, approached, they were surrounded by the wild women who jostled and spat upon their
visitors, humming the while like a swarm of bees. They also delivered what Senator MacGibbon called
“a concerted attack to the front of my trousers”. Labor Senator Michael Tate fared no better. A
feral woman abused him for “invading women’s space”. When he suggested that the public gardens
before the House were everybody’s space, she “dropped her pants and urinated on the grass in front
of him – like a dog marking its own boundary”. The whole incident, no doubt, showed more about the
capacity of zealots in any movement to discredit their own cause than about the state of federal
politics, but it also underlined a growing nihilistic mood of disgust with all politicians and even
with democracy itself.24

By the long, hot summer of 1986-87, it had become a truism to observe that the Hawke government was
ruling the country in the interests of big business far more effectively than those who trumpeted
the importance of private enterprise had ever been able to do. This made life increasingly
difficult for John Howard and Ian Sinclair, leaders of the Liberal and National Parties. If voters
in the general election due by the end of 1987 were to perceive any difference between the programs
offered by the two major political parties, Coalition rhetoric had to be moved a long way to the
right. That in itself has seldom presented insuperable difficulties to any politician, but leading
Liberals argued publicly and embarrassingly about how far to the right they should appear to have
moved. Many thought that leading National (Country) Party figures had always stood as far to the
right as it was possible to be, but they had underestimated the eccentricity (to use the kindest
word) of 76-year-old Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, National Party premier of Queensland since 1968.

On 1 November 1986, with the help of massively gerrymandered state electoral boundaries, his party
won another general election; not only that, but an absolute majority of seats in Queensland’s
single-chamber parliament – more than the Labor and Liberal parties combined. The Premier was
inspired with delusions of grandeur. If Queensland, why not Canberra? From the far right this
paladin of all the worst nineteenth-century British notions suddenly launched an attack on his own
political comrades in the federal sphere. Just when there was a real chance for the conservative
forces to take power from the Hawke government, its most bigoted enemy contemptuously denounced the
Liberal Party and proclaimed his intention of replacing Sinclair as leader of the federal National
Party.

Some thought him afflicted at last with senile dementia and others that he was being secretly paid
by the ALP to sow confusion in the Coalition ranks, but in fact Joh’s push from the bush to
Canberra was being funded, surprisingly openly, by the “white shoe brigade”, a group of about fifty
wealthy businessmen, some of them newly enriched by participation in development projects in the
swamps of the Gold Coast. At one stage they boasted of having $25 million dollars pledged to the
campaign. It seemed that their semi-articulate champion had cause to be vaingloriously confident.
In a telephone interview with the Sydney Morning Herald he spluttered from his Kingaroy peanut
farm:

I want candidates across Australia. We can get them, we can fund them and we can win. Sinclair?
Isn’t he a Liberal? ... We will do a General Macarthur with him. We will get our own Joh candidates
that will completely annihilate them [Howard and Sinclair].25

Joh’s unguided intervention must have appalled the Coalition chiefs in Canberra as much as it
delighted the Labor ones who could now sit back and watch the Opposition parties destroy their
electoral credibility by passionate public disputation among themselves. Some sophisticated
southerners, using the analogy of the Ayatollah Khomieni in Iran, dubbed Bjelke-Petersen “the Mad
Mullah of the Deep North”, but nothing seemed to shake his popularity with rural Queensland voters.
He seems never to have doubted that Howard and Peacock, already locked in a continuing battle for
the Liberal Party leadership, would be forced to hand over that of the Coalition to the Nationals.
Only a madman could have believed further that Ian Sinclair, the ablest and most ruthless member of
the Commonwealth parliament, could be forced under any circumstances to relinquish leadership of
the National Party to the “Mad Mullah”. In Apri11987 a Sydney Morning Herald poll showed that Labor
again had a commanding lead over the Opposition: 51 per cent to 42 per cent for the
Liberal-National group. It was probably at this time that Labor strategists like Senator Graham
Richardson began to think of calling the next federal election early. Controversy over the
Australia Card provided the trigger.

This measure proposed to equip every citizen with a card recording his or her Taxation Department
file number and other personal details which, the government argued, would make it easier to detect
tax cheats and tax evaders. For that very reason, it seemed to some observers, the Opposition
parties combined with the Australian Democrats in the Senate to block the legislation twice within
three months, thus providing the government with a constitutional reason for calling a
double-dissolution election, announced by the Prime Minister for 11 July. John Elliott,
multi-millionaire and leader of the Liberal Party’s extra-parliamentary organisation, fecklessly
helped the Labor campaign with his suggestion that the Australia Card might usefully be issued to
unemployed persons, pensioners and other ne’er-do-wells, but on no account to respectable people
such, presumably, as himself. But the troublesome card practically disappeared from view during the
six weeks of electioneering. Voters and those wooing them were preoccupied with the bizarre daily
spectacle created by the “Joh for Canberra” campaign. Nearly half of all National party Members of
the federal parliament were Queenslanders fanatically committed to the belief that Joh, as leader
of the far or lunatic right, would destroy the Hawke government they hated. This northern mafia
forced Sinclair and the whole National organisation to end the coalition with the Liberals, thereby
writing finis to conservative chances. It is hardly surprising that, though the ALP lost two seats
and gained two elsewhere, it won four seats in Queensland and an increased overall majority in the
House of Representatives. For the first time in history, a Commonwealth Labor government was
re-elected to a third consecutive term in office. It seemed that what W.K. Hancock had
characterised in 1930 as the “party of initiative” had become the acceptable party of government,
helped thereto more by the political stupidity of its opponents than by any great virtues of its
own.

Three months later the world was rocked by the greatest stockmarket crash since the great
depression of the early 1930s. Panic selling began on Wall Street on 17 October and spread to
London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and of course Australia. By the end of the month the market value of
shares throughout the world had fallen on the average by more than one-third.26 Paul Keating had
long been hailed by many as the most skilful Treasurer in the Western world. He had “managed” the
economy by abolishing controls as much as possible, in order to allow it to be managed by “market
forces”, that is to say, by the freest possible competition between capitalists. And it worked. The
richest individuals and corporations became richer still as, with limitless credit pressed upon
them by the banks, they “took over” or swallowed smaller companies, which had already swallowed
smaller ones and so on ad infinitum. By enriching the greatest sharks, the process was seen to be
enriching the whole country, for few noticed that the first result of a successful takeover was
often to add to the unemployed pool workers made redundant by the new giant company’s rationalising
plans. Names like John Elliott, Robert Homes à Court, Laurie Connell, Christopher Skase and Alan
Bond, unknown a generation earlier, became household words, while those who bore them were inflated
by the media almost to folk hero status. In 1983 a trifling part of Bond’s money had made it
possible for Ben Lexcen and other talented Australians to wrest the America’s Cup briefly from the
New York Yacht Club. A celebratory party raged all night in the Royal Perth Yacht Club. The
recently elected prime minister, Bob Hawke, had flown across the continent on time to congratulate
the winners at daybreak. In 1987 Bond’s name was emblazoned on a huge ovoid captive balloon
floating in the polluted air above some Australian cities. Five years later he was made bankrupt
and began serving a two-and-a-half-year gaol sentence for fraud.

The only prominent investor to emerge from the crash not only unscathed, but richer than ever, was
polo-playing Kerry Packer, son of a previous America’s Cup challenger, Sir Frank Packer of the
Sydney Daily Telegraph. The rest were execrated by press and public as though their inordinate
greed, abetted by that of the banks which backed them, had actually caused the crash. Overnight
almost, the folk heroes were transformed by the media into scapegoats. But in truth no two economic
experts could wholly agree on what had caused the disaster, still less on what the government
should do to restore prosperity. Like the first black Australians who refused to utter the name of
a dead kinsman, everyone agreed not to utter the word “depression”, as though to do so might make
the “recession” worse. For the past seventy years a few thoughtful people had pointed to the
planned economy of communist states as the only way of avoiding cyclic booms and depressions
brought about by the free play of market forces; but this no longer offered a credible alternative.
Comrade Gorbachev, leading the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union itself, had
already begun to dismantle that country’s centrally planned economy in favour of one driven by
“market forces”. So the recession continued for year after year with interest rates of between 15
and 25 per cent, rising unemployment and declining government expenditure on social services,
particularly education. Government and Opposition agreed that this increasing hardship for the
masses was the only way of reducing inflation, but by the end of 1990 the purchasing power of the
Australian dollar was still decreasing by more than 8 per cent per annum.

It is good to record that public penny-pinching and private penury were not allowed to blight the
Bicentenary celebrations of 1988. Inevitably these culminated in a re-enactment of the arrival of
the first fleet of white invaders on Australia Day, 26 January. Original Australians had long
proclaimed their view that this was an occasion for mourning, not joy, and many people feared that
the official performances led by Prince Charles and the prime minister might be marred by violent
Aboriginal protests. They need not have worried. On the great, sunny morning when so many hundreds
of thousands of good-humoured people streamed towards Sydney Cove, it seemed all the policemen in
Australia would have, been lost among them and so quite unable to keep order even if they had been
ordered to do so. Those who marched under the red, yellow and black Aboriginal f1ag27 reported
friendly gaiety just as evident as everywhere else and as it still was at night among the throngs
who, from every harbourside suburb, watched the illuminations on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and in
the sky. The harbour itself was covered with many thousands of boats ranging in size from
home-made, one-child canoes to the long straight line of one or two thousand-tonne sailing ships
which passed through the Heads, between the myriad moving smaller craft and under the Bridge.

So sparkling was the weather and so joyful the spirit of the people, that class, sexual, racial and
even political divisions were forgotten. Collisions and accidents ducked many pleasure seekers but
hurt none. Not far from Man-o-war Steps where the official speakers were in full flight, two white
Australians in clothing suggesting the naval uniform of two centuries ago paddled a tiny bumboat
beside the shore. Two black Australians dived into the water, dispossessed the invaders and ran up
the Aboriginal flag in place of the “white” Australian one. Everyone, including the four principal
actors, cheered and roared with laughter. Best of all, the whole spectacle, and the rare feeling
for common humanity which informed it, were brought by the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s
television service to millions of viewers from Cape York to Cape Leewin. Many feared they might
never see again such a demonstration of that unaffected egalitarian goodwill which optimists have
liked to think is a distinguishing characteristic of the Australian people. On that day it was
possible to hope that the nineteenth-century bushman’s mateship might one day embrace the whole
human race.

Voters always tend to blame economic recession on the party in power: which at this time meant the
ALP everywhere except the Northern Territory, Tasmania and Queensland. Hard times, however, added
little to the failing credibility of the long-lived National Party government of the last-named
state, which had already sown the seeds of its own destruction. After the federal election, Sir
Robert Sparkes, chairman of the Queensland National Party’s State Council, who had been
enthusiastic about Joh’s “push for Canberra”, naturally blamed him for its failure. By October 1987
the premier was made to realise that his once-loyal party comrades perceived him as an electoral
liability, even in Queensland, but he clung grimly to power and place. In November he asked the
governor to approve his sacking of five “disloyal” cabinet ministers and, it was reported, to call
a new election. Advised by other ministers that Joh no longer had the support of his parliamentary
colleagues, the governor properly refused. On 26 November, all forty-seven National Party MPs met
in Joh’s absence and elected Mike Ahern their leader, but it took them another five days to force
their 76-year-old icon to resign from parliament and the premiership.

Even before the last climactic state election, the most self-righteous and religious premier
Queensland ever knew had been touched by the shadow of future disasters. In 1986 in an out-of-court
settlement of a libel action, he had admitted receiving from Alan Bond $400,000 which, the West
Australian believed, was the equivalent of a bribe to be allowed to engage in business in
Queensland; but no one then believed the Lutheran lay preacher capable of wrongdoing. The first
allegations to be taken seriously were made during the election campaign by a National Party
trustee, Sir Roderick Proctor, who publicly stated that the Bjelke-Petersen government was involved
in “cronyism”, Sir Roderick’s euphimism for corruption. Before long, four senior public servants
were gaoled for “misappropriating” money belonging to the government departments which they had
helped to administer. So the quaint phraseology of the law avoided calling presumably respectable
people thieves. Most prominent in Brisbane society were Judith Callaghan, executive director of the
Queensland Day Committee, and her husband Allen, under-secretary of the Department of Arts,
National Parks and Sport and sometime press secretary and adviser to the premier. Each purloined
about $40 000 but, quaintly again, Judith was sentenced to only thirty months’ goal compared with
four years for her spouse. Then ABC TV devoted its “Four Corners” program to long-standing
allegations of corruption in the police force and newspapers alleged that a prominent member of the
“white-shoe brigade”, Mr Mike Gore, had received from the government a bridging loan of $10.16
million to help with his Sanctuary Cove development. At last, in Joh’s absence and against his
wishes, a cabinet meeting chaired by Deputy Premier Bill Gunn on 26 May 1987 commissioned Mr Tony
Fitzgerald, QC to inquire into the augean stables which, many believed, were presided over by the
Queensland premier.

Experience had made many Australians expect from Commissions of Inquiry little more than a
whitewashing of those accused of any wrongdoing. The Fitzgerald Report, made public two years later
on 3 July 1989, confounded the expectations of the most cynical. It revealed not only criminal
behaviour by named government ministers and senior public servants, but, much worse, that the whole
administrative structure of the state had been misused to further the political ends of the
National party. Criminal and political networks operated over a wide range of activities “including
bribery, prostitution, the operation of sex parlours and brothels, tax evasion, illegal gambling,
SP betting, the rorting of ministerial expenses, protection rackets, money laundering and,
probably, drug running”.28 Most cabinet ministers were later charged with misappropriating public
money for their own personal benefit as the Callaghans had done, but the grossly gargantuan “Big
Russ Hinze, Minister for Everything” was shown to have accepted $1.8 million dollars from
developers within weeks of cabinet approval of projects in which they were interested. A Supreme
Court Judge, Mr Angelo Vasta, under investigation by Fitzgerald for perjury, was allowed by the
Chief Justice of Queensland “to stand down from his duties voluntarily, with dignity”. But
corruption began, it seemed, at the top.

In 1976 the Bjelke-Petersen cabinet had inexplicably promoted a man called Lewis, over the heads of
more than a hundred better qualified applicants, to the position of assistant police commissioner
for the whole state. The then-Commissioner, Ray Whitrod, a man notorious among many of his
colleagues for unassailable integrity, resigned in protest. Lewis then “automatically” became
commissioner and was knighted soon afterwards. From his instantly acquired vantage point, Sir
Terence presided over what Fitzgerald characterised as the corrupt “police culture” of the whole
state. He also provided welcome advice to his benefactor on such matters as appointments to the
cabinet, the judicial bench, the governorship of the state and how best to redistribute electoral
boundaries to the advantage of the National Party. Even before the Inquiry’s report was presented,
Sir Terence was suspended from duty as Vasta had been; but this did nothing to divert attention
from the ex-premier. Fitzgerald showed that Joh had instructed the Special Branch police to “get
something on” designated political opponents, such as Liberal Mp Angus Innes, Labor Opposition
leader Keith Wright, and former state president of the ALP, Dr Denis Murphy. The ex-premier’s
belief that he had done nothing wrong merely reinforced what other revelations to the Inquiry
showed: that the yokel who misruled Queensland for twenty years knew nothing and cared less about
the traditions of Westminster-style democracy. “The greatest thing that could happen to the state
and the nation,” he declared in a gem of purest Johspeak, “is when we get rid of all media. Then we
could live in peace and tranquillity and no one would know anything.”29

Evidence to the Inquiry suggested, however, that he knew more than he was willing to admit about a
safe in the ante-room to his office in Parliament House. The ex-premier explained that National
Party supporters frequently dropped tens of thousands of dollars in cash into this treasure box and
that neither he nor his staff “wanted to know” the names of the donors nor the amounts of money for
which no receipts were issued. It seems to have been this pecadillo which later brought Joh into
court to answer “one charge of official corruption and two of perjury”. The former charge held that
“on or about September 18th, 1986, being premier and treasurer of Queensland”, Bjelke-Petersen
“corruptly received from Singapore businessman Robert Sng $100 000 in cash on account of his
ensuring that Historic Holdings Pty Ltd would be the ‘selected developer’ for the redevelopment of
the Brisbane Post Office building and site”.30 At his trial in October 1991, Australia’s best-known
Lutheran lay preacher escaped conviction because the jury was unable to reach a verdict. But long
before the case came to trial, the Fitzgerald Report had changed the course of Australian history.
The state election of 2 December 1989, though fought on the old gerrymandered boundaries, was won
by the Goss Labor Party with fifty-four seats to thirty-five for all other parties. The National
Party’s percentage of all votes cast was slashed from 39.6 at the previous election (called by some
“Joh’s last hurrah”) to 24.

Electors decided that the National Party, with or without its Liberal partners, had been in power
for too long for its own good or for that of Queensland; but voters sometimes reject a government
for no real reason other than that they feel it is time for a change. So the long-lived Labor
government of New South Wales had already been replaced by the Greiner-led Liberal-National
coalition on 20 March 1988. In South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, the ALP still clung
to office, though only after savage in-fighting which in the last-mentioned state had ended only
with the replacement of Labor’s leader, Peter Dowding by Dr Carmen Lawrence, the first female
premier in Australia. On balance, despite the Labor renaissance in Queensland, the auspices seemed
clearly to favour the conservative parties as the 1990 federal election approached. Inflation,
interest rates and unemployment remained unacceptably high and the recession promised to become
worse before conditions could improve. Judging (or perhaps just gambling) that an early election
would help his party, Hawke set its date at 24 March. Labor’s campaign was again helped
considerably by public brawling between the Liberal leader, Andrew Peacock, and his deposed
predecessor, John Howard, and between both and the far-right national figures who had succeeded Joh
Bjelke-Petersen and Ian Sinclair. Two of the ALP’s own positive strategies probably had more to do
with the party’s success. First they saturated with direct propagandist mail those marginal seats
which public opinion research suggested could be won. Second, as similar research showed that
unprecedently large numbers of electors were determined to vote for the Democrats, Green
(environmentalists) and other minority party or independent candidates, the ALP solicited their
second-preference votes on the grounds that Labor’s environmentalist record was demonstrably much
better than that of the Coalition.

The gamble paid off when the ALP won seventy-eight seats in the House of Representatives against
sixty-nine for the Opposition plus one independent. The vainglorious Robert James Lee Hawke had led
his troops from their unprecedented third successive term of office into their fourth. With the
exception of the fabulous R.G. Menzies, no political leader in the history of the Commonwealth
parliament had ever done so much, but judicious observers felt sure that this was Bob’s last
hurrah. Immediately after the election, the Liberals replaced Peacock with John Hewson, sometime
Professor of Economics, who bade fair once and for all to end the internecine warfare in the
Opposition camp. Besides, by-elections and opinion polls continually showed that Australian voters
were “sick of Labor” and steadily becoming sicker. Even in the poll on 24 March, Labor had lost
votes and seats in every state except Queensland. But the main reason why the ALP’ s ten-year rule
would be ended (if not before) by the election due in 1993 was the party’s manifest abandonment the
Opposition plus one independent. The vainglorious Robert James Lee Hawke had led his troops from
their unprecedented third successive term of office into their fourth. With the exception of the
fabulous R.G. Menzies, no political leader in the history of the Commonwealth parliament had ever
done so much, but judicious observers felt sure that this was Bob’s last hurrah. Immediately after
the election, the Liberals replaced Peacock with John Hewson, sometime Professor of Economics, who
bade fair once and for all to end the internecine warfare in the Opposition camp. Besides,
by-elections and opinion polls continually showed that Australian voters were “sick of Labor” and
steadily becoming sicker. Even in the poll on 24 March, Labor had lost votes and seats in every
state except Queensland. But the main reason why the ALP’ s ten-year rule would be ended (if not
before) by the election due in 1993 was the party’s manifest abandonment – reversal even – of its
traditional policy: using taxation and other government powers to reduce the income gap between
rich and poor. One of Labor’s brightest backroom boys, wine merchant Richard Farmer, analysed the
Commissioner of Taxation’s official statistics to show just how much wider the gap had grown in two
Sydney suburbs during the first eight years of Labor administration:

After-tax income in working-class Bankstown is up just 41 per cent while over in upper class
Edgecliff it has grown 267 per cent.

...Back in 1982-83, income tax in Bankstown was 20.4 per cent of taxable income and in Edgecliff
33.5 per cent. By 1988-89 the Bankstown rate was up to 24.7 per cent and that in Edgecliff down to
27.6 per cent.31

Before the end of the year, the tired government was presented with another problem. The ruthless
Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, brutally annexed the neighbouring oil-rich Arab state of Kuwait.
The president of the United States, George Bush, swore to make war on Iraq if Hussein did not
withdraw his troops and restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. He sent American land, sea and air forces to
the area and obtained practically unanimous United Nations backing for his planned attack. Should
Hawke “go all the way” with Bush as preceding prime ministers had done with President Truman in
Korea and President Johnson in Vietnam? Or should he keep our forces at home on the ground that our
vital interests and national integrity were in no way threatened by an Arab quarrel half a world
away? Experts in the Foreign Affairs Department advised the latter course, but his instincts, he
declared, pushed him toward the former.32 In the past, support for the United States had always
been justified by the perceived need to oppose communism, but the Soviet government had demolished
the Berlin Wall and thereby written finis to any expansionist aims it may have nourished. It had
also abandoned its support for Hussein and offered diplomatic support to the United States. No sane
person could any longer pretend that “international communism” posed a threat to Australian
territorial integrity. So Hawke compromised, sending three RAN vessels, but no land or air forces,
to support American and Allied ships in the Persian Gulf. In a political sense his plan worked
brilliantly. Thousands of tonnes of American bombs smashed Iraq in a few weeks. Australia was seen
to have been a loyal United States ally and yet our victorious ships returned without the loss of
one Australian life.

Public opinion on the whole approved, if tepidly, the government’s handling of the situation, but
the war’s outcome did nothing to arrest the downward slide of the economy into the “recession”
which the Treasurer claimed “we had to have” in order to make Australia more competitive in world
markets. His strategy seemed to be working when, in April 1991, the balance of payments improved as
exports exceeded imports for the first time in many years, and in May the annual inflation rate
fell to 4.9 per cent, the lowest since 1962. So the Labor government, in Keating’s New York
words,33 kept on “doing all the right things”, but this time it was “being kicked to death” by
pensioners, dismissed schoolteachers and other workless people – for, as the inflation rate fell,
that of unemployment rose, in 1991 to more than 10 per cent. All the opinion polls spelt Labor’s
doom. It seemed that people were tired of the same old faces in the Canberra opera-bouffe. They
wanted a new cast.

The only person in the government ranks apparently not rendered immobile by the situation was the
man once described by some as the “world’s greatest treasurer”, Paul Keating. Since 1983 he had
been seen by all, including himself, as the inevitable successor to the prime ministership. In the
last weeks of the year, Senator Graham Richardson and other ALP “numbers men” began, not very
covertly, to mobilise support for the change. There was no difference between the stated policies
of the two men, but because Hawke’s leadership was seen to be increasingly ineffective, a small
majority voted for Keating at a caucus meeting a few days before Christmas 1991. It was not a vote
in faith in the new leader’s genius, but rather a measure of the desperation in Labor ranks. Just
possibly, some members hoped (rather than thought) the jaded electors might be appeased by a change
of leaders instead of a change of party. Keating had the political cunning to produce the
appearance of a radical change. Fostering republican sentiment was ALP policy, but Hawke and all
his followers had talked of republicanism, if at all, only softly as a possible future development.
Keating used the Queen’s visit in March 1992 to put republicanism on the contemporary political
agenda. His wife Annita pointedly shook the royal hand instead of curtseying when the Queen visited
parliament. Keating’s speech of welcome stated that Australia was likely to go its separate
republican way by the end of the decade. His remarks were delivered in such a way as to recall an
earlier Australian’s address to the Emperor of Japan, “With all respect you may conceive to be due
you without degrading formalities...”34 Many older people were outraged, but most opinion polls
showed approval of the new prime minister’s emphasis on Australia entering the third millennium as
a republic. Yet it seemed as likely as ever that the National-Liberal coalition would be returned
to power at the next election.