GOUGH Whitlam made a much better legend than a prime minister. No sooner had the news broken yesterday of the death of the former Labor prime minister in a Potts Point nursing home at the age of 98, than the ABC airwaves erupted in tearful hyperbole.
“This country would not be Australia without Gough Whitlam,” said one weeping caller to ABC 702.
“Devastating, devastating,” said former Hawke government minister Susan Ryan. “The loss to the nation is just indescribable.”
“Whitlam knew what government needed to do,” opined playwright David Williamson. “With-out Whitlam where would Australia be? … We would be like America where if you’re poor you die.” And on and on it went all day. The myths, the exaggeration and the outright lies.
Gough Whitlam led a chaotic big-spending government for less than three years between 1972 and 1975, reaching high farce in the shady Khemlani Loans Affair, and ending when he was dismissed by the governor-general and lost the ensuing election in a catastrophic landslide. That’s the truth.
But if you consumed any news yesterday you might believe that Whitlam was a visionary genius who single-handedly ended the White Australia policy and the Vietnam War, opened Australia to Asia, ended discrimination against women and Aborigines, gave university education to poor people, and was overthrown by the CIA in cahoots with Rupert Murdoch. In fact the best thing that ever happened to Whitlam was to be dismissed from office, because he became a Labor martyr, and never had to account for the devastation he wrought on his country and his party.
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The Left has always been better at making myths than conservatives, and none is bigger than the myth of Gough, created and burnished by the self-described “Great Man” himself, a superb showman with a brilliant wit, charisma and an optimistic disposition.
Whitlam is crucial to Labor lore because they think it proves theirs is the party of “enlargers” and reformers, whereas the Liberals are just agents of resistance.
Among the myths is that Whitlam was a western suburbs kid made good, like Paul Keating, when in fact he was a Knox boy. The son of a senior public servant, he grew up in Turramurra and Mosman and other Melbourne and Canberra suburbs.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s amusing that Mark Latham, who later inherited his seat of Werriwa, a genuine westie and class warrior, who once boasted of hating people from Mosman, would wax lyrically yesterday about “the greatest-ever Australian”.
Alan Reid, the most senior press gallery journalist of his time, wrote of Whitlam in his definitive 1976 book The Whitlam Ventures that he was “the quintessence of upper class suburbia … He was pedantically precise of speech, sloppy in action.”
Yet Whitlam was fantastically good at self-promotion. As Malcolm Turnbull said yesterday: “He will be given credit I imagine for many things that were equally or perhaps even entirely the achievements of others.”
Whitlam claimed to have ended (Labor’s) White Australia policy when it was actually Harold Holt’s government, on March 9, 1966, which changed immigration policy so that race was no longer a criterion for entry.
Those who were uni students in the 1960s also remember it was Robert Menzies who effectively scrapped fees by introducing Commonwealth scholarships so any student who did well in high school could go to university for free and receive a living allowance. Whitlam just removed the competitive aspect and extended university to anyone, regardless of aptitude.
Whitlam’s proposals for modernising Australian were really to introduce welfare state measures that were popular in continental Europe at the time. If he did transform Australia it was to start us down the road from self-reliance to entitlement so that half the nation is now on welfare.
Yet the arrogance of Labor’s mythmakers would have us believe Australia was a terrible country before Whitlam.
Thankfully, John Howard’s book The Menzies Era rescues Australia from such slander.
He shows it was the Menzies era which utterly transformed the Australia, “bequeathed to the incoming Labor government in 1972 after 23 years of Coalition government’’. Howard wrote the book to “provide a substantial rebuttal of 30 years of consistent myth-making … It’s a hard slog,” he said.
Yes it is. But the Whitlam Myth has gone so far into fantasy that it may become toxic.
It’s what brought us Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, both of whom yesterday declared Whitlam had been their inspiration.
As a shiver runs down your spine, hold on to the memories of how bad the Gillard-Rudd era was, because in another 30 years they, too, may be mythologised, their faults replaced by falsehoods.
