Fifty years ago, unbeknown to himself, Gough Whitlam was in the final year of his prime ministership.

He had led Labor to electoral victory on December 2, 1972, after the Coalition had been in office since December 1949. But Whitlam was dismissed by governor-general Sir John Kerr on November 11, 1975, when Labor could not ensure supply and would not advise an election. All this, no doubt, will be discussed again in a few months.

It so happened that the final nine months of 1975 involved the Whitlam government in having to respond to the exodus of refugees from South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) to the forces of communist North Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

The North Vietnamese Army and its Viet Cong operatives in (then) South Vietnam were supported with arms by the communist regime in the Soviet Union, with some assistance from the communist dictatorship in China led by Mao Zedong. However, the non-communist government in South Vietnam was losing allies.

Vietnam commemorates the 50th anniversary of its unification — a turning point that ended US involvement and reshaped the country.

In March 1973, under the Paris Accord, the US withdrew its final combat troops from Vietnam. Soon after, on July 1, 1973, congress passed a law – despite opposition from president Richard Nixon – that prevented US military operations in the region.

The US congress continued to cut back on military aid to South Vietnam. And then the Watergate scandal had an immediate effect. Because of this mishandling of the break and enter into Democratic National whCommittee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington in June 1972, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

His replacement as president, Gerald Ford, could not get approval from congress to send additional military aid to Saigon. The government in Hanoi understood that the US had lost the will to support its one-time ally.

North Vietnam renewed its assault in March 1975. The South Vietnam forces fought valiantly but could not prevail. Saigon fell on April 30.

In Australia, from early April the Whitlam government understood that Saigon would soon fall. Australian combat forces had been withdrawn from Vietnam by the William McMahon-led Coalition government by November 1971.

The Whitlam government withdrew the remaining Australian Army Training Team the following December.

However, Australia still had diplomats in Saigon. Moreover, there were local Vietnamese who had worked in, or with, the Australian embassy in Saigon along with Vietnamese who feared persecution if the Hanoi totalitarian regime came to power in South Vietnam.

And then Whitlam and some of his senior ministers threw the switch to intolerance.

Richard Palfreyman reported the final days of the Vietnam War for the ABC. He concluded the extract from his unpublished memoirs in The Weekend Australian last Saturday by stating that he still felt “a sense of shame and regret” about the events of the day when the Australian embassy staff finally left Vietnam. It was April 25, Anzac Day.

Put simply, Whitlam went out of his way to stop Vietnamese who had supported Australia from fleeing Vietnam with Australian diplomats. He was willing for Australia to accept infants but not adults.

The reason? The Whitlam government did not want to antagonise the communist rulers in Hanoi who were soon to conquer Saigon.

Clyde Cameron was a left-wing member of the Whitlam cabinet who happened to be opposed to Australia accepting Vietnamese refugees.

In his 1986 book China, Communism and Coca-Cola, Cameron wrote that in cabinet in 1975 Whitlam told his colleagues that he was “not having hundreds of f. king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us”.

I had an extensive correspondence on this matter with Whitlam in late 2002 and early 2003. It is published in the March 2003 issue of The Sydney Institute Quarterly.

Whitlam told me that he did not recall making the statement attributed to him that “these Vietnamese sob stories don’t wring my withers”. However, Whitlam did not dispute the comment attributed to him by Cameron.

Whitlam’s attitude at the time was explained to me by Peter Wilenski at a private dinner I attended in the Foreign Affairs Department in the early 1990s. He was head of the Department of Foreign Affairs at the time and in 1975 had been head of the Department of Immigration.

Wilenski told me the Whitlam government was willing to admit Vietnamese to Australia in 1975.

But the Labor government was looking for candidates other than those who had, or were alleged to have had, an association with the anti-communist government in Saigon. In response, I made the point that it was the anti-communists who were refugees because they had genuine fear of persecution.

Wilenski did not refute this analysis.

Quang Luu is a case in point. Formerly a South Vietnamese diplomat in Australia, he returned to Saigon before the communist victory. Luu fled the regime and eventually made it to Australia, only to experience difficulties with the Whitlam government. The advent of Malcolm Fraser’s government in November 1975 resolved his problem.

Luu’s story is in the April 2009 issue of The Sydney Papers.

Certainly, the Fraser government was more sympathetic to Vietnamese refugees than its predecessor.

But as Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian on March 26, 2015, it was not until late 1977 that Australia accepted Vietnamese refugees in large numbers.

Overwhelmingly, they were chosen from UN camps and arrived in Australia with valid visas on Qantas planes.

The Fraser government’s position was made easier in a political sense because Bill Hayden had replaced Whitlam as Labor leader following Labor’s defeat in the December 1977 election. To be fair, there was opposition to Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s and early 80s from some Coalition politicians as well as some Labor MPs.

However, the refugee intake worked. Not only have Vietnamese Australians made a significant contribution to Australian society; what’s more, they convinced many Australians of the communist tyranny imposed on some Southeast Asian nations a half-century ago.

From the late 70s, the “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” chant, once much beloved by the left, was rarely heard in the land.

Even Whitlam declined to maintain his rage towards anti-communist Vietnamese.