Gough Whitlam’s Legacy – What worked; What Didn’t

The Whitlam Governments – from December 1972 to November 1975 – led a reform revolution in many areas, from education and health to the environment and foreign policy. But alongside the great achievements were great failures and, ultimately, great tragedy when the government was dismissed. On Wednesday 11 December, The Sydney Institute brought together four of the contributors to the recently released The Whitlam Legacy to discuss the impact of Gough Whitlam’s time in power. Troy Bramston, a columnist with The Australian and contributing editor of The Whitlam Legacy, joined former Labor minister Susan Ryan AO, The Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson and Deloitte Access Economics Director and John O’Mahony, former economics advisor to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, in this review of the Whitlam years. Susan Ryan’s paper is taken from an edited transcript of her address.

GOUGH WHITLAM’S LEGACY – WHAT WORKED; WHAT DIDN’T 

SUSAN RYAN

Good evening to supporters of The Sydney Institute, and my fellow panellists. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to come before you tonight as an unreconstructed Whitlam-ite. I was the one who constantly attracted that tag – and it wasn’t a compliment – in the deliberations of the Hawke Cabinet. I suppose if I start with a little bit of my own, the beginning of my own relationship with Gough, you might understand that.

I wasn’t in the Whitlam Government. I was first elected to the Senate in 1975 after the Dismissal, which was not an auspicious time to start a political career, shall we say. And it led to my forming, I suppose, a very dramatic idea of Whitlam, because in that campaign, the 1975 campaign – there will be some people in the room who remember it – it was quite a, well, the cliché. “Rollercoaster” doesn’t come near to it.

If you went around campaigning with Whitlam, to mass rallies in support of Whitlam, you would have thought that we were going to be swept back into government. Such was the fervour for Whitlam, the sense of outrage over the sacking and the dismissal. And of course there were so many groups in the community, including newly politicised women via the Women’s Electoral Lobby, who really wanted Whitlam to be re-elected and thought he would be. However, if you contrast those experiences with what actually happened on polling day, of course, it was terrible; it was a rout.

So I still have that contradictory sense of the wonderful up-moments of the campaign. In particular, the candle-lit rally outside Parliament House not long before the actual election date. I think Don Dunstan chaired it, another person that Labor people couldn’t love more. Thousands of people turned up, lit candles, sang songs, and we thought, “This is it, it’s going to happen.” Well, it didn’t.

It was quite a dramatic time. Of course I was, in a sense, a beneficiary of the Whitlam reform program – which Troy has neatly summarised for us. Especially in the earlier part with the creation of the Territory senators. This was done by legislation. The constitution provided for it but it hadn’t happened. Two senators’ positions were created for the Northern Territory and the ACT. That was challenged in the High Court before the 1975 election, but it was upheld. It was also challenged afterwards, in my very early days as a senator, but again the law was upheld.

Along with much of the Whitlam legislative program, if you step back from it, you can’t imagine Australia without it. Not that everyone in this room would think that Territory senators were an irreplaceable adornment to our national political landscape. But if you go to the Territories they do.

So many things are now part of our ongoing agenda, some of them very successfully implemented and re-implemented such as Medicare (at first Medibank) or universal health insurance, and needs-based funding of all schools. The latter was started by Whitlam when he set up the Schools Commission and established very substantial needs-based funding of all schools in Australia.

The removal of university fees was not maintained as a policy. Even though as Education Minister I fought a few battles, I lost the war on that one. However, access to university for those with the ability and the motivation to go is still a very important. Access to universities is growing.

The questions around Indigenous Australians and their relationship to the land they occupied before we came were opened up. These are still huge on our national agenda. And who could imagine an Australia in which we didn’t have an important, perhaps the crucially important, trading relationship with China. When Whitlam visited China as leader of the Opposition, it was seen as an outrageous act. Whitlam wasn’t a person who had a lot of luck in politics but happily that early visit to China turned out to be very lucky timing as it emerged that Henry Kissinger was there at the same time, paving the way for a visit from President Richard Nixon. What would have been presented by Whitlam’s enemies as an outrageous pro-Communist action became a sensible, global strategic move that the President of the United States immediately gave legitimacy to.

These reforms happened because of Whitlam. And they have been developed, Some changed a bit others not changed; some resolved and some not resolved, but you couldn’t imagine modern Australia without them. But I would like to go to the policy area which is the subject of my chapter in the book, and that’s women.

When Gough Whitlam was elected Australia’s prime minister in 1972, there was not one woman elected to the federal parliamentary Labor Party. Not one. There had been a woman in the past, Senator Dorothy Tangney from Western Australia. She had been elected in 1943, but she lost her seat in 1967. There had not been any other Labor woman. On the other side of politics, Enid Lyons had been elected to the House of Representatives as its first female MP in 1943 – to be followed by Annabelle Rankin and Ivy Wedgewood who had both been elected to the Senate for the Liberal Party in 1946 and 1949 respectively.

That demonstrated the position of women in Australian public life, or Australian economic life. Roma Mitchell been appointed a judge in 1965. As to having a woman on the High Court, even we ambitious young feminists never envisaged something like that. There was no woman vice-chancellor of a university.There had maybe been one or two female professors in our universities. There were no women current affairs journalists, women were not allowed to appear on television except on what were called “women’s programs”. Women weren’t much on radio because the sound of a woman’s voice was considered to be irritating and lacking authority. Female university students were a very small minority.

Today, women have leading roles in all major institutions, professions and occupations in Australia – not enough, some of you will hasten to add, and I agree with that. But we have had a female prime minister, and we have a female Governor-General. We’ve had several female premiers now. We’ve had several state governors. Those changes are huge when you think that they hadn’t started when I first entered parliament.

You can understand why I am the unreconstructed Whitlam-ite. I saw his initiative, in policies that affected women, as being the beginning of what I’m very pleased to call, a social revolution. Whitlam was prepared to support such a range of initiatives that assisted opportunities for women because, at that time, not only was there no woman in his caucus, there had been virtually no women in the upper echelons of the party machine, and virtually no women in senior positions in the trade union movement.

Whitlam spent years preparing policy for the time that he became Prime Minister. It was detailed preparation of policy in the areas of foreign policy, defence, the development of cities, the development of suburbs, the environment – very early policy work on the environment – and Aboriginal land rights. All of that work had been going for years before he actually got the chance to implement it. This is why his “It’s Time” speech at Blacktown in 1972 was such a detailed manifesto. He hadn’t, of course, prepared a very detailed manifesto on opportunities for women because basically there were no women in the organisations he was involved with to make proposals.

However, there had been by that stage quite a long tradition of supporting equal pay in industrial matters, not achieved but it was certainly an aspiration. One of the first things Whitlam did as prime minister was to re-open the Equal Pay Case and appoint Mary Gaudron as the legal advisor for the case. He also did something that at the time seemed extremely eccentric and even a bit embarrassing. Whitlam took the sales tax off contraceptives. Some of you in this room might think, “Well that’s pretty small beer.” In fact, it wasn’t.

There was a huge problem at that time with women’s access to reproductive knowledge and control. There had been no abortion law reform at all and access to contraception was very limited. The contraceptive pill was available only on prescription from a doctor and often only to married women. Also, it was very expensive. By reducing the sales tax, it meant that women without a lot of means could start having some control over their own reproduction, as more affluent or knowledgeable women already had.

Whitlam also did what was seen as a radical and, indeed, high risk thing. He appointed a Women’s Advisor. She was appointed to go into his prime ministerial office to advise the PM on women’s policies. It caused uproar, especially in the media. The person appointed was to be paid at the level of a middle-ranking public servant. The job was filled by an open advertisement and there were a number of applicants, with five of us shortlisted. I was one. The media pursued us, taking photos, and calling us “Gough’s Super Girls”. But worst of all was the idea that one of us would be paid at the rate of a middle level public servant. Why would any woman be paid that to talk about women’s affairs?

The appointment was a high risk move, and a very contentious one. It also opened the floodgates. Women at last had someone they could write to about their problems, their marital problems, domestic violence, about discrimination in the work force, lack of childcare, all of those things. It resulted in a deluge of submissions from women. Elizabeth Reid was appointed to the job.

So, Whitlam started to address childcare programs. He funded the first women’s refuges, the first women’s health centres. All of this now sounds pretty normal but at that time it was extremely contentious. Whitlam didn’t step back from any of that which is why so many women of my era, and older, today hold him in such high regard. When the Whitlam government entered the stormy weather Troy has outlined for us, with so much going wrong – and many were big mistakes – at the same time there was constant sarcasm and derision about his genuine effort to improve policies for women. And Whitlam never flinched. He just kept doing it.

In 1975 –the first United Nations International Women’s Year – Whitlam appointed a committee to develop projects around women’s issues for the year. He funded that committee to the tune of $2 million. And, the media went berserk about that. Two million dollars, indeed. There were all sorts of jokes about – “What are they being paid for?” and so forth. The PM also sent a delegation to that first International UN meeting in Mexico City. I was lucky enough to be on that. And it was quite clear, when we were there and Elizabeth Reid gave the world a description of the improvements for women’s lives that the Whitlam Government had been undertaking, that we were world leaders.

For years, after that, people came to Australia to study our policies for women and to ask us how such policy initiatives came about. For a leader who had come through such struggles, the internal dramas and scandals of quite a fragmented labour movement when he was developing his leadership, to suddenly become a world leader on policies to advance the circumstances of women was really outstanding. But it did him no good at the ballot box whatsoever.

We returned from the high of being in Mexico City and being world leaders in women’s policy to the news of the Bass by-election in June 1975, A shocking defeat for Labor. It seemed as if all of those policy initiatives would be thrown out with the Whitlam Government. But they weren’t.

The important thing about policy is leadership. I’m not saying they were all soundly implemented. But they were soundly indentified policies to achieve social progress in Australia. They started with Whitlam and most have never been dismantled. My own personal test of what is good policy is that it is policy that meets a very serious, well-defined need. Good policy survives over the decades. As Gough Whitlam’s policies for women did.