Gough Whitlam: His Time Updated Edition

Index

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‘WE’RE IN’

‘The early days of the Whitlam Government would rival the 100 days of President Roosevelt in its scope and initiatives. … There will be a flow of legislative and administrative activity unparalleled in the history of national government in Australia’.

—Lance Barnard

ROOM 7 of the Cabramatta Sunnybrook Motel was crowded, hot and noisy, bristling with expectation. Four television sets carried the same live image of the national tally room in Canberra, while seven white telephones brought insistent updates from Labor Party scrutineers.² Gough Whitlam was at the centre of it all, hunched forward, shirt-sleeves up, watching the televisions intently. Not long after the counting began, he turned to his long-time speechwriter Graham Freudenberg and quietly said, ‘I think we’re in’. All around him, his advisers and staffers, those who had been with him for years on this remarkable journey from chaotic opposition to party revival, through the internecine battles and the electoral disasters to the brink of government, were in unrestrained celebration. At 10.30 p.m. Whitlam emerged from Room 7 with wife Margaret by his side, greeted the press throng outside, poured the (Australian) champagne and joined them. The moment they had been waiting for came soon after 11 p.m. as they watched the Liberal Prime Minister, Billy McMahon, the man Whitlam had once mercilessly but aptly described as ‘Tiberius with a telephone’,³ concede defeat in a ‘landslide’ result for Labor. With Margaret, his advisers, office staff and campaign workers around him, Whitlam left the Sunnybrook Motel and walked back up the hill to Albert Street, past the hundreds of supporters along the street chanting ‘Gough, Gough, Gough’, to join the party members, neighbours and jubilant family members at the packed election night barbecue in their Cabramatta backyard.

A remarkable scene greeted him as he entered the modest Albert Street house, surging with people streaming in to celebrate, to watch the tally on the television sets scattered around the garden, to see Gough Whitlam. Hundreds of chanting, cheering party-goers rushed towards him and in between the crush of ecstatic supporters, the eager journalists, the jostling camera crews engaged in a fist-fight over prime position and the sheer mayhem of victory, Margaret kissed him: ‘Darling, we’ve made it’. At 11.30 p.m., a ‘tired but delighted’ Gough Whitlam climbed a three-metre-high scaffold temporarily erected in the backyard and, perched above the willing crowd, sweat pouring from the heat of the camera lights above, gave his first televised public address as Prime Minister–elect: ‘It is a magnificent victory. The Government will have a mandate from the people to carry out all its programmes … Tomorrow is the first Sunday in Advent—the advent of the first Labor Government in 23 years’.⁴

Whitlam had led the Australian Labor Party into government for the first time in twenty-three years, but more than that, he had led it out of Opposition and into government from an election for the first time in forty-three years—an achievement not matched since Jim Scullin took Labor to victory in 1929 over the sitting Bruce–Page government. Whitlam’s victory was more marked, more closely identified with the ideas and determination of Whitlam himself, for his having done so in less than six years as leader. The victory was all the more remarkable for his bringing the Labor Party back, in that short time, from the despair of its massive defeat at the 1966 election. Whitlam would now become Australia’s twenty-first prime minister and its eighth Labor prime minister, leading a party that had formed national government for only seventeen of the seventy-one years since Federation. Although the final margin of victory was not yet clear, with several close seats still being counted, the Labor Party had secured a 2.6 per cent swing in its primary vote and would take government with a majority of at least nine seats.⁵ The swing was not uniform, being strongest in Tasmania where Labor won all five seats, and against the party in Western Australia. But two aspects of it gave Whitlam the greatest personal satisfaction: the party’s support from the new outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney; and, secondly, the substantial swing to Labor in Victoria. The branch that had for years been his greatest obstacle to victory was now his vindication.

Whitlam recalled McMahon’s concession speech as ‘a brief, brave television appearance of memorable charm and grace’, the first nationally televised concession by an Australian prime minister.⁶ But later that night he was less generous about his predecessor and the departing dishevelled Coalition government: ‘They would have been beaten under anybody. It’s just too silly for them to blame—or us to thank—Mr McMahon’.⁷ It was after 2 a.m. before he finally went to bed, only to be woken an hour later with a cable of congratulations from the President of the United States, telephoned through as ‘urgent’. ‘I think it could have waited’, he remarked wearily, with a hint of the coming end to this supine bilateral relationship.⁸

After twenty-three years out of office and with a policy exposition as detailed and as carefully articulated as the decades of Opposition had allowed, it was inconceivable to Whitlam that he would do anything other than immediately take office, form government and govern. To Whitlam the election result confirmed his mandate as ‘not merely a permit to preside but as a command to perform’⁹ and to perform at once. His planning behind the scenes had been meticulous: before polling even began he had arranged for an RAAF flight to take him to Canberra the next day, a flight that ‘in all probability would have been my first … with its 34 Squadron as Prime Minister-designate or my last as Leader of the Opposition’ had he not achieved victory.¹⁰ As Prime Minister–elect he had immediately announced that the government’s ‘top priority’ would be to repeal conscription laws ‘within hours of taking office’,¹¹ and his adviser, Dr Peter Wilenski, had already prepared a paper on the transition to government that was to prove crucial in restructuring the public service. Even as he fell into bed, exhausted but exhilarated, he was planning to set in train the immediate formation of a new Labor government.

As he and Margaret woke that Sunday morning to a house overflowing with the debris of celebration and sleeping interlopers spilling from the couches to the floor of his lounge room, he took a brief telephone call from Billy McMahon to discuss the handover of government. The Whitlams’ neighbours made them breakfast and Margaret struggled to imagine what they would now do: ‘I hadn’t given any thought to the aftermath’.¹² After thirty years with Gough, Margaret was surprised but scarcely unprepared for his peremptory announcement that they would be leaving Cabramatta for the airport that afternoon. ‘I was just sort of scooped up’, Margaret recalled of their sudden departure, and they collected others along the way—the bleary-eyed staffers Graham Freudenberg and Carol Summerhayes, the bedraggled advisers Jim Spigelman and Richard Hall. Whitlam had waited until 3 p.m. only in grudging acknowledgement of his colleagues’ monumental hangovers.¹³

As Whitlam arrived at Mascot airport barely fifteen hours after claiming victory on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, he gave the first public indication of his intention to form government in two days’ time, although the means through which he could do this were by no means clear. It was a particularly Labor problem that now beset him—a new government, with a clear majority of seats in the House of Representatives but with a ministry that could not yet be determined. As several seats were still too close to call and counting would not be finalised for several days, the Labor caucus therefore could not meet to elect the full ministry and the new government could not be formed—or so it appeared. The assembled media, more interested in the fact of the Labor Party’s election than the mechanism of the transfer of power, had not yet recognised this political intricacy nor grasped its implication and although Whitlam politely suggested a question that might lead them to it—‘Perhaps you might be asking me shortly when I would expect the Caucus to meet to elect the ministry?’—none did. Asked instead whether the job ‘frightened him at all’, Whitlam replied, ‘Not in the least’.¹⁴

In the Australian Financial Review the next morning, Max Walsh confidently predicted not only the immediate formation of a Whitlam government but that it would see out its full term: ‘We can expect the first Whitlam Parliament to run its full three-year course’.¹⁵ Only the Sydney Morning Herald, clinging to the forlorn hope of at least prolonging the McMahon government that it alone had steadfastly supported during the election campaign, quoted an unnamed ‘Constitutional expert’ that, according to ‘normal procedure’, the McMahon ministry should continue in office until the new Labor ministry was ready to be sworn in.¹⁶ Of this, there was no chance.

Indeed it was the outgoing Prime Minister McMahon who ensured that the transfer of power would be smooth and immediate. During his early morning telephone call, McMahon had told Whitlam that he would tender his resignation to the Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck the following Tuesday, 5 December, and that he would be advising Hasluck to call upon Whitlam to form the next government. What McMahon did not reveal to Whitlam was his intention to advise the Governor-General that he should remain as caretaker prime minister until the first Labor ministry could be called—then nearly two weeks away, while results were being finalised.¹⁷ McMahon suggested to Whitlam that he contact the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Sir John Bunting and, somewhat superfluously, that Whitlam consult the precedents for transfers of government after an election, particularly for incoming Labor governments.¹⁸ Of these there were remarkably few: since Federation governments had changed at election on only seven occasions and of these only the election of the Robert Menzies-led coalition in 1949 was within Whitlam’s own political experience. McMahon was hopeful that this previous changeover would set the parameters for Whitlam’s transfer into office, for Ben Chifley had remained as prime minister in caretaker mode until the victorious Menzies took office nine days later. McMahon now put this prospect of his own continuation as caretaker prime minister to Sir Paul Hasluck; but the Governor-General agreed only to take advice and consider it.¹⁹

The story of previous incoming Labor governments would have given Whitlam cause for concern, particularly that of Jim Scullin. Whitlam had witnessed with such great excitement the beginning of the end of Stanley Melbourne Bruce’s loose coalition in 1929 when, as a young schoolboy in Canberra doing his homework in the lounge of the Wellington Hotel, members of the Labor caucus spilled into the bar in absolute elation at the government’s loss of a crucial vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. Whitlam was spellbound by the alchemy of belief and emotion that is politics, and knew that this was where he wanted to be. Yet despite Scullin’s overwhelming victory over the Bruce–Page government, he had waited ten days before taking office while counting was finalised. During this time Bruce remained as prime minister, despite having lost not only government but his own seat.

Whitlam now faced an even longer wait for the distribution of preferences to be completed and the Labor caucus to meet to elect a ministry, and, with Christmas and New Year, there would be no real government action for several weeks. Leaving the hapless McMahon as prime minister, maintaining the policy positions of the defeated Liberal–Country Party government or, even worse in Whitlam’s eyes, continuing their abstentions in critical votes due before the United Nations and losing the great momentum for change that the election result represented was something that Whitlam simply never considered. ‘The members and supporters of the ALP were entitled, after 23 years of disappointment and defeat, to see prompt and vigorous action from their new Government. Undue delay in forming a government would have been a kind of breach of faith.’²⁰

The usually soporific Sunday afternoon in Canberra was transformed as Whitlam and his party arrived by VIP jet to cheering crowds gathered outside Canberra’s Fairbairn RAAF base and lining the streets nearby—‘the biggest welcome for a political figure since Nixon’, one journalist reported rather incongruously.²¹ For Freudenberg and the slightly seedy staffers, ‘it was really only then that it hit home that we had won’.²² It was a scene reminiscent of the mythic homecoming of a conquering hero and elicited a rare moment of unchecked emotion for Whitlam as he hugged the local member for the ACT, Kep Enderby, his wife Dorothy and Joe Forace, the Maltese high commissioner and Labor supporter, as they welcomed him at the airport.²³ He had intended to drive directly to Parliament House to meet senior public servants, but on seeing the enthusiastic crowd Whitlam stopped the Commonwealth car and walked across the tarmac to speak to them. He thanked them for supporting Enderby in the face of ‘some of the most contemptible and irrelevant arguments of the campaign’ over his position on abortion law reform, and left for Parliament House to the sounds of cheers and car horns.²⁴

Assembled at Parliament House to meet their incoming Prime Minister were the permanent secretaries of three key Commonwealth departments: Sir Keith Waller from the Department of Foreign Affairs; Clarrie Harders from Attorney-General’s; Sir John Bunting from Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Chairman of the Public Service Board, Alan Cooley. A notable omission was Sir Frederick Wheeler, head of Treasury. Whitlam had requested the meeting to discuss what was coyly termed ‘certain administrative arrangements’. He made it clear that he wanted to find a way to assume government and to avert the McMahon government remaining in office even for a single day longer. Despite the fears that had been expressed for the future of senior public servants under a Labor government, it was an entirely constructive meeting. In this Whitlam had been greatly assisted by Wilenski’s meticulous paper ‘Transition to Government’²⁵ and he was better prepared for the immediate assumption of office than his unsuspecting senior public servants. Neither Sir John Bunting nor Clarrie Harders had any great desire for the inertia of the outgoing McMahon government to continue and they cleared the way for Whitlam’s negotiations with the Governor-General to form an interim ministry.²⁶

It was during this initial meeting with his senior departmental secretaries that Whitlam made the first of several critical unilateral decisions that day in asking Bunting, Harders and Waller to remain in their positions. He had discussed it neither with his party nor his staff, many of whom were privately appalled. John Mant, Tom Uren’s adviser and later to be Whitlam’s private secretary was particularly keen that all four heads be replaced: ‘it had been so long in the Menzies mould … we thought it was really important that you get the person running the department that you want running the department’.²⁷ By the time Whitlam had met with the legendary tough survivor Sir Frederick Wheeler the next day, it was a clean sweep for the old guard as Wheeler also stayed. Whitlam’s decision to retain these permanent secretaries was grounded in his belief in the proper relationships between government and the executive and based on his experience of his father Fred Whitlam’s propriety and studious political impartiality in public service: ‘I didn’t distrust public servants, because my father had been one and was a particularly impartial one’.²⁸ But it was a politically unworldly view, an idealisation from another time that Whitlam never doubted, but should have.

Letters of congratulations flowed in. A former neighbour in Canberra reminded him of his mother Mattie’s prediction that Gough would one day end up in the Lodge: ‘I know countless mothers may say this of their sons, but none with so much confidence as did Mattie’. David Nott, the son of the first member for the ACT, Dr Lewis Nott, urged him ‘to acquire a reasonable degree of cardio-vascular fitness’, and he was congratulated by a woman who recalled him taking her ‘modest case’ through legal aid as a young barrister in 1949, ‘and defended me, an 18 year old wife and mother, in a very (to me) painful eviction matter … I have always felt you were very sympathetic, kind, and in no way felt that helping little people was below your dignity’. An RAAF colleague who had been stationed with him in Canberra told him ‘Australia is now in very safe hands’.²⁹

The renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith sent a letter in ‘admiration and enthusiasm’, and Whitlam found particular pleasure in a letter from the ageing Sir Arthur Coles, the former independent member for Henty, whose vote in 1941 had made John Curtin prime minister.³⁰ Coles told Whitlam that he could now administer ‘the shot in the arm that Australia needs. I am sure you are the man to do it’. The inimical former prime minister John Gorton, always an iconoclast, simply wrote: ‘Well—you asked for it and now you’ve got it—and good luck’.³¹

But of all the expression of congratulations, the one Whitlam felt most keenly came from a man whose own political trajectory and undoubted party political skills he admired immensely, the longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies.

You have been emphatically called to an office of great power and great responsibility. Nobody knows better than I do what demands will be made upon your mental vigour and physical health. I hope that you will be able to maintain both and send you my personal congratulations. My wife who well knows the nervous strain of being a Prime Minister’s wife joins with me in sending our good wishes to Mrs Whitlam.

Whitlam replied, clearly moved as he was not afraid to indicate and as he still recalled many years later:

I was profoundly moved by your magnanimous message on my election to this great office. No Australian is more conscious than I how much the lustre, honour and authority of that office owe to the manner in which you held it with such distinction for so long. No Australian understands better than you the private feelings of one now facing the change from the years of leading the Opposition to the burdens and rewards of leading our nation. You would, I think, be surprised to know how much I feel indebted to your example, despite the great differences in our philosophies. In particular, your remarkable achievement in rebuilding your own party and bringing it so triumphantly to power within six years has been an abiding inspiration to me.³²

By Monday morning Whitlam’s private office was already bursting with activity. The leader’s office, still in Whitlam’s former suite as Leader of the Opposition, teemed with public servants, advisers, diplomats and politicians all waiting to speak to the Prime Minister–elect. As discussions continued over the transfer of power, Whitlam formally announced the make-up of his private office. It was a mix of old and new, rewarding loyalty and welcoming new ideas, but the newcomers had two things in common: they were young and they were highly educated. Dr Peter Wilenski, a 33-year-old career public servant with four university degrees, was to shift from Treasury to become Whitlam’s Principal Private Secretary. Jim Spigelman, ‘Maroubra’s answer to Henry Kissinger’, was to remain as Whitlam’s senior adviser, a position he had held during the election campaign.³³ A young Sydney lawyer, 26-year-old Spigelman was, like Wilenski, a former president of Sydney University’s Student Representative Council and academically much decorated with a double honours degree in government and economics and the university medal for law. Wilenski and Spigelman occupied offices along the same corridor of Parliament House—Whitlam called it ‘my Polish corridor’. Wilenski was brilliant, dour, short and, like his leader, intellectually snobbish. He was a long time anti-apartheid campaigner. Spigelman was the author of a well-known work on privacy, and had also been part of the ‘Freedom Rides’ through outback New South Wales in 1965 with a busload of students and activists led by Charles Perkins. The group exposed the overt racial discrimination against Indigenous people from Walgett to Bourke, with the pro bono legal assistance of a young Sydney barrister, Michael Kirby.³⁴ David White, from the Sydney Morning Herald, would continue as media adviser and Evan Williams, former editor of the Sunday Australian, as press secretary.

Whitlam’s most significant and long-standing staffer, Graham Freudenberg, was to be appointed the Prime Minister’s ‘special adviser’, although it was widely expected that he would continue to act as Whitlam’s principal speechwriter.³⁵ Freudenberg, who had been with Whitlam every step of the long journey into office, was used to being in the engine-room of change, a big fish in a small pond where ‘nothing happened without being involved’.³⁶ Now he found himself just one among many—from his name and his position he too deserved a room along the ‘Polish corridor’, but instead he was relocated in the drab public service amenities of West Block. With space at a premium he offered to take the office outside Parliament House, and regretted it immediately: ‘I’d cut myself off from access’. Freudenberg was isolated, from the earliest days of government, and he could never regain the personal and political proximity that he had shared with Whitlam for decades. When he came to Whitlam’s office, it was no longer as a critical member of Whitlam’s loyal entourage, but as a visitor. For the first time in their intense, intuitive relationship, Freudenberg felt excluded and, more significantly, Whitlam found himself apart from the core band of advisers who had served him so well in opposition.

Finally, Whitlam confirmed the appointment that he had announced to such acclaim during the election campaign of Dr HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs, ‘the greatest public servant of my time’,³⁷ as his personal adviser on economic policy and the arts. There could not have been a clearer link to the postwar reconstruction ideals of the Curtin and Chifley Labor governments, and of Whitlam’s determination to complete its unfinished agenda, than this. Coombs, as the former director-general of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction and a former Governor of the Commonwealth Bank and the Reserve Bank of Australia, was the closest connection remaining to the period that Whitlam considered the genesis of his own political aspirations and credited as the policy exemplar of ‘the greatest prime minister’, John Curtin. But the appointment also highlighted what others had noted and that Whitlam himself now acknowledged: that economics was one of the few fields in which he professed neither expertise nor interest.³⁸ Whitlam’s great passion and scholarship lay in foreign affairs, the policy domain he would fill with distinction, and with Coombs he was hoping to fill the singular void in his own capacity through someone who shared his background and his intellectual framework of Keynesian liberalism. But the days of Treasury as a bastion of unbridled Keynesianism were long past and it was not only Coombs’ appointment but also the nature of his economic philosophy that saw the first crack that would later rend relations between Treasury and the Whitlam government.³⁹

It was a difficult if not misplaced expectation from the outset as Coombs recognised:

One of Whitlam’s motives had been to get benefit from my long experience in economic matters, both in substance and from the advice I would offer, and from the greater credibility which he hoped my earlier role as the Governor of the Bank would lend his policies. However, I had been out of close contact with economic events for almost five years and it was clearly not going to be possible for me to re-establish conditions in which the data necessary for judgments about the current and prospective state of the economy would flow across my desk.⁴⁰

Coombs was also concerned that there could be some anxieties over his role from within the senior members of the public service, in particular that his activities (and those of the other personal advisers) might conflict with the responsibilities of ministers’ official advisers—their departmental officers. Whitlam addressed this concern at a press conference the next day, indicating that his objective in appointing such personal advisers, who would work within his office rather than within the public service, was ‘to de-politicise the public service so that persons who are responsible for carrying out political decisions will be known to be appointed by a minister at his whim and disposable at his whim. The public service, of course, will be less political if there are such personal advisers’.⁴¹ The rise of the personal adviser was both a political necessity for a reforming government and a signal to the permanent heads that, after twenty-three years of advising conservative governments, they would need equally to accommodate the policy requirements of a new Labor government.

As Whitlam’s office literally overflowed with activity, spilling into the adjoining corridor as their first working day progressed, speculation mounted as to just how he would now take office. The difficulty was in finding a mechanism for forming a Labor government with its cumbersome and, to Whitlam, troublesome requirement that membership of the ministry be determined by the entire Labor caucus, for there could be no meeting of the caucus while the outcome in some seats remained in doubt. Scullin’s experience had told Whitlam that any hesitation could cost weeks in government and Whitlam was never going to ‘do a Scullin’, biding precious time in Opposition while his defeated opponents remained in office. Whitlam had for some time contemplated having to deal with precisely this situation. Although problems arising from this delay in final counting seemed to take many by surprise, it came as no surprise to Whitlam who had anticipated it and prepared for it. In the weeks leading up to the election he had received detailed constitutional advice on aspects of the transfer of power and the assumption of government.⁴² But it was only now, in consultation with the heads of department and his senior Labor colleagues, that he decided what form that government would take.

Whitlam wrote his own script, stepping audaciously straight into government in a manner and a form that at once became history. The first Whitlam ministry would be a government of just two, of Gough Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard. In this historic mix of constitutional creativity and executive flexibility, symbolic in its form and yet entirely practical in its function, the duumvirate was a marker of so much to come.

In the end Whitlam had the Duke of Wellington to thank for the possibility of a limited ministry, and Scullin to thank for its inevitability. The duumvirate was, as Whitlam was fond of remarking, ‘the smallest ministry with jurisdiction over Australia since the Duke of Wellington formed a ministry with two other Ministers 128 years previously’.⁴³ But there the comparison ceased, for the Wellington government was widely considered to have been ‘one of the more torpid Tory ministries’⁴⁴ achieving little of substance, a charge that could not be levelled against any of the Whitlam ministries, particularly not the duumvirate.

Although initial discussions within the Labor Party leadership group had centred on all four senior members—Whitlam and Barnard, with Lionel Murphy and Don Willesee as the two Labor Senate leaders—as together constituting the interim ministry, Whitlam became increasingly concerned by the constitutional implications of its size. Clarrie Harders had emphasised that a proposed ministry of four would enable a meeting of the Executive Council (for which the quorum was three) to take place in the absence of the Governor-General, since three ministers would then be able to meet as the Executive Council in quorum. In normal circumstances this would not be an issue—indeed it was not uncommon for Executive Council meetings to take place with a minister attending as deputy president in place of the Governor-General—but under this unprecedented circumstance of limited executive government, it could raise concerns for the Governor-General. Sir John Bunting pointed out that limiting the interim government to just two ministers would also ensure the Governor-General’s presence at every meeting of the Executive Council for the quorum to be met, and Whitlam agreed. Bunting reported to the Governor-General that Whitlam had made it clear that ‘he definitely would prefer that only two [ministers] be sworn’.⁴⁵

Harders assured Hasluck in writing that the interim ministry ‘would be legally and constitutionally valid and that, under it, the acts of the new interim Government will be valid’, before the Governor-General agreed to the swearing-in of Whitlam and Barnard across the full breadth of all twenty-seven portfolios the next day.⁴⁶

It was the first real tension within the leadership group as Whitlam told senators Lionel Murphy and Don Willesee over dinner on the evening of Monday 4 December that they were not to be included in the interim ministry. Whitlam was also determined that his first ministry, the only one he would ever choose free of the demands of caucus, should consist only of members of the House of Representatives. Had he been pressed to include a third member, it would have been neither Senator Murphy nor Senator Willesee but the most senior Labor parliamentarian, the member for Melbourne Ports Frank Crean. Whitlam’s insistence was absolute and he advised Hasluck ‘that if anything were to happen to him and Mr Barnard during the period of the two-man Ministry (e.g. a fatal air crash) the member for whom I should send for advice would be Mr Frank Crean’.⁴⁸

Murphy and Willesee might have taken ironic cheer had they known just how close Whitlam and Barnard also came to being left out of any interim ministry, and the duumvirate to being consigned to history as a great idea that never eventuated. In a series of frantic telephone calls between the Governor-General and Sir John Bunting, Bunting indicated that he had ‘overlooked’ the fact that since the final counts for the seats of Werriwa and Bass had not yet been declared (although both were safe Labor seats), neither Whitlam nor Barnard were technically even members of parliament at the present time. In an indication of the extent to which the very possibility of this interim government was being driven not by political demands but by decisions of the executive, Bunting reassured Hasluck of the advice of Clarrie Harders, that section 64 of the Constitution, which allows someone who is not then a member of parliament to be a member of the Executive Council for up to three months, would cover this situation.⁴⁹ And so the duumvirate was finally enabled, more by a remarkable expression of bureaucratic determination than political creativity. An exhausted Bunting later confided to a friend, ‘It is problem enough having one Prime Minister. On Tuesday … I had two—one going and one coming’.⁵⁰

Murphy in particular was personally aggrieved by his exclusion, considering it a deliberate and unnecessary omission and another example of Whitlam’s presidential style of leadership that had irritated the Labor caucus for so long. For just as Whitlam could not abide the notion that his long-fought-for program might be implemented in the name of the existing McMahon government as caretaker, so Murphy could scarcely abide the thought that it would be Whitlam and his duumvirate who might now take credit for the introduction of some of the landmark legal reforms for which he had worked equally tirelessly.

That there was more to this undoubted slight against Murphy than mere executive good manners can be seen in Whitlam’s later churlish suggestion that Murphy was annoyed by his omission from the duumvirate only because it meant ‘he wasn’t the next reforming Attorney-General after Evatt, I was’. Whitlam certainly made a pointed reference to himself as being ‘for the time being … Attorney-General’ during his first press conference as Prime Minister.⁵¹ The make-up of the interim ministry was more than just a slight against Murphy and Willesee, or indeed any other member of the caucus who had for decades worked towards this moment. With the duumvirate Whitlam would achieve what for a Labor prime minister was simply the unthinkable—the formation of a Labor ministry elected not by the Labor caucus but by the direct personal determination of the party leader and, secondly, the formation of a Labor ministry made up entirely of members of the House of Representatives to the exclusion of any senators. This rupture in the party’s organisational control was the symbolism of the duumvirate that gave Whitlam the greatest cheer—not its much vaunted symbolism of size and action —but in its reflection of his victory over the faceless men and of the supremacy of the Lower House, the people’s house, in the formation of government. The duumvirate gave expression to both.

When McMahon announced his intention to call on the Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, on Tuesday 5 December, and hand in his commission as Prime Minister, he still fully anticipated remaining in office as caretaker prime minister at least until Thursday, if not until the Labor caucus met in ten days’ time.⁵² Such was the Coalition’s unpreparedness for Whitlam’s immediate assumption of office that McMahon was left to inform his startled former Deputy Prime Minister, the leader of the Country Party, Doug Anthony, of Whitlam’s immediate ascendancy in an impromptu meeting by the side of the road near the Hotel Canberra, where Anthony had been ‘flagged down’ by McMahon heading for Yarralumla.⁵³ Whitlam arrived for his own meeting with Hasluck soon after and accepted the Governor-General’s invitation to form government. Negotiations became extended for some time as Whitlam put to the Governor-General his proposal for the formation of an interim ministry of two, its structure and powers and the means for it then to become the full ministry. Whitlam rejected outright any suggestion from Hasluck that the incoming government’s policies could equally be implemented by the outgoing McMahon government in caretaker mode—these historic changes in Australia’s domestic and international stances would never be taken under the names of McMahon and his conservative ministers. That those who had opposed those same policies at every turn might now take credit for them was unthinkable: ‘it would be more effective to have these decisions made by an interim government which sympathised with them rather than by an interim government which had opposed them’, Whitlam explained later that day.⁵⁴

Together these two very different yet mutually respectful men negotiated the form of Whitlam’s historic first government. Observing Whitlam closely during these days of crucial talks, Hasluck found the extent to which Whitlam had foreseen every possible contingency quite remarkable.

It became apparent that some weeks before polling day he had worked out in his own mind the expedient of having an interim government of two Ministers instead of asking the McMahon Government to continue as a caretaker government and that he had planned the sequence of immediate action to be taken.⁵⁵

As Whitlam left Yarralumla having accepted the Governor-General’s invitation to form a government, he was still to be formally commissioned as Australia’s twenty-first Prime Minister, but already the signs of change were everywhere. The black Bentley long favoured by prime ministers was gone, replaced by the Ford Galaxie Whitlam had been using as Leader of the Opposition and soon to be replaced by a white Mercedes.⁵⁶ Gone too was the Australian flag flying from the bonnet, as would be the prime ministerial sobriquet ‘the Right Honourable’, for Whitlam had been offered and had rejected the traditional prime ministerial honour, bestowed by the Queen on the recommendation of the British Prime Minister, of membership of the Privy Council. Describing it as a ‘meaningless and anachronistic hangover from Victorian times’, Whitlam said that no Australian prime minister should be ‘beholden’ to his British counterpart.⁵⁷ And, for the first time in two years, the Lodge would once again become the Prime Minister’s family residence as Whitlam announced that he and Margaret would live there permanently and not just, as McMahon had done, when parliament was sitting.⁵⁸

When the Whitlams moved into the Lodge the next week, it was immediately as a family home. They took the bedrooms the Gortons had used, replacing the twin beds with a double bed from the McMahon and Holt suite and their first guests were Lance Barnard and Frank Crean for lunch the next day. Margaret did some Christmas shopping, waiting for their daughter Catherine to arrive for the weekend.⁵⁹ ‘I’m loving it!’ she told her readers in her new weekly column in the women’s magazine Woman’s Day. ‘Tonight the P.M. (how great) and I had a walk after dinner; it was cool, leafy and lovely after the heat of the day.’⁶⁰ Margaret had been approached to write the column soon after the election; its conversational, informal style mirrored Eleanor Roosevelt’s daily newspaper column of the same title.⁶¹ Within months Margaret had brought a less formal, more open, atmosphere to the Lodge. She quietly arranged for the butler, employed for the first time by McMahon, to be moved on to Yarralumla and tried, even with the most high-powered gatherings, to keep them as informal as possible: ‘they leavened their entertaining with dinners for a cross-section of people from all walks of life, hoping to encourage Australians to see the Lodge as belonging to the people’.⁶²

At a press conference that followed Whitlam’s talks with the Governor-General, Whitlam made the central purpose of the formation of a duumvirate quite clear. Its purpose could be put in a single word—action—and its guiding force would be the mandate. The duumvirate existed to begin the process of implementing the program and in doing so its priorities were Whitlam’s own:

There are certain things which I believe must be put in hand by the incoming government … One example is action on abolishing conscription. Another is the reference to the Tariff Board covering colour television. A third is an application to the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to reopen the Equal Pay Case so that the new government can support the claim. There are several other matters, including votes in the United Nations General Assembly. Each of these is urgent.⁶³

At 3.30 p.m. on 5 December 1972, Whitlam returned to Yarralumla with Lance Barnard and was sworn in by Sir Paul Hasluck as Prime Minister and as Minister for Foreign Affairs, External Territories, Treasurer, Attorney-General, Customs and Excise, Trade and Industry, Education and Science, Shipping and Transport, Civil Aviation, Housing, Works and Environment, Aborigines and the Arts. Barnard, as Deputy Prime Minister, took charge of fourteen ministries: defence, navy, army, air, supply, postmaster-general, labour and national service, immigration, social services, repatriation, health, primary industry, national development and the interior.

This first Whitlam ministry was to be an interim ministry in three respects: it would exist only until the full ministry had been elected—‘I have given His Excellency an assurance on this point’; it could take action only on matters not requiring the passage of legislation; and finally, in deference to the mandate, it would take action only on matters clearly set out in the party’s 1972 policy speech. In this way the duumvirate was simply beginning the process central to the entire Whitlam government, to give substance to the ‘three great aims’ of the program: ‘to promote equality; to involve the people of Australia in the decision-making processes of our land; and to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people’.⁶⁴

In particular, Whitlam highlighted the urgent need to reopen the equal pay case then before the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Bunting had noted Whitlam’s obvious commitment to equal pay during their meeting the previous day,⁶⁵ and Whitlam was determined to overturn the McMahon government’s earlier intervention in the case—where it had argued against the ACTU’s claim for equal pay—and for the new Labor government to register its support for equal pay for women.⁶⁶ Sydney barrister Mary Gaudron was briefed to present the new government’s submission arguing for equal pay for work of equal value to the commission.⁶⁷ The Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) was the driving force in this campaign and had been a dominant voice in support of Labor Party policies during the election campaign, drawing on the outcome of its highly influential survey of politicians and making the 1972 election ‘the first in which the average woman [was] really interested’.⁶⁸ Unlike many of his Coalition colleagues who simply ignored the WEL survey, McMahon was proud that he had completed his—by passing it to his secretary to fill out.⁶⁹

Whitlam also declared that the government would move to effect the immediate recognition of communist China, ending ‘the charade of Taipei’.⁷⁰ He referred again to the urgency of matters currently before the UN General Assembly due to be voted on within days that required a change of vote to reflect the arrival of a new government and new policies: ‘to abstain would be to pass up the opportunity to demonstrate at the highest international level that there was indeed a new Government in Australia, with new policies and new attitudes’.⁷¹ On 12 December, the new government broke ranks with Portugal, France, the United States and the United Kingdom when, for the first time, Australia voted in favour of resolutions on the right of peoples to self-determination and the granting of independence to colonial nations.⁷² Whitlam later wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations asserting the new Australian position and affirming the government’s strong support for the United Nations in its efforts ‘to bring an end to the illegal minority regime in Rhodesia [Zimbabwe] and accordingly will strongly enforce sanctions imposed on it’.⁷³

Under the McMahon government, Australia had abstained in committee deliberations on increased sanctions against Southern Rhodesia and had voted against another resolution; Whitlam announced that Australia would now vote in support of both resolutions as they came before the General Assembly and would also support a proposed zone of peace in the Indian Ocean.⁷⁴ He had in fact already approached the Australian delegation in New York to effect this change. Gordon Bilney, a member of the Australian delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York, recalls the excitement and relief that the previous ‘fence-sitting’ on crucial votes on postcolonial arrangements, apartheid and other race-related matters had come to such an immediate end:

It was as heady an experience as I can remember to have been a member of that delegation in the two or three weeks which followed. Clear and definite instructions came, promptly, to support those votes giving real effect to Australia’s new non-racial stance … only in New York, where representatives of so many countries were gathered and where so much had so quickly been done, could one so readily see the international impact of a government bent on real change in Australia’s external stance.⁷⁵

Finally, after confirming that he would adhere to his promise of more open government by agreeing to hold a regular press conference every Tuesday when in Canberra, Whitlam concluded with a general statement on foreign affairs in which he saw so much more to do but that required further discussion with caucus colleagues:

The change of government does provide a new opportunity for us to reassess a whole range of Australian foreign policies and attitudes. In the weeks ahead I shall, in consultation with my Ministerial colleagues and my policy advisers, be reassessing these policies with the general intention of developing more constructive, flexible and progressive approaches to a number of foreign policy issues … the general direction of my thinking is towards a more independent Australian stance in international affairs, an Australia which will be less militarily oriented and not open to suggestions of racism; an Australia which will enjoy a growing standing as a distinctive, tolerant, co-operative and well regarded nation not only in the Asian and Pacific regions, but in the world at large.⁷⁶

Even as Whitlam and Barnard left Yarralumla, the first decision of the first Whitlam ministry had already been taken. Although the future Attorney-General, Senator Lionel Murphy, was notably absent from Whitlam’s first press conference as Prime Minister, the historic decision carried his name:

Immediately upon the return of the Labor Government, Senator Lionel Murphy, QC, set out to arrange for the release of seven young men serving eighteen-month gaol sentences under the National Service Act.

Last night, I signed letters to the Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, recommending remission of the sentences … This morning the Governor-General exercised the prerogative of mercy to release the men on my recommendation. Arrangements have been made with prison authorities in the States for the immediate release of the seven men … I firmly believe that this historic decision marks the end of peace-time conscription in Australia for all time.⁷⁷

It was, Murphy said, ‘an act of overdue justice’.⁷⁸ All pending prosecutions of more than 300 draft resisters would now be dropped and the ‘lottery of death’ that conscription had become would immediately be abolished. Bob Scates, imprisoned in Pentridge jail since April, first heard the news of his release from his cell when a prison officer came in and told him to have a shave.⁷⁹

This first decision of the first ministry of the Whitlam government was symbolic in so many ways—in its immediacy, in its drama and in its essential justice. And it was like a starter’s gun. For the next fourteen days, The Australian ran a daily banner ‘What the Government Did Today’ and even the Sydney Morning Herald, resigned to the reality of a Labor government, gave its own daily record ‘Diary of a Government’—such was the pace and the expectation of daily action. The extent to which things could be done by executive fiat surprised them all and the duumvirate took on a performative aspect as every future minister put forward suggestions that invariably, and to their astonishment, were immediately acted on: ‘it was only a matter of making a suggestion and it would be done’.⁸⁰ The fourteen days of the duumvirate began with the end of conscription and the release of imprisoned draft resisters and continued over its first four days with moves to recognise China, to support sanctions against Rhodesia and a zone of peace in the Indian Ocean at the United Nations, with directions to the government-owned domestic airline Trans-Australia Airlines (TAA) to lower its fares and the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to reopen the equal pay case; announcements covered the removal of the excise on wine, moves to end the British honours list and to introduce an Australian honours system, the placing of the contraceptive pill on the National Health Scheme, the restoration of the exiled journalist Wilfred Burchett’s passport and a direction to the New South Wales Liberal Premier Robert Askin to close down the Rhodesian Information Centre. The duumvirate finished day four with the announcement of the exclusion of all racially selected sporting teams from Australia.

Pausing for breath after these four days of the first Whitlam Government, The Age editorialised its approval of both the pace of change and its content, praising Whitlam’s ‘constitutional propriety’: ‘The political weather is invigorating, with the Prime Minister (Mr Whitlam) moving remarkably quickly on a range of issues … he has moved through the correct channels, with an eye on constitutional propriety … he has moved within the boundaries of his mandate’.⁸¹ Margaret Whitlam had also contributed to this sense of rampant change. During a press conference held at the request of women journalists on the same day the duumvirate took power, Margaret surprised many, including her husband, when she announced that she no longer thought marriage was as important as she had thirty years previously. At the same time, she placed her support firmly behind the reopened equal pay case and the legalisation of abortion, and suggested that there ought to be a more relaxed attitude toward the smoking of marijuana. She had heard from her medical friends, Margaret said that marijuana ‘does you no more harm than drinking, not even to excess, nor smoking regular cigarettes’.⁸² Asked how she would redecorate the Lodge she replied, ‘with people’.⁸³

Aware of the sensitivities within caucus over their assumption of the entire ministry, Whitlam and Barnard went to great lengths to identify the relevant future Labor ministers in each of the historic duumvirate decisions that were to follow. In a ‘cautious, confident pace’,⁸⁴ Whitlam repeatedly deferred in this way to his relevant caucus colleagues in specific policy elaborations, insisting that some areas would be best left to his colleagues to detail and that others must await the caucus vote on the full allocation of ministries.

The duumvirate continued at pace with announcements of a contribution of $300 000 for international birth control programs and new grants totalling $4 million for the arts. The seventh day saw announcements of the immediate withdrawal of all remaining troops from Vietnam and the establishment of an interim Schools Commission to propose funding for disadvantaged schools. On the eighth day Whitlam committed to the landmark signing of two key United Nations covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that had remained unsigned by Australia since their unanimous adoption by the General Assembly in December 1966.⁸⁵ On day nine came the establishment of special schools for Aboriginal Australians, and an end to the export of wheat to Rhodesia; the ban on advertising of contraceptives in the ACT came to an end on day ten. On the eleventh day, the government made the first moves towards granting Aboriginal land rights, with plans to establish a royal commission on Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory, and announced the appointment of Elizabeth Evatt as a presidential member of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission; the next day, the government announced a purchasing policy that would preference Australian-owned firms over foreign-owned companies when awarding government tenders. The actions of the duumvirate ended on 19 December with announcements of new nursing home benefits and, finally, of the biggest shake-up in the organisation of the public service since Federation.⁸⁶

As the duumvirate drew to a close, the music promoters Michael Chugg and Michael Gudinski staged a free open-air concert at the Richmond Reserve Oval in Melbourne to ‘Celebrate the Defeat of the Draft’ with headline acts Carson, Coloured Balls and Matt Taylor. Within days, the last of Australian troops left Vietnam. Some 60 000 Australian personnel had served there; 521 had been killed and 3129 injured.⁸⁷

In their iconoclastic mix of the dramatic and the mundane, of the nation-changing and the quotidian, the forty decisions of the duumvirate reflected the possible and at the same time voiced Whitlam’s own political agenda. The constraints of the mandate and the bounds of executive government set the institutional parameters but the priorities were Whitlam’s own: equality for women and Indigenous Australians, advances in federal funding for education, the immediate adoption of non-racially based policies on every level, the belated signing of UN covenants and the removal of petty obstacles to the free availability of family planning and contraceptives. They reflected also a strategic party imperative; Whitlam was well aware of the antipathy of some among his right factional colleagues to these social policies and setting them in train through a decision of the duumvirate pre-empted future caucus division and even repudiation.

The duumvirate had presided over one of the most productive periods of government—of executive government free of the constraints of either party or parliament—marked by frenetic yet controlled activity. It left no-one in any doubt that change had come. Of its forty decisions, only four had required Executive Council authorisation, the issue that had caused such consternation in the numerical make-up of the limited ministry. These four Executive Council decisions included the duumvirate’s first and its most symbolic—the immediate discharge of national servicemen—and its last, the extensive restructuring of the public service in preparation for the election of the full ministry.⁸⁸

Aware that his department had just overseen the workings of a history-making government, Sir John Bunting sent a memo to his staff urging the full compilation of the duumvirate’s actions, not only for the department’s own records but also ‘for future historians’:

that the First Whitlam Ministry was formed on 5 December; that it consisted of two Ministers only … that it was designed to be an interim Ministry; that it held no Cabinet meetings but that it nevertheless made and promulgated certain decisions. It would be useful to get from the press or the Prime Minister’s office the daily statement of decisions or actions.⁸⁹

But even the flat, colourless language of the career bureaucrat could not hide either the magnitude of the ‘certain decisions’ of this first Whitlam ministry or the import of its actions.

While much has been made of the duumvirate as executive government according to the mandate, as ‘the apotheosis of the mandate’ in Freudenberg’s description,⁹⁰ it was also the apotheosis of the Whitlam–Barnard partnership. In this, the role of Lance Barnard, while frequently overlooked, was critical. Despite his ready dismissal by some as Whitlam’s ‘yes man’, as ‘unimaginative’ and, at best, ‘reliable’,⁹¹ Barnard was indispensable to Whitlam, an essential sounding board, a cautionary influence and a link into the caucus that Whitlam had too little time for: ‘He had insight and sagacity, rare gifts in a politician. He possessed wisdom and simple humility, qualities which, along with his practicality, made Barnard invaluable to Whitlam’.⁹²

Barnard’s insight extended even to himself and he not only freely acknowledged his limitations, he recognised in them a strength that was also the key to his successful partnership with Whitlam. ‘If I’d begun with regarding myself as an outstanding personality I don’t think I’d have achieved what I have’, he later noted.⁹³ Above all, Barnard was unstintingly supportive of Whitlam, neither unquestioning nor uncritical—but, once a decision had been made, unflinchingly loyal. Their relationship was also one of Whitlam’s few emotional attachments in politics. ‘There was no man to whom I owed so much. He was my first and always my firmest Caucus supporter. No Labor Leader ever had a better deputy or a better friend’.⁹⁴ There was never any doubt that Lance Barnard was the man who would join Gough Whitlam in that first Whitlam ministry.

In the aftermath of victory Whitlam occupied a rare place within the Labor Party—secure, supported and begrudgingly respected. Electoral victory, unthinkable barely six years previously, had given Whitlam an undisputed ascendancy within the party, acknowledged even by those who had fought his rise so fiercely and despite the lingering divisions now papered over in the rapture of success. With the notable exception of the Sydney Morning Herald, the media had largely welcomed the coming of a new government and new ideas, that it was time for a change had been embraced and with it a willingness to accept Whitlam as a Labor prime minister. The electorate, including those who had voted against him, appeared ‘to be reconciled swiftly to his rule’.⁹⁵ American Time magazine similarly reported that ‘generally, the nation … seemed to be going along with Gough’.⁹⁶ But with the elation at achieving government and the excitement of the energy of the duumvirate, the perturbations of those who had known only government themselves were all too easy to miss.

The euphoria of those early days masked the reality of stark institutional and political resistance that would confront the government from its earliest days. This resistance lay in the complex interlocking relationship between the Senate, the Opposition and the conservative state governments. The first of these was in the anachronistic arithmetic and democratic artifice of the Australian Senate. Whitlam had secured victory for the Labor Party in an election for the House of Representatives alone while the Senate, not having been called to an election by McMahon, remained as it had been since 1970—the date of the most recent half-Senate election—and half of its members had been elected in 1967, the previous half-Senate election. As Whitlam came to office, the Labor Party held only twenty-six Senate seats out of a total of sixty; the Liberal and Country parties together held twenty-six, with five Democratic Labor Party senators and three independents guaranteeing easy control of the Senate by the Opposition.⁹⁷ A critical institutional obstruction for the new government lay in this outmoded Senate it inherited—half its members having been elected five years earlier—out of step with the changed electoral mood and unrepresentative of the recently expressed wishes of the Australian electorate. Second, the attitude of the conservative Coalition, now in the unfamiliar terrain of Opposition, was equally belligerent in its rejection of the changed political landscape, its unwillingness to accept the outcome of the election and its rejection both of its own loss of government and the legitimacy of the new government. Despite McMahon’s ready transfer of power to Whitlam and his graciousness in defeat, many of his colleagues had no compunction in revealing instead a preparedness to use this Senate disjuncture to force the government to another election that, believing the Labor government to be only a temporary aberration, they fully expected to win.

The final piece in this jigsaw of institutional and political impediment came from the nature of federation itself, from those states—New South Wales, Queensland and to a lesser extent Victoria—then led by conservative governments, jealously guarding their domains and sharing the Opposition’s view both of the Whitlam government and of the potential for the Senate to play a destabilising role. Within days of the election, the New South Wales Premier, Sir Robert Askin, and the Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, had clashed with Whitlam over his early forays into intricacies of the federal–state divide. The duumvirate’s decisions to close down the Rhodesia Information Centre in Sydney and to ban the entry of any racially selected sporting teams into Australia had infuriated both premiers. Describing the new government as ‘a bunch of novices and political troglodytes’ and ‘big heads’, Askin angrily told reporters that New South Wales was ‘a sovereign state and nobody gives us orders’.⁹⁸

They may have seemed like the words of a premier in need of basic constitutional tuition, but they heralded an unprecedented and unanticipated role for the states in the national political process that Whitlam would ignore at his peril. The Rhodesia Information Centre was closed two days later under threat from the Attorney-General’s Department of invoking the federal government’s constitutional foreign affairs power, and the scene for the bitter federal–state relations that were to dog the new government was set. It was exacerbated with Whitlam’s rapid move to abolish the New Year and Queen’s Birthday lists of British honours, long seen by the states as an avenue for their personal preferment, and with the pending New Year’s Honours announcement well in train, several of them had been not only earmarked but already promised as conservative political sinecures.⁹⁹ Whitlam dismissed speculation that people had already been recommended for honours, referring to an apparently disappointed leader of the Democratic Labor Party, Vince Gair: ‘it would have been the most remarkable Knighthood since Sir Toby Belch’.¹⁰⁰ Askin seemed particularly alarmed by the government’s plans for state land commissions, which would buy land for subdivision in competition with private developers, ensuring the supply of reasonably priced land for housing. Of all the states, only South Australia took up the proposal for a land commission, enjoying the cheapest land prices in Australia for some years after. A more spirited but less spiteful clash between Whitlam and the Queensland Premier, Bjelke-Petersen, regarding sovereignty of the Torres Strait Islands and a reconsideration of the contentious border between Queensland and Papua New Guinea appeared light-hearted when the Premier suggested that Whitlam might like to spend Christmas with him—touring the Torres Strait.¹⁰¹

When the final election result was announced on 15 December, the government had secured 49.59 per cent of the formal primary votes, 52.7% of the two party preferred vote, and held 67 of the 125 seats in the House of Representatives, giving it a margin of nine seats.¹⁰²

On 18 December, the federal Labor caucus assembled at 9.30 a.m. in the Government Party Room in Parliament House to elect the second ministry and the first full ministry of the Whitlam government.