The 1975 dismissal of Labor PM Gough Whitlam was a watershed moment in post-war Australian politics. Porco writes about the dismissal and what it means for communists in Australia today.
Almost 50 years ago, Gough Whitlam was sacked as Prime Minister of Australia. The Labor Party, which still held a majority in the House of Representatives, was removed from government. The Governor General, Sir John Kerr, using the ‘reserve powers’ of the Crown, had conspired with Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser to “dismiss” Whitlam.
Fraser was allowed to appoint a cabinet, and “governed” with a minority for over a month before an election was held. The Labor Party passed no confidence motions and protested this move as unconstitutional in the subsequent election. But the damage had been done. Labor lost 30 seats to the Opposition. Gough Whitlam held on as Labor leader until 1977 but after losing another election to Fraser, his career as ALP leader was over.
Communists can learn from the way this crisis unfolded and what the events imply about the constitutional system we are forced to struggle within. The constitutional monarchy has not been meaningfully reformed since the dismissal.
The Dismissal
In 1969 half a million workers took part in strikes across Australia, defeating repressive federal penal laws that allowed the state to prosecute striking workers and unions. Indigenous land rights were becoming central to the struggles of Aboriginal workers on the Wave Hill cattle station.
This labour militancy was the culmination of two decades of uninterrupted postwar growth. The Labor Party almost won in 1969, just missing out on a majority by 4 seats. Graham Freudenberg, Whitlam’s speechwriter, notes in his book A Certain Grandeur that:
“The odd thing about 1969 was that Whitlam was actually helped by the buoyant economy. … It was precisely because the younger middle class electors felt content and confident that Whitlam’s appeal attracted them. Whitlam raised expectations and those electors could see no reason why their expectations could not be met.”
By 1972, the labour movement was confident and ready to support a Labor Government’s social democratic program. Whitlam’s slogan was “It’s time.” Labor was ready to take the reins of the country after twenty three years of continuous Liberal/National Country Party rule. Whitlam’s campaign speeches reveal a palpable sense of optimistic fervour.
The Labor Party was elected in 1972. In the first few weeks, Whitlam and his deputy prime minister Lance Barnard pulled Australian troops out of Vietnam, released all imprisoned “draft dodgers” and recognised the People’s Republic of China.
The Whitlam government would go on to lower the voting age to 18 and begin designing a national health service — Medibank. Free higher education, the introduction of no fault divorce, the establishment of legal aid and the abolition of the death penalty were other reforms the Whitlam government successfully implemented.
Unfortunately for Labor they had been elected at the exact moment that the postwar boom was beginning to turn. The 1973 Oil Shock sent an inflationary spike through the world economy and drastically increased commodity prices. The Liberal party jumped at the chance to accuse Labor of crashing the Australian economy.
During this economic crisis, which led to three recessions in two years, the Labor government was desperate to find a way of mitigating overseas capital flight which had begun as soon as they were elected. They needed to slow unemployment and curb inflation. But some of their solutions only caused further problems, at least for their political survival.
Gough’s deputy in 1975, Jim Cairns, worked with the minister for resources and energy Rex Connor on a scheme to buy back Australia’s entire resource sector. The government knew that the loan council, which was overseen by the state premiers, would never approve of borrowing money for nationalising industry. So they had to look for loans in secret. Connor was in contact with Tirath Khemlani, a Pakistani banker who claimed he could provide a USD 4 billion loan to the government. Soon Whitlam ordered Connor to break all contact with Khemlani.
However the Liberals already had enough information to build a scandal for the media. They obtained a transcript of telex conversations between Connor and Khemlani and accused the government of corruption and incompetence.
Using this as a justification, the Liberals refused to vote on the appropriation bill. This meant the government would run out of money. The L-NCP demanded an election be called. However Whitlam would only support a half senate election, hoping it would provide him with a majority. John Kerr refused to allow the election. So the government was jammed.
Contributing to the crisis was Whitlam’s frustration with the Australian intelligence services, and the CIA stationed at Pine Gap, who monitored almost all communications sent through telephone lines. Whitlam believed they had intercepted the Khemlani telex and provided it to the Liberals. Whitlam even named Richard Stallings as a CIA agent with connections to the Opposition on November 2, 1975.
On November 11, after Remembrance day celebrations, Kerr informed Whitlam he was dismissed as Prime Minister. Andrew Theophanous describes the decision in his book Australian Democracy in Crisis:
“A logical consequence of the authoritarian interpretation of the constitution adopted by Kerr is as follows. A Governor General could, by declaring a crisis had arisen, simply dismiss the majority in parliament from government. He could then appoint any minority group in parliament to government. … they could remain as ministers until such a time as the Governor General deems it necessary to have an election.” –
Whitlam acquiesced to the decision but the Labor Party attempted to rally the public against the anti-democratic turn. Some union leadership, such as the ACTU President Bob Hawke, attempted to ease the discontent and called for strong support for Labor in the next election. There was no unified response from militant workers. Some strikes happened here and there. Some did not. Probably most people were more concerned with the ongoing effects of inflation and unemployment which were both still increasing.
Whitlam campaigned in the subsequent election on the basis that the entire dismissal was unconstitutional.
Theophanous points out the contradictions in this campaigning strategy:
“This was the fundamental logical error in Whitlam’s strategy. He accepted the ruling of the system, then condemned it as unconstitutional, then participated in the consequent forced election. Needless to say, this demonstrates his ideological confusion and his ambivalence towards the ruling class. He had played by the rules of the system, believing that his opponents would put the interests of democracy over and above their class interests.”
The Labor Party has been traumatised by this event ever since. The lesson they learnt from the 70s was that to remain in power, they could not meaningfully challenge international capital, intelligence apparatuses, and the Opposition. Yet Gough Whitlam was also a victim of his own success. He ascended just at the time that the political order he had come to take for granted, namely the postwar economic boom, was coming to an end.
In many ways a comparison can be made between him and Anthony Albanese, who while nowhere near as charismatic, does represent the epitome of a neoliberal progressive, thrust into power just as the neoliberal order reveals itself to have evaporated in the electrical fire of quantitative easing and Trumpian tech-oligarchy. The world is changing just as it was in the 70s. What comes next is hard to predict.
What is Australian Republicanism?
Gough Whitlam’s government made an admirable attempt to reform Australian society. Unfortunately they underestimated the scale of resistance they would face. Even given the circumstances of the present constitution, they only had a slim majority for the duration of their time in office, their mandate was not decisive enough.
Democracy and the Australian constitution are totally negotiable for the capitalist class. Profits and minimal government intervention in private production are not. The 1975 dismissal showed that even mild reform can be rebuffed. Truly revolutionary change will require the establishment of a new democratic republic.
The monarchy must be repudiated and cast away from the politics of this continent. A new legislative assembly that can properly represent the interests of the working class would need to be formed.
No president or cabinet would be necessary. The MPs would be instantly recallable and elected on a mandate to vote for the specific interests of their region, community or particular industry. Elections would be annual and the voting age would be lowered to 15.
This would have to be a first step towards meaningful political reform, let alone socialist revolution.
This should be obvious for socialist organisers in this country but unfortunately some still believe that the road to socialism can come out of the current parliamentary system, or alternatively some kind of direct challenge to the capitalist state as it is currently constituted.
These two strategies should not be posed in opposition to each other. Nor should they be considered sufficient for the actual task we have set ourselves as communists. This state, and all of its anti-democratic features must be smashed. Yet at the same time, a mass party that can engage in elections will be necessary to build the kind of political expertise required to establish a new republic.
The central question is how to mobilise the majority of working people in this country. We need popular support or else we will be crushed. Neither spontaneous outbursts of revolutionary fervour, nor tepid electoralism will be up to the task. Before we can build a democratic socialist republic we must support the development of working-class civil institutions in Australia. These institutions are not just social, they are political.
Communists should contribute to the redevelopment of working-class social centres, free art, music, sports and recreational events, libraries and working spaces. These will be the third precondition for a socially coherent and politically aware working class that can defend its own political majority from the forces of reactionary capitalist domination.
Our movement, if it ever develops to a mass scale, will need diverse strategies for disseminating political propaganda. Whitlam was at the mercy of the Australian corporate media, and also forced to navigate complicated parliamentary bureaucracy in such a way that he was easily portrayed as corruptible and chaotic.
If we intend to win, we will need a movement and political party that is far less naive than the Labor Party was and continues to be. The Labor Party are loyal to this colonial state. We are aiming to be revolutionaries.
Down with the monarchy!
The powers of the crown were used to remove a government, and they can be used again. The monarchy must be abolished.
Communists and socialists will need to be united and prepared for a future that is increasingly unstable. Our political success will be measured by the level of independence the working class of this region of the world can realise.
The dismissal still influences today’s electoral politics. The modern Labor and Liberal parties were moulded by this event. No one in politics has forgotten it, and the spectre of another constitutional crisis hangs over the Australian government at times. Scott Morrison used similarly anti-democratic tactics against his own party in 2018 — by refusing to recall parliament he avoided a leadership spill until he was able to hold an election.
The tragedy for Gough Whitlam in particular is he wasn’t able to adapt to a paradigm shift in the economic order. He tried to, but his attempts were thwarted by the rapidly changing nature of the times. The economy did not stabilise under Fraser and remained volatile until the mid-80s. But nevertheless, Whitlam was easily blamed for tectonic shifts in the global economic system.
We may be faced with even more difficult economic realities. This is why our program of a radically democratic workers republic is a necessary first step in the struggle for communism.
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