The House passed several motions of confidence in the Whitlam Government and instructed the Speaker, Gordon Scholes, to relay this to Kerr. The Governor-General refused to see the Speaker until after he had dissolved the Parliament. Scholes subsequently wrote to the Queen and received a letter in which the Queen indicated there was no place for her involvement in an Australian political conflict. The dismissal remains a controversial subject in Australian history.
It is central to any understanding of the current debate about becoming a republic. The constitutional and political effects of the Dismissal remain of importance to anyone interested in Australian politics. The main players in the Dismissal have experienced different fates.
He lived in England for some years and died on 7 April Even in death, he remained controversial, the parliamentary condolences provoking a spirited intervention from Paul Keating. Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister for seven and a quarter years, before losing an early election in Ostracised by many in the Liberal Party during the s for failing to capitalise on his majorities in both houses of parliament, he was rehabilitated in the public mind during the s. Collective amnesia was applied to the fact that such things had happened before.
Chief justices had advised governors-general and governors on almost every constitutional controversy since Federation. Labor had blocked supply in state upper houses before, resulting in the governor, after consulting the chief justice, requiring the resignation of the conservative premier — even when he held a majority in the lower house.
It had long been the case that if supply could not be obtained, the only options were resignation, an election, or dismissal sometimes disguised as a forced resignation. In , the Speaker asked the Queen to intervene and restore the Whitlam government.
Many people were influenced by the events of to support a republic, due to their objection to an unelected representative of the Queen dismissing an elected government that had majority support in the lower house. All the major participants in the dismissal were damaged by it. Whitlam was never able to form a government again. Kerr was publicly vilified and led much of his later life outside Australia. One salutary consequence has been that both governments and oppositions have been more wary about taking matters to extremes, preferring to let conflicts be resolved in the ordinary course by elections.
This is the record of a party which expects Australians to trust it to build up our defences and build up honest and friendly relations with our allies and our neighbour!
Australian arms remain undimmed; but Australian policy has never suffered so total and unrelieved a defeat. The Liberals sabotaged two attempts in to end the war. They denounced all attempts to end the war in and they have remained sullen, silent and resentful about all subsequent American initiatives to end the war.
They know but they will not admit that the American Administration has now only one aim—to end this war as decently and quickly as may be. They know that President Nixon must have moved substantially to end the war by the Congressional elections if November next year or else face the decimation of his party in these elections. President Nixon has clearly expressed his determination that there will be no American combat troops in Vietnam by Christmas Under Labor, there will be no Australian troops in Vietnam after June The greatest assistance, the only assistance Australia can now render the United States in its tragic dilemma in Vietnam is to stop impeding the liquidation of this war which the American people and the American nation so desperately seek.
For years the Liberals have talked about our involvement in Vietnam as a means of earning the gratitude of the American people. The only way that Australia can now earn or deserve the gratitude of the American people is to assist them in the liquidation of the war they have come to hate. I intend, therefore, to go to Washington as your Prime Minister at Christmas to make it clear beyond all doubt that Australia will give every assistance to the United States in her efforts to extricate herself honourably and quickly from a disastrous and deluded war.
Meanwhile my Deputy, as Minister for Defence, will go to Saigon to begin the arrangements for the take-over of our area of responsibility in Phuoc Tuy Province by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to ensure that arrangements are made for the maximum safeguards, not only for our own troops but for the people of that area whose only real security and hope lies in a quick political settlement of the war we have so misguidedly prolonged. I will also tell the President that we will sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which President Kennedy and President Johnson worked so hard to create and which President Nixon sees as so crucial to his hopes for a detente with the Soviet Union.
We will use our influence, an influence which must rest on example, with the remaining countries in our region to adhere to this, the most important and fundamental initiative for world peace the United States has ever taken and the most important request the United States has ever made to us as an ally.
Beyond Vietnam, we find the various Liberal definitions of our role crude and unacceptable. We see Australia as a good neighbour. Indonesia, our nearest and most populous neighbour, is especially important to us. We look forward to resumption of open, honest and constructive relations with Malaysia and Singapore after the avoidable misunderstandings of the past year.
Our aim in relation to those three countries may be summed up in a single sentence: it is to assist them to build up their economies, their societies and their defences so that they can stand on their own feet.
We will use the years ahead—ten years of peace, according to Mr Gorton—to create effective patterns of regional co-operation in defence and development. The garrisoning of token military forces so restricted physically and politically as to render their presence useless and meaningless is incompatible with this wider aim. We will best help Singapore and Malaysia to stand on their own feet by applying our strengths where they are deficient and helping them overcome that deficiency.
Our defence strengths are our skills, our familiarity with expensive and sophisticated equipment, the quality of our air force, and the calibre of our training techniques. In practical terms, we will enter into arrangements with New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia for the standardisation of defence equipment, for the shared production of such equipment as is within our collective technological capacity and for the purchase of those major items which we cannot ourselves produce by joint approach to supplier nations.
We will concert our tactical planning with the planning of our neighbours to create a capacity for rapid and flexible regional response in an emergency. Developing and sustaining our own defence strengths depends on the professionalism and mobility of the army.
Expanding that professionalism and testing that mobility require constant training with and within the countries of the region. And in such training exercises, conducted not only abroad by our Army but here in Australia in exercises with our neighbours, we would foster not only the strength of our own Army but the strength and ability of theirs.
It would be the military part of true regional co-operation. It would be a basis for a build-up, of our own defence industries. We should have exercises in neighbouring countries and their forces should exercise in ours. We should pool our procurement arrangements, our defence production in the region and our joint procurement from overseas.
Similarly with the air force, Australia properly assumes a training role with the Malaysian air force. But in fact half our Mirage squadrons are marooned at Butterworth because there are no airfields in Australia suitable for them. This is making a virtue of necessity with a vengeance. We will provide operational, technical and domestic Mirage facilities at Darwin, as at Williamtown. If a system of regional defence training and co-operation is to work properly, it requires that Australia should have highly professional army.
Uniike the Liberals, we will treat the armed forces as an essential occupation which a man pursues for relatively few years in his working life. We will not run the army on the cheap by continuing conscription.
We will not base our ability for rapid expansion of the army in an emergency by compelling those who have already been conscripted on the basis of one-in-ten to have to serve again—this is the logic of Liberal defence policies—a double penalty for conscripts.
The Regular Army is the basis of strength in peace and rapid expansion in wartime. Yet the re-engagement rate of regulars has declined every year for the past 5 years. The defence forces must be shown to be as necessary, and their conditions as attractive, as any other pursuit in the community. The only way to attract and retain regular soldiers in peace-time is to guarantee that they and their dependants will be, and after discharge will remain, on a par with civilians of the same age.
They should be given war service homes, repatriation health benefits, civilian rehabilitation training, scholarships for their children and generous retirement and resettlement allowances.
These are the methods by which other countries have acquired adequate regular armed forces. They are methods which have never been given a trial by the Liberals. Stronger defence forces mean better balanced defence forces. The F fiasco has not only unbalanced our defence budget, but the R. Even if this aircraft proves technically sound, it will remain a totally unsuitable aircraft for our requirements. These 24 planes will be orphans in the Pacific. Unless Liberal mismanagement has created a solution in which cancellation would be absolutely ruinous, we would negotiate for a substitute aircraft more suitable to our means and needs.
A Labor Government will place orders for those boats. Since , the Labor Party has insisted on the need for naval and maritime facilities on the Indian Ocean. We will co-operate with the Western Australian Government in providing general maritime facilities at Cockburn Sound. The purpose of defence is to preserve the nation and its freedom. It is one of the sure signs of the Liberal decline that there has been an erosion of personal freedom, particularly in the last 2 years.
In the Liberal decline into illiberalism, they have become not only a force for division but a force for repression. There has been invasion of privacy, suppression of freedom of speech in public streets, attempts to deprive citizens of the right of trial by jury, denial of freedom of conscience against military service. We will introduce laws providing for protection of human rights and civil liberties especially to prevent discrimination on the grounds of colour, race, sex, religion or political opinion.
We will press for world-wide and regional implementation of International Labour Organisation and human rights conventions. The right to privacy will be protected by special laws and vigilant administration to prevent interference with postal, telephone and other communications. The censorship laws will be altered to conform with the general principles that adults be entitled to read, hear and view what they wish in private or public and that persons and those in their care be protected from exposure to unsolicited material offensive to them.
For the purposes of implementing these principles a judicial tribunal will be established to hold public hearings and give published reasons. The Commonwealth laws for censorship of imported books, records and films will be altered to conform with these principles. Public servants, who are now one in four of the work-force, will be given the maximum possible freedom to exercise the civil and political rights enjoyed by other citizens.
Restrictions on the freedom of expression of public servants and former public servants will be reduced to the minimum necessary for the conduct of affairs of state. Trial by jury will be preserved and extended as far as can be in all serious civil and criminal cases. We shall adopt from the United States a Federal system of legal aid to ensure equal access to the courts and benefit of the laws. We will pass the bill which Senator Murphy persuaded the Senate to pass in June last year for the abolition of the death penalty.
We will pass the two bills I introduced last November. The other will give the vote at In enhancing and expanding liberties in Australia, in giving youth a say in Australian national life, we wish also to enhance freedom for dissent, and to avoid the need or excuse for violence.
In this campaign in particular there is no justification for violence. On the contrary, I believe it is about the one thing that can prevent a Labor victory. Whoever might be the ostensible object of violent demonstrations In this campaign, they would be in fact directed, and deliberately directed, against the Labor Party.
Indeed, one of the extraordinary aspects of this election is that people know far more about the proposals of the party which seeks to become the government than those of the parties currently forming the government. I have had the honour of presenting those proposals.
In all these matters, the people of Australia are offered a very clear choice. At this time in our history, we cannot afford the Liberals, with their backward-looking ideas and their backward, brawling partners in the Country Party, for another 3 years. We cannot afford another 3 years of the embarrassments and eccentricities and crudities, this appalling blend of amateurishness and arrogance—the perfect recipe for disaster—of the past 2 years.
The Liberals and their allies are in a state of nervous prostration and political exhaustion. Let them settle their squabbles, let them sort themselves out in opposition. Give them a chance to recover.
The programme I have outlined is a beginning. I cannot promise to reconstruct in a year, or even a single Parliament, 20 years of Liberal failure.
The future is with Australia; the future is with Labor. Read the speeches. John Gorton. Gough Whitlam, National Library of Australia. Elections contested , , , , and When I pledge our party to a plan for reducing the cost of land and housing by: directly participating in purchasing, developing, sub-dividing and selling land helping to reduce the interest burden on home-owners, particularly young couples introducing a uniform building code ending the rationing of War Service Homes making a fresh housing agreement with the States to make special provision for urban renewal and housing for the aged — I want it understood that these are essential elements of our overall approach for building more pleasant, more civilised, better planned communities—true communities, in our cities and centres.
Now they have no proposals, except in the words of the retiring Minister for Defence: the war is inevitably moving towards an unpredictable end at an indefinite date. Why should you any longer trust a party whose leader responds to the momentous events of our time in our region by telling you: We are not the sheriff but we are part of the posse.
Emergency grants The Schools Commission will be expected to make its first report in time for its recommendations to be included in our Budget. Teachers The nucleus and basis of any education system is its teachers. Universities University education is the roof of the house of education. Pre-schools If the university is the roof, then pre-schools are the foundation of education in a modern community.
Health If it is important that Australia should be an edudated, it is no less important that Australia should be a healthy nation.
Drugs To reduce the cost of drugs, we will encourage Australian drug companies to expand their activities. Dental health Australian standards of dental health are among the worst in the world. Housing and urban development In education and health we are missing out on opportunities freely available to citizens in comparable countries.
Housing In no case is Commonwealth responsibility clearer than in housing. Land Land prices are artificially high in Australia because we are one of the few urban countries in which public participation in land development is almost unknown. Construction costs Housing costs are artificially high in Australia because of the diversity and multiplicity of building regulations and codes. Urban planning Housing costs are not simply dependent on the cost of land and houses themselves.
Commonwealth Grants Commission The Commonwealth Grants Commission was set up to advise the Commonwealth on the fairest way to help the smaller States to provide services equal to those of the larger States. Regional development We will sponsor the growth of regional development authorities. New financial agreement Development authorities will provide a focal point for rational and regional co-operation, planning and development.
Welfare We must now begin to prepare for the sort of country Australia is to be for the rest of this century and beyond. Means test The means test has long been discarded in most countries who claim to be modern and prosperous. National superannuation Abolition of the means test is only a partial answer to removing the injustices, inconsistencies and inadequacies of the present system. Pensions In the interval before these proposals begin to operate, there remains the pressing problem of the inadequacy of the general pension rate.
Australian assistance plan Those dependent on pensions, particularly pensioners living alone and widows with children, comprise a large proportion of the one million Australians who live in real poverty or marginal poverty.
Aborigines Although the Australian public showed by its overwhelming vote in the referendum of May that it wanted the Commonwealth to accept responsibility for bringing Aborigines to a position of equality with other Australians, the Government has declined to do so. Penal clauses Australian employees can no longer tolerate a situation in which industrial action is made a criminal offence and where all employees from airline pilots to tram drivers, bank officers and building laborers, are liable to criminal proceedings and penalties if their association or their union even contemplates direct action.
Development Maintaining and increasing our standards will depend, not only on the quality of our workforce, but on the proper use of our natural resources. In his policy speech in , Sir Robert Menzies described the Chowilla project as: a splendid example of the Liberal approach. Revolving fund To place financing of new development projects on a continuing basis and to take projects out of the realm of electioneering, we will establish a Development Revolving Fund.
Northern development We will establish a Ministry for Northern Development. It is a remarkable thing liberals always stress the rights of property—except when the property belongs to the whole people Overseas investment In September last year, after nearly 19 years in Parliament, Mr Gorton made his first visit to any place in Northern Australia outside Townsville and Darwin.
Shipbuilding A Labor Government would introduce those forms of assistance to companies building and operating ships which already apply throughout North America and Western Europe. Whitlam visisted China in , promising to establish diplomatic relations if elected to government. The attacks on Whitlam by the coalition were severely blunted during the visit by the announcement that US President Richard Nixon was working towards his own rapprochement with China.
In a whirlwind of activity, Whitlam was appointed Prime Minister on December 5, governing in tandem with his deputy, Lance Barnard, until December Background To The Whitlam Era. Gough Whitlam: The Party, The Policies and The People In this climate of political decay, Whitlam had embarked on a three-year program to reform his Party, develop new Policies, and persuade the People that it was time for a change of government.
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