ADDRESS BY GOUGH WHITLAM TO THENATIONAL PRESS CLUB LUNCH

CANBERRANovember 1985

Madame e President, fellow ladies and gentlemen,

Each time I come here the Chairperson has made the pointthat I am keeping my place as the record holder for addresses tothe National Press Club. This institution - the lunches, not theClub - and the principal part of my public career are roughlyco-eval.

One has to acknowledge, however, that the largest singlefactor contributing to this record has been the frequency ofelections in Australia. Half my previous appearances have beenin connection with election campaigns. And while I always.regarded the traditional end-of-campaign National Press Clubluncheon as the second-most important campaign event after thepolicy speech itself, I find it doubly pleasing - one mightalmost say liberating - to be addressing you in a differentcapacity -in that rarity for Australia - a non-election yea

Indeed, this book itself might have beenfinishedsooner, had there not been so many elections.

So I thank the Club for the important forum it hasprovided in the past, but especially for this presentopportunity, for the second time since 1979, to launch a book ofmine.

One can certainly say on this occasion, with Disraeli tQueen Victoria: "We authors, Ma'am, must stick together".

The Canberra Press Gallery, past and present, teemswith published authors.

output in recent years, for both quality andquantity, has been unexcelled in any of the democracies.I spawned a gr eat many of the books myself.

Indeed, for a number of years up to 1983, the Whitlambook industry was our largest growth industry after taxavoidance.

should be said that the political journalists whohave written t se books have fulfilled an important historicalrole.

Letters and diaries no longer form the most significantpart of the contemporary record. The telephone has been thegreat thief of the raw material of political history - at leastbefore illegal tapping and taping became something of a national

pastime. The contemporary account, in book-form, by the workingjournalist does much to retrieve and retain a great deal thatwould otherwise be lost forever. These books have had thefurther virtue of being published while the events they deal withare still fresh and the persons involved still alive and, for themost part, still active, with both the ability and incentive torefute or even litigate.

And in a real and important sense the books of thisgenre which have dealt with my own period provided the groundworkfor this book of mine. My book of course is a book of a verydifferent kind and as my patient and forbearing publishers wouldacknowledge, has been anything but a "quickie". By groundworkmean that those earlier books, emanating largely from yourgallery, cleared the ground and helped me to define the scope andpurpose of my book.

At the very least, they helped me define what my accountof the Whitlam Government would not be. There is no new "inside"story of the Whitlam Government. Indeed, there never really wasan inside story. What you saw was what you got. Secrecy was notour forte.

However, I never thought it necessary to give yetanother account of the events of 1975 leading up to our dismissalten years ago today. There again I do not believe there is abasically new story to be told. There may be new interpretationsand possibly revelations of hidden motives. But nothing hasemerged in the intervening ten years to alter fundamentally theaccount I gave in my book The Truth of the Matter, which I alsolaunched here, on 8 February 1979.

That incidentally happened also to be a notableanniversary - the twelfth anniversary of my election as leader ofthe parliamentary Labor Party.

The two books The Whi lam Government andThe Truth of the Matter - should be seen as complementary.

I have said in the introduction toThe Whitlam Government that I have sought in this book to redressthe balance of the accounts already written about the Government.By that I mean that these accounts by their very nature and thepurpose concentrated on the personal and political drama, andmost of all, upon the drama of my Government's destruction. Theneed now, I believe, is for a book which deals chiefly with theGovernment's policies, their development and theirimplementation. I have written this book mainly to fill thatneed. And it is in that sense that I say that this book, withits concentration on policy, attempts to redress the balance bysetting the actual record in perspective.

wished in particularparticular to dispel certain mythsmyths whichhave grown up about the Whitlam Government, again largely becauseof the concentration hi therto on its demise.

Among these myths are:

that preoccupation with the program precludedproper attention to the problems of economicmanagement;

that our second elected term after May 1974 wasso distracted by economic and political crises thatimplementation of the program was aborted;

and that the political aftermath of 1975 led tothe wholesale dismantling of the program andinvalidated it as a guide to action for futureLabor governments.

is tree that after the oil crisis of October 1973,Australia, along with all comparable economies, facedunprecedented difficulties. It is true that with all thosecomparable governments, we floundered for a while.It is true that we made certain errors and were sometimes badlyadvised. I acknowledge them. But I believe it can be shown thatthe program itself was not the cause of our economicdifficulties; but that on the contrary - its intrinsic meritsapart - its implementation made a major contribution to the mostsignificant economic achievement of those internationallydifficult times: namely that the Australian economy, almostalone in the West, was able to record significant growth in atime of world-wide decline.

As to the second myth, is certainly true thatthroughout 1975 every effort was made by our opponents in and outof Parliament, destabilise and distract our Government.

Yet it is equally true, and much more important, thatthe Government continued its work steadily and purposefully tothe very end. So did the House of Representatives, from whichalone we derived cur authority, continue its real work while theSenate went on strike. The last Notice Paper - the Notice Paperof 11 November 1975 - stands as testimony. It includes Bills andNotices covering the whole range of the program, Bills forschools, cities, health, from aboriginal land rights to theJapan-Australia Foundation; and of course the AppropriationBills - the Hayden Budget, the blocked Budget which became, whenthe Fraser Government accepted it in toto over the 1975-76financial year for which it was designed, not only the best ofour Budgets but the best of theirs. That Notice Paper, of11 November 1975, is not the epitaph of the Whitlam Government.It stands as one of its monuments

I especially examine in the book the fate of theprogram: and its contemporary relevance. True, there was a greateffort in the next seven years to dismantle it. Yet even I wasimpressed, when one came to the task of examining the realitiesas distinct from the rhetoric of reaction, how durable so much ofit has been, and just as important, how enduring and relevant itremains to the cause of national reform in Australia.

This henḏa book which deals comprehensively withpolicies, their origins, their development and theirmplemen

The antecedents of a policy often explain itsdevelopment and implementation; and that is why it has beennecessary, in many chapters, to deal with events well outside theyears 1972 to 1975, and in many cases to go back to eventsbefore my leadership or even before my election to Parliament.Only in that sense does this book represent my memoirs. But as Ihave said, I have not gone over in any detail events andincidents which I have covered elsewhere, including the dismissalitself.

As this, however, is an occasion and a day of somehistoric significance, I suppose I should at least make a passingreference to those events. As I have said, I do not believe thatsignificant new facts will emerge to explain them. But one isalways interested to examine new interpretations orjustifications, especially when they come from those principallyinvolved.

In mycompare me withnever done so.compare myself,characteristicsay, with Job:

And

me, ill-disposed persons have often attempted toa variety of biblical character I myself haveBut if there were one with whom I would choose to

would be Job.ḏAbove all, for hisquality, his proverbial patience. But I can alsoWould that mine enemy would write a book."

e did.

The more surprising theḏe, to read in the wilds ofdistant Paris, the Bulletin head ine "Sir John Kerr Breaks hisSilence"

I should have thought that a 450-page book was notexactlyḏTrappist.

Nevertheless, t deserves attention to the extent thatin his second apologia, Sir John Kerr, while producing nothingnew, more than amply confirms the central point I have alwaysmade about the crisis of October-November 1975 and about hisconduct on 11 November 1975.

And that has always been - I argued it inThe Truth of the p atter, I reaffirm it in The Whitlam Govern ent

that the crisis of 1975 was never in any real sense aconstitutional crisis; it was always a political crisis fullycapable of resolution by political means; and that it was withindays, if not hours, of that political resolution, until Sir JohnKerr's political intervention transformed .a purely politicalcrisis into a genuine crisis and breakdown of the Constitution.

I was able to point out in the 1983 second edition ofThe Truth of the Matter that the admissions of people likeSenator Guilfoyle had confirmed the truth of this proposition asI had put it in the first edition. In The Whitlam Government Iam able to add to the strength of this confirmation by theevidence o Neville Bonner.

And of course, in his very significant article in lastWednesday's Australian, Paul Kelly is even more circumstantial.He names Senators Bonner, Missen, Jessop, Bessell and Laucke who,to quote Neville Bonner "had more or less given notice that by acertain time they would cross e floor if there was nosettlement".

And most tellingly of all Paul Kelly quotes themastermind of the operation, Senator Withers:

"For all I know my blokes might have collapsed on the12th. I don't know. You T d just hope day after daythat you'd get through untilthe adjournment "

And Kelly quotes Withers as saying that if the deadlock hadcontinued more than another week, then the Opposition Senators"would have melted away like snow in the desert".

And all of us know the basic truth. that the Oppositionin the Senate was about to crack. It can never beover-emphasised that the Budget was never rejected. It was onlystalled. The Senate never voted to refuse us Su pply. Theysimply refused to vote on it at all. One defector would havebeen sufficient to break the deadlock. Two would have beensufficient to end the nonsense for all time. We now know thatthere were at least five Senators who would have crossed beforethat week was out to pass the Budget which they refused toreject.

Therefore, the most crucial factorof all in thedismissal of my Government was the timing the day 4

-11 November.

Why 1 Nove be

In his Bulletin a idles Sir John Kerr gives fourreasons - and I quote:

6

"I acted when I did because:• the Parliament and politicians were incomplete deadlock;

. the money was beginning to run out;

. for an election to be held that year, it hadto be called very soon; andMr Whitlam made November 11 a day for decisionby coming to Government House with advice which I could not accept

Now this, I put it to you, is pretty breathtaking stuff;because each of those four reasons are purely political - thepolitical judgments of a Governor-General acting either withoutor expressly against, the advice of his elected, constitutional,advisers.

He had no right to make a judgment that the Parliamentand the politicians were in complete deadlock. And his judgmentwas wrong in any case. The political deadlock was about to bebroken by political means.

Secondly, he had no right to make a judgment that themoney was beginning to run out. I never so advised him. Henever sought such advice. And again, his political judgment wasnot only improper, it was wrong.

Thirdly, the judgment that if an election were to beheld that year it had to be called very soon, was not one forhim to make at all.

There is nothing in the Constitution which governs theelectoral machinery of Australia. The timing of an election forthe House of Representatives is the most political, in everysense of the word, decision that can ever be made. And by thestrongest of all the conventions in the Westminster system, it isa decision which lies within the narrowest of all perogatives.It is the one decision that is the ultimate perogative of thePrime Minister and the Prime Minister alone. And as I say, it isthe ultimate political decision.

In any case, the logistic difficulties of holding anelection in the Christmas-New Year period have absolutely nothingto do with the Constitution or the Governor-General. Theyinvolve only difficulties related to our traditional holidayhabits, especially those of public servants and teachers. if thecrisis had been in May rather than November, no suchconsiderations could ever have arisen. Are we to believe thatsheer convenience prevailed over the Constitution?

And the fourth point is so remarkable that I must quotein full again:

"Mr Whitlam made November a day for decision bycoming to Govern ent House with advice which I could not accept."

Let the implications of that sink in. The advice I wastaking to Government House was for a half-Senate election. I hadin fact foreshadowed this course as a possibility in Parliamentas early as 16 October - the very first day of the crisis.I cannot believe that Sir John Kerr did not avidly read Hansardthroughout that period. At no time did he raise the matter withme. Yet he now says that he had already determined to reject myadvice - before I gave it to him formally and before he had heardfrom his Prime Minister my reasons for tendering such advice.And we know that this decision to reject the Prime Minister'sadvice had been made days before. The preparation and thecontent of the letters dismissing me and installing Malcom Frasermake this abundantly clear.

But the more important point is that his decision thatthis was "advice which I could not accept"; grossly.improper andunconstitutional asḏwas - was itself a purely politicalJudgement. He made the judgment that my advice for a half-Senateelection would not help solve the crisis. He says as much in hisletter of dismissal and repeats it in his book and in theBulletin articles.

In fact of course, the half-Senate election would havebecome academic in terms of resolving the crisis in theParliament. By then the Senate would have cracked, the deadlockwould have been broken and the Budget would have been passed.But on 11 November, my advice for a half-Senate election was anmportant part of the political process of keeping up thepressure - if you like, of turning the screws on the Senate, toensure that this political crisis would be resolved by politicalmeans. It was the political judgment of a Governor-General whointervened politically to prevent - at the eleventh hour in everysense - the political resolution of this tremendous politicalcrisis.

Madam Chai ladies and gentlemen,

I don't wish to dwell further on the matter on thisdelightful occasion today - certainly not to repine or complain.I am here and I am having too much fun - where I am.

But there is a new generation of Australians coming on -there is even, as I see around me, a new generation in the pressgallery.

Those of us who were there have a duty to educate thosewho were not, to help them better understand, not only whathappened on that memorable day ten years ago, but to help them

understand why it happened, and most important, the relevance andmeaning of what happened to Australia and to our future.

And I do suggest that the starting-off point, for anytrue understanding of what happened is to grasp the central factthat a Governor-General, purporting to represent the Queen,intervened in a purely political manner, under the mask of theConstitution, to end a political dispute in favour of onepolitical party, to the gross disadvantage of the political partyand the elected Government which had an unchallenged andunchallengeable majority in the House of Representatives; andthat without that partisan political intervention on his part,the great political crisis would have been resolved by politicalmeans in favour not only of the twice democratically electedGovernment of Australia, but in favour of parliamentary democracyin Australia and indeed, in favour of the trueof the Australian Constitution itself.

Madam Chair, ladies and gentlemen,

I thank you once again for this occasion, thisopportunity, this most important forum.

This forum - now for more than twenty years - has alwaysbeen to me one of the more important vehicles to enable me tocarry out what I have always conceived to be a principal part ofmy duty and responsibility to the Australian Labor Party and tothe people of Australia, throughout my public career.

And that has been to place issues of importance andrelevance to the needs and aspirations of the people of Australiaon the agenda of my Party and the agenda of this nation.

I trust that this book which the Prime Minister haslaunched today and for which you now have so generously providedthe launching pad, will be a continuing part of that process, towhich I dedicated myself more than three decades ago.