Page 3528 - Week 11 - Thursday, 23 October 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
and have gone on to careers they never thought possible, thanks to the reform of school funding and removal of university fees; women who, for the first time, had a Prime Minister vigorously defending them as equals, who spoke up for them on reproductive rights and issues like access to contraception; Indigenous Australians, who, for the first time, had a Prime Minister determined to end racial discrimination, deliver them equal rights and govern for them as equals in their own country.
Who can forget that significant time in 1975, immortalised in the Paul Kelly song From Little Things Big Things Grow, when he and Vincent Lingiari stood together, when they met and showed all of us there could be another way to live together in this great country. This week we have seen the grief of the Gurindji people as they remember the great white man who came and stood with them.
The list of reforms was incredibly long. In the 47-page “It’s Time” speech of 1972, some 200 promises were made, and most of them were kept. But for all the fury of the time, little of the Whitlam program seems radical today. And here lies, I believe, the true Whitlam legacy. Gough brought what had often been considered dangerous ideas into the Australian mainstream and welded them onto our value system. In 1969 he said to the national Labor conference:
When government makes opportunities for any of the citizens, it makes them for all the citizens. We are all diminished as citizens when any of us are poor. Poverty is a national waste as well as an individual waste. We are all diminished when any of us are denied proper education. The nation is the poorer—a poorer economy, a poorer civilisation.
Today in politics we argue over elements of these ideas but few disagree with those core principles. They are entrenched now in the Australian identity, in our concept and understanding of fairness, and their presence there is assured even now that we have lost that great champion.
The true challenge now, for those of us privileged to reach elected office, is to honour the legacy of positive change for which Gough Whitlam will always be remembered. His life has taught Australia not to fear reforming governments and social democratic principles. On the contrary, these are some of the great qualities which set Australia apart from other nations.
This is one reason Gough’s death is being felt so heavily in the Labor Party, as he was a giant of the movement. As with anything else, he was always willing to shake things up to achieve the changes he wanted, but the party would come to owe him for it. He changed Labor from what he described as “Australia’s largest pressure group” into an election-winning force and a transforming national government.
He attracted a young and revived membership, from which has been drawn much of the party’s senior leadership today. And whilst his own government was short-lived, the experience of the Whitlam government would greatly inform the success of great reforms made by Labor prime ministers since.
His visionary diplomacy with the People’s Republic of China is another aspect of this program, and has been high on my mind, having been in China just last week. Gough
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video