3.
A coup in Canberra
Initially big business had accepted the Whitlam Government. To be sure, the acceptance was guarded: Whitlam’s speech-writer and biographer Graham Freudenberg reports that the giddy pace of reform in the first weeks “aroused uneasy suspicions” in business circles, who feared that “when Whitlam spoke of change he might well be serious”. There were some signs of a “capital strike” almost from the start, with overseas investment falling and profits paid overseas rising in 1973 and 1974, while the financial press complained of a “business-government gap”.
Yet in 1973 this was not the full story. The Murdoch press continued to back Whitlam, and Cairns, who had become good mates with leading industrialists on a trade mission to China, was a big hit in his economic portfolios. When he was removed from Secondary Industry the president of the Associated Chamber of Manufacturers declared him “worthy of high praise”. The withdrawal of overseas capital was partly a response by its owners to economic deterioration in the home countries. It was in 1974, with the advent of economic crisis, that the mood gradually turned against the government. A survey found US firms becoming reluctant to invest in Australia, probably owing to inflated fears of how left wing the Whitlam government was. In rural areas a backlash developed against the government’s priority emphasis on urban development, and crystallised around hostility to removal of the superphosphate bounty. There was an anti-union march in Hobart. Peak industry bodies began to attack the government more concertedly.
Finally in 1975 the opposition to Whitlam began to take on some features of a general mobilisation of the ruling class. Conservative governments in NSW and Queensland broke with convention to appoint non-Labor replacements for retiring ALP Senators, thus strengthening the Opposition’s position in the upper house. Right wing forces were able to organise a 2000-strong “march against socialism” in Mt Gambier, ironically a town whose economy depended heavily on the public sector. A Sydney Anglican rector asked his flock to pray for Jim Cairns’ removal from the Ministry in May, and announced in August that “God has answered our prayers.” Emboldened by a crushing victory in the Bass by-election and the ALP’s near defeat in South Australia, the federal Opposition began to scent victory and began looking for any suitable opportunity to block Supply in the Senate, which would force an election.
The Opposition’s blocking of Supply (money to pay government bills) was not unprecedented. Not only had it happened at State level in the past, but Whitlam himself had asserted Labor’s right to use the power of the upper house while in opposition. Even so, the conservatives’ use of the Senate had a different air about it, reflecting a conviction that they and a traditional, conservative layer of the employing class -- the “Establishment”, so to speak -- really were born to rule. They saw Labor in office as an aberration which the voters would soon regret. Senate Opposition leader Reg Withers had said in 1973 that “because of the temporary electoral insanity of the two most populous Australian States, the Senate may well be called upon to protect the national interest by exercising its undoubted constitutional rights and powers.” Withers’ contempt for the electorate was subsequently given a sharper class content by fellow Liberal Bob Ellicott, whose 1975 election advertisements ridiculed Labor’s years in office as:
Three years of so called “working man’s politicians” groping around trying to handle something they were never capable of doing: run the country. No matter how many academics they employed to compensate for their inferiority complexes, it was you who did the worrying for them.
The Liberal Party ranks were in a lather by the final months of 1975, their heads filled with capitalist cliches. Peter Smark of the Melbourne Age described the crowd at one Fraser rally as “slavering for action against the unions”. Donald Horne, who found himself at a Liberal branch meeting on Sydney’s swanky North Shore during the election campaign, gave a memorable account of the atmosphere:
One speaker said unemployment was caused by pampered dole bludgers who needed more discipline. Another said free enterprise must be liberated by making tariffs higher. Someone else said free enterprise would prevail only with strong government leadership … The phrase “free enterprise” was passed from mouth to mouth like a magic charm. It was thought ridiculous to suggest that a world economic crisis affected Australia. Stimulate business confidence and all would be well.
More than a few industrialists shared the mood: in late 1975 a government advisory committee reported that some manufacturers saw in Labor policy “a socialist plot to destroy them”.
Poison pens
The mass media, controlled as they are by the employers, generally reflect and propagate the views of the ruling class. Often they do so fairly subtly, but there was little subtlety about their role in Whitlam’s fall. The Murdoch press turned on Labor with a vengeance, and the media generally lined up behind Fraser, from the time of the loans affair. The bias during 1975 was unmistakable. While many of the press gallery were pro-Labor, the policies of the proprietors largely determined what appeared in print or went to air. The sensational treatment of the loans affair set the tone. To read some of the papers, you would have thought Labor had sold the country to evil-hearted foreigners and that this betrayal had brought the economic crisis upon Australia; irritating facts -- for example that the government had never actually borrowed any money -- were virtually ignored, as a media worker complained:
The money was never there in the first place [but] to people out there in the community, who couldn’t grasp what had happened to the economy, here was something that was quite ludicrous that they could grasp onto and … provide rationalisation for saying, “Well yes, the reason why unemployment is up is because we have got these silly people running the economy.”
Union-bashing also helped set an anti-Labor tone. Industrial disputation over a $35 claim at Kurnell Oil Refinery in Sydney, which posed a challenge to the indexation guidelines, seems to have been the signal. The Sydney Sun-Herald seized on some run-of-the mill rhetoric from employer spokesmen and ran it under the heading, “Action On Strike Chaos Demanded”. “The cauldron is just simmering,” said the executive director of the NSW Employers’ Federation. “Unless we get some action the lid will really go off.” Amidst the strained metaphors he demanded government action, as did his fellow employer representative George Polites, while the Sun-Herald backed them up with some evocative prose of its own about “another grim bout of emergency conditions”.
In September, the ACTU Congress gave the Australian an opportunity to warn of a “Vote For Leftists At ACTU”. Readers alarmed at this new menace had to turn to the small type to learn that it consisted of four candidates who “share the leftist views of Mr R.J. Hawke, the ACTU President”.
The public sector was another handy target. In early November the Sun-Herald shifted the attack to government employees, featuring a statement from an academic who claimed that the public service was “grossly overpaid”, and that the government could sack up to 100,000 public servants with little loss in productivity.
During the election campaign of November-December, the media continued to hammer Whitlam. Sometimes the methods were pretty crude. According to one source The Age held over a penetrating piece on Liberal policies by its economics editor, Kenneth Davidson, bringing in the business editor to write a more acceptable commentary. A different journalist voiced the frustrations of many colleagues: “The campaign was just so depressing. I knew it didn’t matter what I got, I just couldn’t get it in the newspaper.”
The palm for blatant “massaging” of the news inevitably went to Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. Murdoch, who had originally held “high hopes” for Labor (“I still believe it was the right thing to have a change,” he later said) had gone very sour on Whitlam by 1975. His Sydney tabloids used some classic tricks.
The Daily Telegraph city edition of 1 December was bad enough with its claim that “Welfare Bludgers Get $350 A Week”, but the country edition went further, claiming that the total was $700. It turned out that the correct figure, $350, was for a household of four adults and six children. Then came the Daily Mirror front page of 26 November. Labor was proposing inexpensive rental accommodation for low income earners. The headline in one edition was “Gough’s Promise -- Cheap Rents”. When someone on the staff decided this front page was too favourable to the ALP, the story was revamped, the last edition carried the headline, “Gough Panics -- Cheap Rents”, and a new introduction made it appear as if Whitlam had stolen the policy from Fraser.
The egregious examples, however, were probably less important than the weight of day-after-day reinforcement. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a series of relentless anti-Labor editorials, with key excerpts reprinted on page one. Reporters allowed Fraser to get away with stone-walling at his press conferences. Thus Ranald Macdonald, chairman of the Australian Newspapers Council, passed a very restrained judgement on his industry when he later wrote that “our credibility is at an all-time low. In the months leading up to the last federal election, the Labor Party didn’t have a fair go.”
Trade unions made some efforts to combat the media onslaught. In late November the train drivers’ union placed a ban on giving news to the Daily Mirror, and the Cumberland, NSW branch of the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union (AMWU) called for a national one-day union ban on the daily papers. Such bans are usually ineffectual, but the South Coast Trades and Labor Council (TLC) had some success with a ban on the Illawarra Mercury. The Mercury had run a front page editorial entitled “Our Dying Land”, which attacked “irresponsible militant union leaders” out to “usher in an era of industrial anarchy”. By imposing bans on cooperation with the paper’s journalists, the TLC won the right to reply to the editorial, and to contribute a weekly column of 250-300 words.
News Ltd faced a certain amount of industrial unrest among its printing workers, and at one stage Perth unions attempted to ban newsprint supplies to the company, but the most important union action against the company’s press manipulation was a strike by Murdoch journalists. Even before Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam, three of them had written to their boss complaining that the Australian had “become a laughing stock”:
It is not so much the policy itself but the blind, biased, tunnel-visioned, ad hoc, logically-confused and relentless way in which so many people are now conceiving it to be carried out.
These writers were no radicals. They insisted: “We make no case for a dull paper, a bleeding hearts paper, a worker-controlled paper. Our catch-word is simply: integrity.” However, having concluded by 8 December that this quality was not their employer’s strong suit, journalists stopped work at Murdoch publications in four cities to register their protest.
Satisfying no one
Labor’s original perspective had been to reconcile and unite capital, labour and other interests. In 1975 the government found itself in direct conflict with powerful groups of companies, professionals and skilled workers; it was a sign of how unrealistic that hope was.
Concerted opposition by the insurance industry to the proposed Australian Government Insurance Corporation (AGIC) was the first of three challenges Labor had to face. The AGIC idea arose after disastrous floods in Queensland during January 1974 made large numbers of home owners acutely aware their insurance didn’t cover flood damage. Housing minister Les Johnson proposed a government corporation to fill the void, an idea the ALP made part of their 1974 election platform. This set off alarm bells at the private insurance companies. They had suffered badly in the deepening economic crisis, and did not wish to face a new competitor at a time of squeezed profits, particularly a government-backed flood cover they couldn’t match. There was also some measure of paranoia in the industry about socialisation, apparently fed by AMP’s public affairs secretary Ian O’Brien, who thought “the demise of the industry was what [Labor] were after -- and through us the whole private sector. We were the jugular vein they were trying to get.”
Despite their financial problems, the insurance companies had no difficulty raising funds for a political campaign reminiscent of the 1949 assault on Ben Chifley’s bank nationalisation plan; in April 1975, a series of TV advertisements worth $150,000 raised the spectre of nationalisation by stealth. Around the same time Senator Wheeldon, now Housing minister, told parliament a prominent industry representative had threatened to “see that everything was done to bring this government down” if it persisted with its plans. The insurance companies mobilised their staff for the campaign, giving them paid time off to attend meetings and rallies and, as a leaked memo from one company revealed, reluctant signatories to anti-AGIC petitions were warned that “should the legislation be enacted their future employment would be far from assured”.
The Opposition didn’t rush to join the campaign. While conservative front-benchers were privately sympathetic, Fraser waited until he was convinced the issue was a winner. He addressed a rally of 800 insurance staff in Canberra on 19 August, but refused to commit himself until the Bass by-election saw a sizeable swing to the Coalition. Then he felt confident enough to attack the government on every front, and the Opposition threw out the AGIC Bill. There was a quid pro quo however: the insurance companies organised support for Opposition parliamentary candidates and circulated literature suggesting a Labor victory could threaten their employees’ job security.
The ALP was also facing endless headaches from the medical profession, which fought the hospital side of Medibank with grim tenacity. In exchange for substantial funding, the State governments had agreed to insist that doctors be employed for sessions, rather than on a fee-for-service basis. But overwhelming numbers of doctors refused to cooperate. In September, only emergency surgery was being performed in the standard wards of Victorian hospitals, and it was being done for free under the old honorary system. Surgeons in both NSW and Victoria threatened a complete strike, not even exempting emergency services. This resistance helped set the scene for the Medibank confrontation of 1976.
If the capitalists and the doctors were restive, so were many workers. The huge strike wave of 1974 had abated, and wage indexation was on the way, but the new wage system’s birth was far from painless.
In essence, the trade union leadership had accepted Labor’s wage indexation package. Most union officials believed that rank and file militancy was receding as workers became worried about unemployment. The officials seized on the illusion that indexation could maintain real wages without the risks involved in industrial action. By shifting the focus of wage-fixation from industrial action at the grassroots to the chambers of the Arbitration Commission, the new system also strengthened the position of the full-time officials vis-a-vis the militant shop stewards and rank and file activists. This had a great appeal to the union bureaucracy. At the same time, indexation also appealed to sizeable numbers of rank and file workers who had been bruised by the previous year’s industrial confrontations, and who were now seeing their wage gains eaten away by inflation. They came under pressure from families and friends influenced by the “strikes-cause-inflation” argument, and many of them liked the prospect of an easier way.
Yet the indexation system was still hard to swallow whole. There were still groups of skilled workers confident of their ability to extract sizeable wage gains, including some -- such as certain metal tradesmen -- who believed they had a strong case for “catching up” with skilled workers in other areas. Even many private sector white collar workers were reluctant to accept the guidelines. Their peak union body ACSPA threatened to reject the system until just before the conclusion of the September wage hearing.
Consequently the ACTU executive recommended a “two-bob-each-way” resolution to the 1975 Congress. It accepted “the responsible role that the trade union movement must play in the present economic circumstances” and welcomed the introduction of wage indexation, but called for tax indexation in addition, something that Labor, now operating within the constraints of the Hayden budget, refused to grant. The resolution went on to add:
Wage increases above the minimum award rates negotiated or obtained by collective bargaining, or incorporated into voluntary agreements, are an essential part of trade union wages policy [and] this activity will be continued by affiliates where wage levels are not consistent with wage justice.
A left wing amendment rejecting any form of wage restraint was defeated.
Although the ACTU leadership didn’t wish to create trouble for Whitlam, it had good reasons for keeping its options open. The executive was not sure it could keep the confidence of its most militant affiliates unless it gave them some room to move. In addition, Hawke suspected the unions would be facing a conservative government long before the next Congress, which was two years away, and he did not want to tie their hands unnecessarily. He emphasised this point in addressing the delegates. The formulation which committed unions to playing a “responsible role” was intended to reassure the government and the employers that there would be no generalised challenge to the indexation guidelines. However the oil industry dispute kept this issue in the forefront.
Skilled workers in the oil industry were determined to pursue a $35 claim, which the employers insisted was outside the guidelines. The unions imposed bans at the Kurnell oil refinery in Sydney. These bans had begun to bite by 24 August, when Caltex management announced that shortages of petrol, heating oil, distillate and other petrol products were imminent. When the press began agitating for government action to end the dispute, McClelland’s office responded cautiously, making it known he was “working behind the scenes” to resolve the conflict, but insisting that “strong action by the government could only intensify the present problems”. But by September McClelland and Whitlam had changed their tune, and the Prime Minister was warning that the claims could jeopardise indexation:
All our efforts to protect the worker from inflation, to establish secure and stable industrial conditions, to create the right climate for a national anti-inflationary drive, will be destroyed -- The strong-arm boys, by thumbing their nose at indexation, are threatening the jobs of their mates.
The unionists persisted until 108 operators were stood down in October, whereupon the AWU called for national strike action. By now the government and the media had decided there was a major conspiracy afoot, with Laurie Carmichael of the Metal Workers as the villain of the piece. Jim McClelland argued that the dispute would give the Liberals an excuse to bring down the government, charging that Carmichael, whose only concern was allegedly to torpedo wage indexation, “couldn’t care less”. Carmichael’s Communist Party membership provided a convenient point of attack, although in reality the Metal Workers had always had an ALP majority in their leading bodies.
In its calmer moments the government didn’t really think the AMWU, whose strength had been eroded by recession, was a threat to the new wages system. Whitlam and McClelland’s statements represented a growing frustration with the intractability of the dispute, and a desire to show the business community that the new-style Labor regime could get tough with the unions. Had they known how soon they would be appealing to those same unions to rally round them in the battle against Fraser, they might have been more cautious. Meanwhile, the government’s rhetoric helped inflame anti-union sentiment in the community, creating a climate which was a virtual gift to the Liberals.
A ruling class conspiracy?
After the Bass by-election, Fraser had taken the offensive. Following Rex Connor’s resignation in October, he felt confident enough to block supply in the Senate and bring on a constitutional crisis. At this point, according to Paul Kelly, “Fraser spoke with senior newspaper executives from at least two of Australia’s three newspaper chains … Almost without exception the press supported Fraser’s decision to force an election …”
The powerful hostility to Labor amongst business was reinforced in October by pessimistic assessments of the economy. For example Warren Hogan, Professor of Economics at Sydney University and later a Fraser adviser, discounted government hopes of recovery in 1976, and said its budget strategy had little hope of success. A bit later in the year the experts became more optimistic, but by that time the business mood had hardened beyond redemption.
In the political sphere, meanwhile, the government met obstruction at every turn in trying to resolve the Supply crisis. When Whitlam sought a half-Senate election, conservative State governments refused to co-operate. When he sought temporary finance from the banks, they refused to extend it, which in turn gave John Kerr a pretext for dismissing the government. In October Queensland Governor Colin Hannah had made a blatantly political speech attacking Whitlam, and Sir Robert Menzies joined the fray with a statement endorsing Fraser’s actions. Thus Andrew Theophanous is right when he says Whitlam underestimated the forces ranged against him:
It was not just the parliamentary Liberal Party and their supporters. It was the whole corporate sector, and, by this stage, the totality of the media.
Whitlam’s destruction undoubtedly resulted from a general mobilisation of ruling class and conservative forces. However the left liked to put a finer point on it. For example the Communist paper Tribune, which appeared daily during the election campaign, insisted:
The Kerr putsch was not just a Liberal Party plot. It was a class conspiracy conceived and executed by the ruling class, who saw their interests threatened by even the limited encouragement given to the working class and social liberation movements by the Labor government.
This was understandable as a piece of political agitation, but as analysis it was untenable. A mobilisation of social forces is not the same as a conspiracy, nor was there monolithic unity in the anti-Labor camp. In fact during the weeks before the dismissal, ruling class sentiment was fairly volatile. Shortly before Connor’s resignation, the Sydney Morning Herald questioned Fraser’s credibility: the Opposition leader had begun hinting that “extraordinary or reprehensible” circumstances were not required to legitimise blocking supply, and the Herald suggested this new tack was itself “reprehensible”.
After Connor’s demise the Herald did change its tune and declare that “Fraser must act,” yet even then he did not have an easy run. As Whitlam sought to tough out the supply crisis, the Liberal leader had a grim battle of his own keeping control of skittish backbenchers, while the breakaway Liberal Movement condemned his actions. Sections of the media also remained nervous, with The Age arguing for a backdown by the Liberals and the Brisbane Courier-Mail pleading repeatedly for compromise. W.J. Sharp, managing director of Jennings Industries, saw the political uncertainty as bad for business confidence:
I am in favour of passing Supply … I believe the story that the business community was urging the Opposition to stop Supply was a complete myth and ought to be scotched. If a survey of business people had been done one month ago, I am convinced that the vote would have been overwhelmingly against the Liberal Party doing what it did. My own recollection, from conversations in the last few weeks with dozens of businessmen, is that only one executive was in favour.
Another unnamed business leader expressed the fear that if Fraser seized power, union unrest could turn him into “another Ted Heath.” Heath was the British Prime Minister driven from power by the 1974 miners’ strike. This reaction was understandable given the growing social polarisation. At a Hobart rally in October, Fraser was howled down by a large hostile element in the crowd despite powerful sound equipment. Fraser sought to play down the actions of a “wretched rabble” he claimed amounted to no more than 100 people, but observers suggested that up to 1500 of the crowd of 4000 were antagonistic. In Canberra a large number of trade unionists, some of whom had stopped work and travelled from Wollongong, effectively took over a Liberal rally and shouted down Fraser with chants of “We want Gough!”
Melbourne saw a large pro-Whitlam rally as “hundreds of maritime unionists marched to the City Square … waterside workers stopped work until this morning, and seamen employed on tugs stopped for 24 hours.” Some 2000 workers attended a stopwork meeting in the Kwinana industrial strip south of Perth, and in Darwin about 350 workers marched through city streets. In Sydney the port lay idle on 18 October due to a strike by 3500 wharfies, then on the 24th students brought traffic to a standstill and later fought police while marching to an ALP rally.
These events took on added weight with Bob Hawke’s impetuous suggestion that “if they are going to withhold supply, the trade unions might very well withhold supply” from the bourgeoisie. Hawke’s remarks, made at a Canberra rally, were followed by extravagant statements from other union officials. Bill Landeryou of the Storemen and Packers, for example, said it was “possible the trade union movement could so react that it could paralyse the country, as long as the servants of overseas monopolies use their power in the Senate to frustrate democracy.”
John Halfpenny of the AMWU called for a “massive mobilisation of workers”, lest Fraser “usher in an era of political terror.” A special meeting of 56 Victorian unions called for a national conference, and indicated they were “prepared to mobilise union members in demonstrations and rallies immediately.” By late October some Liberals were saying they were “stunned by the public reaction against the Opposition’s bid for an early election.”
In one sense they were unnecessarily alarmed, for having helped arouse this wave of anger, the union officials quickly set about channelling it into controlled and token actions. Hawke backtracked rapidly, saying he had no plans for strike action: “The only thing I was calling for is for people in their thousands to attend public meetings around Australia.” A special meeting of the ACTU executive settled for some “selective withholding of supply”, and The Age reported:
Most sources were confident last night that union bans would not be necessary. But they warned that if action was taken it would probably be aimed at Opposition parliamentarians.
This meant little, though Victorian meatworkers showed a sense of humour in banning livestock owned by Opposition MPs, an action directed at a certain Nareen grazier.
Thus at the official level, the union response was largely hot air. Yet the events had just as clearly demonstrated an angry mood among the rank and file. Viewed against the background of poll results showing a large majority of the electorate favoured the passing of Supply, this was a sobering prospect for business and the conservative forces, and it was hardly surprising if there was some hand-wringing in the weeks before Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. Among the media there was a growing belief that Fraser had missed the boat. The Bulletin portrayed him as the “man in a muddle” while the British Economist thought blocking Supply had “begun to look like a smart tactic which went astray.”
So while the ruling class was united in and prepared to act upon its political opposition to the Whitlam government, making Whitlam’s eventual destruction virtually certain, capitalist opinion was always divided over Fraser’s tactics, with important sectors fearing the consequences of social unrest if Whitlam were removed by a “coup”. Thus the bourgeoisie was far from monolithic, nor was it ever to be entirely united in the following seven years. The Liberal leader, who clearly fancied himself as a tough guy, was never to have quite enough backing to ride roughshod over society.
Another conspiracy theory of the time raised the spectre of foreign interference. Perhaps American companies did have an economic incentive to undermine Labor; for example a Westinghouse representative was quoted in Nucleonics Week as telling a US court: “Maybe if the Labor Government is thrown out in five weeks … we can get the uranium we thought we had.” Tribune cited the quote under the heading, “Uranium Grab -- Why Giants Support Libs”, and noted that the government had banned uranium exports for a time (on nationalist, not environmental grounds). As an explanation for why some multinationals backed Fraser, such arguments were plausible, though hardly necessary since foreign firms were influenced in any case by the general trend in ruling class thinking. But what of suggestions that for either economic or security reasons, the Central Intelligence Agency had a hand in the November coup? Here, speculation was fuelled by some seemingly improbable coincidences.
It emerged that American Richard Stallings, who had established the US communications base at Pine Gap, was a CIA agent with direct links to National Party leader Doug Anthony. Whitlam made much of these revelations, casting about as he was for any stick to beat the Opposition. The CIA was worried that the government or media might be about to blow their agents’ cover -- or reveal sensitive information about Pine Gap, fears which were intensified by the fact that Whitlam had recently removed the chiefs of two Australian security organisations, ASIS and ASIO. The CIA turned to Sir Arthur Tange, head of the Defence Department, who went to great lengths to kill the public debate.
It was easy for nationalist Labor supporters, for whom the CIA was a traditional focus of hostility, to conclude that American agents had a hand in Whitlam’s fall. Subsequent analysis also found links between the CIA and US ambassador Marshall Green. Kerr himself had once been involved in intelligence work.
The theories are intriguing, but unconvincing. It is unlikely the CIA would destabilise a traditional ally so precipitately. Marshall Green’s spy links are hardly remarkable for a career diplomat. There is no actual evidence that Kerr made contact with the CIA, or even considered security issues, in the period before the dismissal. Even if the CIA was somehow involved, that doesn’t make its role important, let alone decisive. The Whitlam government was destroyed by its internal contradictions, a major recession, and intense social conflicts. In such a mosaic, spies could represent no more than a fragment.
The battle is joined
Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam on 11 November 1975, installed Fraser as caretaker PM and called elections for 13 December, provoking immediate euphoria in much of the business world. The prices of leading shares soared on every exchange and brokers cheered. Among working class pensioners sunning themselves in Sydney’s Martin Plaza the mood was far more sombre; one of them, Eric O’Brien, said Whitlam had “done a good turn for pensioners” and that the “workers have lost one of their best men”. Why Kerr took his dramatic decision is a question which no amount of discussion seems likely to resolve fully, though Paul Kelly’s reconstruction seems as plausible as any: that Kerr always entertained the possibility of dismissing Whitlam, but could not warn him for fear of being sacked himself; that Whitlam consequently defied the Senate in ignorance of the full implications; and that as the Supply crisis reached a critical point, Kerr decided the dismissal had become inevitable. On this account the decision was an individual one, and Kerr was nobody’s puppet.
If so, it does not invalidate the Marxist thesis linking political events to social forces. Kerr’s options were shaped and limited by the social conflict raging around him, and by his desire to preserve political stability. His ability to make the dismissal stick depended on the outcome of further social conflict. Given these provisos, we can safely grant Kerr the individual a role in the making of history. Wider social forces determine which individuals can do this, and when, a point the Marxist writer Kelvin Rowley explained very well in discussing the “conspiracies” of 1975:
I agree that the capitalist class is able to pursue and realize its class interests in ways which the working class cannot. That is, after all, what we mean when we refer to it as the dominant or ruling class in capitalist society. However, this is a function of position in the class structure. Between us [you] and I would be lucky to conspire to knock a beer glass off at a busy pub and get away with it, let alone topple a government. This is … because our class position is a very long way from being “the central cog in the class machine.”
The dismissal provoked a sharp initial response from the labour movement. It seemed the fears of Fraser’s capitalist critics had not been misplaced. In the following days a major working class mobilisation began, more far-reaching than Whitlam actually desired, though his own rhetoric and posturing were themselves a factor. On parliament steps Whitlam declared that Fraser was “Kerr’s Cur”, supporters should maintain their rage, and nothing would save the Governor General. In reality he only wanted an electoral response: “Maintain your rage and enthusiasm. You will have a Labor Government again.” But given his tone ALP supporters might well feel they had a green light for more direct action.
On the day of the dismissal, angry crowds gathered in all the main cities. The Sydney demonstrators heard Joe Owens, former leader of the BLF, call for a 24 hour national stoppage, while in Melbourne “more than 50 policemen engaged in a running battle with demonstrators” who “clambered over the police cars, kicking and denting panels, smashing lights and brawling with uniformed and plain clothes police.” Meanwhile trade unionists were stopping work, defying a plea from Bob Hawke to “cool it” and donate a day’s pay to the election campaign rather than strike. Workers seemed to prefer his earlier idea of “withholding supply” from the bosses.
According to the Australian, “seamen walked off the job, tying up ships around Australia, waterside workers struck for 24 hours from midnight, metalworkers in factories throughout the country held spontaneous strikes and employees in railway workshops in Sydney and Newcastle also walked off.” A number of NSW coal mines stopped for 24 hours, with the Miners’ Federation leadership calling for pit-top meetings nationwide. There was talk of union bans to stop ballot papers being printed for an election many saw as undemocratic.
The following day saw major rallies in Sydney and Brisbane, with workers sporting such placards as “Give Fraser The Razor” and “Kerr’s Cur Is A Mangy Mongrel”. In Sydney a section of the crowd invaded the Stock Exchange, and some of the speeches at the Brisbane rally suggested a radical mood:
A union leader spoke of the futility of the parliamentary system. “We get up after 25 years and they knock us off.” … Unionists were told: “Everyone stop work on Friday. The capitalists understand that language -- massed workers and missed profits.”
A day later on 13 November demonstrators were back in Sydney streets. A rally initially organised by the Australian Union of Students attracted some Labor MPs and union officials. Tom Uren described Fraser’s blocking of Supply as a “violent act”, while Richard Walsham of the Teachers’ Federation argued: “It no longer matters who you vote in. You’ve got to do it for yourself.” Jim McClelland’s suggestion to “turn the other cheek” was met with boos as well as cheers. Some of the crowd began chanting for a general strike, and when McClelland left the platform he was confronted by Linda Boland, a socialist and a militant at the Redfern Mail Exchange. The National Times reported:
Boland is taller than McClelland, and she was trembling with scarcely controlled indignation. In her view, the workers were enraged by the ruling class coup d’etat, but to channel that rage back into parliamentary debate was a recipe for defeat. What was required were street demonstrations, meetings, industrial action, and if the ALP followed this course of putting the lid on people’s genuine feelings, the workers would be demoralised.
The crowd later marched on the offices of the Murdoch press, to be met at the front door by police. The marchers then moved quickly around to another entrance, where several hundred of them surged inside and began throwing bundles of papers off the truck, setting some ablaze.
Adelaide also saw stirring scenes after the dismissal, when striking wharfies and builders’ labourers marched to Liberal headquarters, then proceeded to Parliament House to protest against the presence of armed police at their demonstration. They were impatient with Premier Don Dunstan’s pleas to avoid “riots, anarchy and strikes” and one called out hopefully: “It’s time guys like Dunstan realised the ALP doesn’t run this country, the workers run it.” Two days later the SA Labor Party attracted 7-8000 to a rally at Victoria Square, which was quieter despite “a strong nucleus of radical student-worker groups”.
On the job, workers fought for their right to wear badges reading “Shame, Fraser, Shame” despite harassment by employers. Apprentices at the NSW Public Transport Commission’s Chullora College were ordered to remove them, but refused and began collecting additional badges to ensure that everyone could put one on. The Chullora union shop committee backed them, so they were fairly safe. At Kraft Foods in Melbourne a similar battle erupted, with unionists refusing to remove badges when ordered to do so -- management claimed that the workers were violating health regulations. Back in Sydney, the Department of Main Roads threatened to sack employees sporting the “Shame, Fraser, Shame” insignia.
The biggest working class mobilisation was in Melbourne, where the left unions called a four-hour stoppage on Friday, 14 November. 400,000 workers walked off and employers estimated the lost production at $10 million. 50,000 gathered in the City Square to hear fairly empty speeches from John Halfpenny and State Labor leader Clyde Holding. The organisers were anxious to keep the restive crowd from getting out of hand, so they led it away from the city centre to the old Treasury Building in Spring Street, where they appealed to the marchers to “go home and make your street a street for Labor”. Keen for further action, a large section of the crowd preferred to follow the banners of a collection of revolutionaries, with about 10,000 people proceeding to Parliament House, then down Bourke Street toward the centre of town.
At the front of the march raged a battle for control between Maoists who wished to take the crowd to the US Consulate -- a considerable distance away in St Kilda Road -- and the Trotskyist International Socialists (I.S.) who insisted on heading for the Stock Exchange. Each had a political significance: the Maoists blamed the Kerr Coup on the CIA and US imperialism, while the I.S. saw the struggle in class rather than national terms.
A combination of geography (the Stock Exchange was far closer), better organisation and superior political logic ensured victory for the I.S. in this tussle, while most of the 10,000 people marching behind their banner were rather less ideological in their objectives. Although they were happy to occasionally chant general strike calls, their favourite slogan was the simple, straightforward, “We want Gough!” As one of the I.S. members leading the march, I remember how it tempered our exuberant mood to realise we could only hold the huge crowd together by taking up this slogan. “We want Gough!” cried the young socialists who had been among Whitlam’s fiercest critics. When reproached by political rivals my fellow agitator Phil Griffiths, who held the megaphone, called out blithely: “We’re reformists!” We were not, but the crowd were, and we had to face up to that reality.
Another reality awaited us at the Stock Exchange. The police had bolted the glass doors and arrayed themselves on the steps. Our small forces could not organise a successful charge on the police lines; yet at the same time it was impossible to make speeches over a mere megaphone and expect to command the attention of this tumultuous crowd. A young waterside worker voiced the frustration many must have felt. “You bring us all the way here,” he told me angrily, “then you leave us flat.” I understood his reaction but could think of nothing to do. Although we had shown some dash in leading the march, our contingent of 20 people could not hope to take the struggle any further.
After some jostling against police lines, the demonstration dispersed. Our accomplishment was to demonstrate that sizeable numbers of workers were looking for a militant lead. At the same time it was abundantly clear that groups like the I.S. were too small to provide it, something which applied equally to Linda Boland and her comrades in Sydney, or the “radical student-worker groups” in Adelaide. Meanwhile Melbourne’s left union and ALP leaders, who were influential enough to lead a serious struggle, had shown their lack of enthusiasm by going home from Spring Street.
Still, in those early days the anger and resistance clearly frightened sections of the bourgeoisie. The press eagerly seized on Hawke’s call for restraint (“Keep it cool,” was the Courier-Mail’s front page plea) and in Melbourne The Age openly confessed its fears. “There is a very real danger that sections of the public will today feel utterly disenchanted with the whole political process”, said its first editorial, while the business pages suggested that the “unions won’t be Hawke’s doves” and added: “business leaders fear that a new Government might not be able to govern”.
A determined working class campaign could have split the bourgeoisie, pushing Fraser onto the defensive, and such a campaign was entirely possible had the leaders of the ALP and trade union fought consistently to build it. However this was precisely the point at which the left began to falter.
Toward electoral disaster
As it became clear that Melbourne’s four-hour stoppage would go ahead, The Age had decided the left unions needed a stern talking-to. In an article seemingly written in consultation with the ACTU leadership (“Bob Hawke told me last night …”) Geoffrey Cleghorn warned that “large masses of people are difficult to control”, especially with “anarchists” and “Trotskyists” present.
Trade union leaders therefore bear a formidable responsibility in managing today’s Melbourne rally and similar rallies and stopworks … If Mr Hawke is correct in his call for restraint -- and it must be self-evident that he is -- union leaders will accept that responsibility … Unionists cannot allow ideologues to manipulate the present situation and convert a crisis for democracy into a mini-revolution.
We have seen that small bands of Trotskyists couldn’t really create a “mini-revolution”, and anyway a union leader like Halfpenny had no intention of allowing things to get out of control. In fact he had signalled as much in a separate interview published the same day. The four-hour stoppage was consistent with Hawke’s “cool it” appeal, said Halfpenny, because the ACTU President “had since made it clear he was opposed only to indefinite strikes.” Obviously the left officials had little stomach for them either. A few days later when 3000 shop stewards met at Melbourne’s Festival Hall, the meeting was confined to an electoral briefing, at which the stewards discussed badges, stickers and fund-raising with no mention of industrial action.
Without encouragement from these union leaders -- and with their critics on the revolutionary left far too weak to offer an alternative leadership -- the mass struggle began to fade, giving way to the more conventional electoral contest that Hawke and Whitlam preferred. The initiative began to pass to Fraser, and Labor began to slip in the polls, for in a conventional election campaign the ALP had little to offer.
Labor’s official campaign opening, with a daytime rally in Sydney followed by an intense Festival Hall meeting in Melbourne, still aroused great fervour, as did many of the rallies in the remaining weeks before polling day. Moved by the exceptional atmosphere, Gough Whitlam even bought a copy of a radical socialist paper, The Battler, before entering Festival Hall. But the ferment was confined largely to those already firmly committed to the Labor Party and its leader.
The ALP’s initial campaign strategy focused on constitutional issues, for fear that on economics Labor was all too vulnerable. Whitlam appealed to voters to defend democracy. As the prospect of overturning the Kerr Coup through struggle receded, however, working class voters lost interest in constitutional questions, while the bourgeoisie lost its nervousness about them. The two main classes in society began to turn their attention to the economic issues which are always the key to conventional election contests, and the middle classes and swinging voters followed suit. Labor was forced to change its emphasis. But on economic issues Whitlam was ensnared in dire contradictions.
To the workers he offered a scare campaign: Fraser would cut programs, attack living standards and open up, in Hawke’s words, Australia’s “most bloody and exacerbated” period of industrial relations. Yet it was Labor which had brought down the Hayden budget, and it was Labor Ministers who had denounced “bloody-minded unions” not long before. Despite the strong pressure to rally behind the ALP, workers often confronted Labor candidates about these issues. When former Transport minister Charlie Jones visited Clyde railway workshops in Sydney, “the workers gave him a rough time … and raised demands as to what they wanted in the railways. The workers declared that they would support Labor, but that they wanted a better performance.”
So while people continued thronging to hear Whitlam speak, this showed the enthusiasm of the faithful rather than a breakthrough into the wider electorate. And even the faithful did not seem to have much confidence in the party’s election platform. Journalists on the campaign trail noticed that “the crowds are big and enthusiastic but Mr Whitlam does not seem to be getting through to them. He is lecturing, educating, defending the program. Eleven days to December 13 … It’s late to start telling voters what Labor’s welfare programs are all about.”
For the employers Whitlam had a different pitch: the Hayden budget was working, hence Fraser’s head-kicking methods weren’t required, indeed they might be counter-productive for without Labor’s reform program workers would not accept wage indexation. The unions, he warned darkly, “wouldn’t wear” the abolition of the Prices Justification Tribunal. This ignored unionists’ own cynicism about the Tribunal, reinforced as recently as October when it had awarded BHP an 8.75 percent price rise without a hearing. The rise meant steel prices had risen 65 percent in two years, prompting John Halfpenny to describe the Tribunal as “little more than an arm of BHP”. In any case, ruling class concerns about what the unions would or would not tolerate had been largely laid to rest by Hawke’s success in ending the strikes. As for the reform programs, if Labor accepted these had to be slashed, why not put Fraser to work slashing them properly?
A good example of the ALP’s difficulties was the area of women’s rights. Fraser was an easy target given his suggestion that women should enter parliament to “brighten the place up”, which had embarrassed even some Liberals; and Margaret Whitlam could justly point out:
Nowhere in Mr Fraser’s policy speech is there an acknowledgment of women’s special areas of need. In fact, the words “woman” or “women” are not once mentioned.
Yet this argument was less than compelling, given that the Whitlam policy speech had devoted just two sentences to the subject! While the Women’s Electoral Lobby analysis of candidates found Labor was on balance more sympathetic and aware, it didn’t emerge unscathed. WEL said both the ALP and the coalition parties “ignored unemployed women, child care and probate tax concessions for women.” Even at a “Women For Labor” picnic, Whitlam didn’t seem very interested and ignored requests to speak. The next day Elsie refuge, which had organised a bus load to attend, wrote to the organisers suggesting that women “deserve more than Gough kissing babies”.
Not surprisingly the women’s liberation movement response to Labor was fairly critical. In Sydney a 200-strong special general meeting of the movement rejected a request to join “Women for Labor”, preferring to run an independent campaign against Fraser. A leaflet listed Labor’s reforms but cited their limitations: “Where are the child care centres? Whatever happened to retraining?”
Unable to satisfy either its natural constituencies or the bourgeoisie, Labor staggered on to the electoral debacle that “cooling it” was supposed to forestall. The irony is that, judging by the opinion polls, the one thing which might have raised its vote was militant class struggle. The polls had shown a revival in the party’s support during the supply crisis, partly in response to Whitlam’s fighting stand, and this comparatively good showing persisted for a time after November 11. Labor’s support was initially strongest in Victoria, where the level of struggle was highest, and more particularly in Melbourne where workers were on strike and demonstrating in large numbers.
Thus a poll taken at the end of November gave the ALP 48 percent in Victoria and nearly 50 percent in Melbourne, while the party had only 44 nationwide. Worker militancy was by no means alienating the Victorian electorate, on the contrary it appeared that swinging voters were impressed by the unions’ show of strength. But once the struggle subsided, this picture changed rapidly. It was now Fraser and the right wing that inspired confidence. At the December 13 election Labor’s Victorian vote was nearly one percent below the national figure of 43.2 percent.
In the aftermath a bitter Jim Cairns blamed the bourgeoisie and its media. No government could stay in office if it displeased them, he said:
This is a capitalist society. The capitalist class is the ruling class and their ideas are ruling ideas. It is all tied up with money.
It was an insightful comment, if belated, but Cairns offered no strategy for coping with this capitalist juggernaut except to say Labor should become “more humane, idealistic, altruistic and democratic”. How that could overcome the power of money, he did not explain. The fact was that the working class movement had failed in a first crucial test: it had been unable to stop the right imposing a new political leadership on the country, with a new and more openly reactionary agenda.
To win such battles, the labour movement would have needed very different politics, strategies and leadership to challenge that power. Capital was tied to the state machinery that John Kerr personified, so obviously the working class needed a strategy to confront that state -- yet Whitlam and Hawke proclaimed their loyalty to it. Capital’s domination of the media ensured workers could never win their battles by purely electoral means, yet these leaders had demobilised the alternative forms of struggle in the streets and workplaces.
In the absence of a revolutionary alternative most of the labour movement ultimately drew right wing rather than left wing conclusions from Whitlam’s demise. The hard men -- Neville Wran, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating -- pushed for more clearly pro-business policies, and an increasing number of ALP activists saw this as the most viable course. Thus the Whitlam debacle paved the way not only for the Fraser years, but also for the right wing Labor era which followed them.