GOUGH Whitlam was a political giant who had an enormous impact on Australia.
It is right to speak respectfully of the recently dead. In retirement, Whitlam was a model of wit and propriety and I was one of many journalists who benefited from his capacious memories.
I supported Whitlam against his defamers over East Timor and for a time we collaborated on this issue a good deal.
But sentimentality, and the overwhelming power of the Labor myth-making machine, should not blind us to the central fact of Whitlam: he was the worst prime minister in our history.
This is true in economic policy, foreign policy and processes of government. After three years in office, he lost the 1975 election by the greatest electoral landslide in Australian political history.
He had another go as opposition leader in 1977 and was rejected by a similar margin.
His foreign policy record was appalling, although it is here that the myth-makers have worked hardest because his economic record was even worse.
Whitlam acted with conspicuous cruelty towards the Vietnamese who had worked with Australian forces and Australian diplomats during the war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam.
IN DEPTH: Gough Whitlam 1916 -2014
INTERACTIVE: Gough Whitlam obituary
His foreign minister, Don Willessee, wanted him to bring some of these people to Australia at the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Whitlam told him: “I’m not having these f..king Vietnamese Balts coming into the country with their religious and political prejudices against us.”
The quote is in Clyde Cameron’s memoir. Whitlam never denied the quote. Once, when I recounted the quote with one word mistaken, Whitlam rang me to correct the mistaken word and confirm the quote generally.
Later, when Vietnamese were fleeing the communists whose victory Whitlam had championed, he remarked: “Vietnamese sob stories don’t wring my withers.”
More important than what Whitlam said was what he did. Australian transport planes left Saigon with rows of empty seats while those who had helped us there were left to their fate in the vast gulag of re-education camps the communists set up after their victory.
Or they were left to a worse fate.
Whitlam’s myth-makers are so impervious to the facts that they often claim his visit to China as opposition leader was a breakthrough in opening China to the west. In fact for most of the preceding years numerous Western nations in Europe had full diplomatic relations with mainland China.
It was as near as anything could possibly be to inevitable that Australia would eventually extend formal diplomatic recognition to Beijing. Once the Americans made their move, their Asian allies followed, although the US took some years after de facto recognition to achieve formal recognition. This is because the Americans were tough negotiators and were not going to sell out Taiwan.
They would not recognise Beijing in a way that gave it licence to conquer Taiwan, which is de facto independent but which Beijing considers a renegade province.
Harvard scholar Ross Terrill argues that Whitlam badly botched the negotiations with Beijing because he was desperate to afford recognition straight away. As a result he agreed to conditions that were punitive of Australian interests in Taiwan and effectively sold out the interests of Taiwanese people altogether.
Most of Whitlam’s foreign policy decisions were wrong in principle and turned out badly in practice. Entirely gratuitously, he extended formal diplomatic recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states. This was a blow to Australians of Baltic origin who yearned for human rights and self-determination in their countries of origin.
And, as so often happened, history proved Whitlam wrong. The Baltic states are all independent of Russia today.
The two most disgraceful episodes of Whitlam’s leadership concerned the Middle East. Most people remember the loans affair, but an even greater disgrace concerned Whitlam’s efforts to raise election funds for the ALP in 1975 from the Iraqi government.
With Stalinist efficiency, Labor myth-makers have almost entirely elided this episode from history. So let’s recount the facts. Whitlam authorised Bill Hartley, a far-left figure of the Victorian ALP who received subsidies from Arab dictators, to seek election funding of up to $2 million from the Iraqi government or the governing Iraqi Baath Socialist Party.
Their agreed envoy, whom Whitlam met and authorised, was one Henry Fischer. In Iraq, Fischer met Saddam Hussein, then vice-president of Iraq.
He later intimated he could get half a million dollars from the ALP. Whitlam thought this was fine but wanted to keep it secret.
When news of it came out, in 1976, Whitlam was already in opposition. He was condemned, as leader, by the ALP national executive. John Wheeldon, who had been Whitlam’s social security minister and who later became associate editor of The Australian, resigned from Labor’s front bench in disgust and said he would never again serve with Whitlam.
Kim Beazley Sr, who had been Whitlam’s education minister, had already resigned over the issue. “It would be inevitable for the Australian Jewish community to regard any such (Iraqi) money as blood money that might be paid for, ultimately, in Israeli blood,” Beazley said.
That might have been an overdramatic judgment, but on any measure for an Australian political leader to seek secret electoral funds from one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty tyrannical regimes the 20th century ever saw was a monstrous moral failing.
Imagine the endless outcry there would be if Malcolm Fraser had sought electoral funding for the Liberal Party from apartheid South Africa, or even from the Americans. For the record, Fraser says the Liberals never sought foreign funding from anybody.
The more well-remembered loans affair involved Jim Cairns, then treasurer, and Rex Connor, then minerals and energy minister, seeking a $4 billion loan from Middle East sources for infrastructure in Australia, although there was a later plot to use this money to fund government if the Senate blocked supply.
Connor used the shady Tirath Khemlani to try to raise the money. The problem was that after Connor’s official authority was formally withdrawn, he kept using Khemlani, apparently with Whitlam’s tacit approval.
Whitlam’s view was if the money came through he would take it, however Connor got it.
Both Connor and Cairns were sacked from the ministry in a government of utter chaos.
Whitlam’s economic record was ruinous. He produced massively increased unemployment, the highest level in Australia since the great Depression. Inflation got above 20 per cent at one stage. This was partly influenced by the international oil shocks but the outcome in Australia was much worse than in comparable countries. In 1974-75, government spending increased by 40 per cent, plainly a state of madness. Tax increased by 30 per cent. It wasn’t just that Whitlam was uninterested in economics, his economic policies were catastrophic and took many years to recover from.
Whitlam could not control his ministers, some of whom had pro-communist allegiances (read Mark Aarons’s book, The Family File) and made wildly ill-disciplined statements against the US alliance, which made his government look incoherent and amateurish.
Whitlam did not support the invasion of East Timor, the only thing he is accused of by the Left but is innocent of.
Many of his social reforms had calamitous consequences or could not be afforded. Abolishing university fees made no discernible difference to the socio-economic profile of Australian undergraduates and was later reversed by the Hawke government.
All this economic disaster ruined Australia’s international reputation. The tenor of commentary in British newspapers at the time was that while messing up the British economy was fairly easy, messing up the Australian economy took real determination.
The fact that modern Labor idolises Whitlam rather than Bob Hawke is one of the key causes of its policy malaise. Whitlam had grand ambitions. His government, though, on almost every measure, was an unmitigated disaster.
