Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New

Verity Firth: Welcome to Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. My name is Verity Firth, and I'm the Vice President of Societal Impact, Equity and Engagement here at UNSW. Thank you all for joining us tonight for what we hope will be a really thoughtful, open and genuinely engaging conversation.

As we begin this important conversation, I'd also like to acknowledge, of course, that we're on the land of the Bidjigal people, who are the traditional custodians of the unceded lands on which we are gathered. This land where this University is built, has been a place of learning, knowledge sharing and storytelling for thousands of years, long before the foundations of this University were laid. As we reflect this evening on leadership, reform and democracy, we honour and endure knowledge systems of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their continuing role in shaping a more just and equitable future.

A quick word first, about how we're approaching tonight's discussion: Yes, I am a former Labour politician hosting an interview with a former adviser to the Labour Party on the topic of a former Labour Prime Minister. But I assure you, this is not a partisan event. It's not about promoting a political party or settling old scores, but it is about leadership. It's about leadership across political persuasions, and about what our history can still teach us about courage, reform, miscalculation and Democratic responsibility. Whitlam was a towering figure, but he was also human, imperfect, ambitious, and it's sometimes deeply controversial, and it's that complexity that makes this conversation worth having.

We're incredibly fortunate tonight to be joined by Troy Bramston. Troy and I were talking in the green room, we met each other over 30 years ago at the Labour Club at Sydney University, so we also go a long way back. It just made us feel really old, to be honest.

Troy Bramston: I thought we were keeping that secret.

Verity Firth: We should have kept that secret. Troy, of course, now, 30 years later, is one of Australia's leading political biographers and historians. He's a senior writer at The Australian the author or editor of 12 books, and the chronicler of leaders, including Robert Menzies, Paul Keating and the Rudd Gillard era. He also brings something rarer to his scholarship. He brings experience from inside the political system, having spent a decade as an advisor to federal labour politicians before joining, turning to journalism and history.

And I'm also very proud to add that even though Troy did his undergrad at Sydney, he is, in fact, a UNSW alumnus, and which makes this conversation here especially fitting, and we claim him as one of our own here at UNSW. So, Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New is unique. It is the only full-life biography of Whitlam published since his death in 2014. It draws on thousands of pages of newly uncovered archival material and interviews with more than 100 people, including Whitlam himself. Troy traces the entire arc of Whitlam’s life: his upbringing, his war service, his legal career, his long political ascent, the extraordinary reform years, the Dismissal and then what came after.

What emerges is a portrait of a leader who modernised Australia, often at breathtaking speed, through reforms to education, health care, multiculturalism, indigenous land rights, foreign policy and the arts, many of which have since become permanent features of Australian life. Yet it is also a story of tension between idealism and pragmatism, ambition and execution, vision and political reality. At a time when many people feel disillusioned with politics or unsure about their own role in public life, Whitlam’s story still provokes big questions: “What does bold leadership look like today?” “What risks are worth taking?” and “how many, how much agency do individuals, citizens, students, institutions, really have?” And these are all questions we'll be exploring tonight.

So now let's start the conversation, and please join me in welcoming Troy Bramston. So Troy, what I enjoyed about your book, actually was the fact that it spread the entire arc of Whitlam’s life. And as we were saying, backstage, I in particular, found the early part of his life just a fascinating insight into Australia more generally. But when you do reflect on the whole arc of Whitlam’s life, what ultimately became the spine of the story for you? The thing that made this biography feel necessary now?

Troy Bramston: Well, thanks, Verity, and thank you all for coming. It's good to be back on campus as a former student, and to see so many of you come out here this evening. Look, it's a really good opening question. Gough Whitlam, there's a couple of things in his early life that become really important later on in life. I mean, one of those is that he is the only Prime Minister to grow up in Canberra. So, his family moved there at a very young age. His father was there when the Parliament was opened in 1927. He was in the in the Attorney General's department, and so Whitlam and his family, his mother and his sister Freda, saw this new national capital literally rise from the red dirt. They saw the buildings being constructed. They saw the politicians. They saw the public servants. So, it gave him an idea about what a national government can do. So, I think that really invested in him, but in terms of his personality, I mean, he was always very intelligent, very bright, but a bit of a loner. I went through his school reports, you know, he went to school in Sydney, and then he moved to Canberra and went to school there, continued his schooling, and even when he's at Sydney University, studying arts and then law, he's very much following his own star. He's a lone ranger. He has a little bit of difficulty making friends with other people. They see him as someone who, you know, loves debating, loves performing on the stage, very intelligent, you know, he's editing literary journals. He's translating ancient Greek and Roman poets and things like that. So, he's liked, but he's a bit distant from everybody else. So, when I was sort of analysing some of these things, that's just two things. One is this national idea of a national government and what it could do. He saw that in Canberra. But also, his personal relationships. He has this sort of defining flaw, which is how he works with other people, which is not really very well. And so, so that follows him through his entire life. And yeah, and so sort of you know, when you're sitting down to write a biography, you look for these sort of clues from early life that might help explain what happens later.

Verity Firth: Yeah, that's really interesting. And you've profiled many political leaders of both sides of the aisle. Across all the political figures you've interviewed or profiled what patterns or traits consistently appear in people that that choose political life? And where does Whitlam sit, either inside or outside that pattern?

Troy Bramston: Look it's a good question, and it's difficult to answer, to be honest. You know, I've interviewed every prime minister since, since Gough Whitlam. And I've met them all, interviewed them all several times and got to know them, meet them at their homes or at the lodge or Kirribilli House or wherever it is. So, I've been very fortunate. And you know, as a student here and earlier at Sydney University, I was always interested in political power. So, you know how power is gained, how it's used, and inevitably, how it's lost. So, I'm always interested in that, and in the personality, when someone thinks “I can be Prime Minister.” There's lots of people who think they can be Prime Minister. Very few get to be Prime Minister. So, some of the qualities, I mean, some of them, are obvious. You've got to be a hard worker, you've got to be driven, you've got to be determined, you've got to be pretty smart. You've got to be pretty, pretty clever. But it's in many ways, the human side of things that can really distinguish someone apart. So, you know Bob Hawke and John Howard, who I got to know really well, and I wrote a biography of Bob Hawke a few years ago. What I learned about them was how they related to other people. They actually liked people. Here's a news flash: A lot of politicians actually don't like people and are not comfortable talking to people, but Bob Hawke and John Howard love it. If you've ever seen them out in public in their heyday, they'd always be interested in the person, their job, their family, their issues. And so, in politics, you've got to have that skill, right? You've got to be able to, what I think, I've often asked politicians about is, is that sort of quality that is not seen, but it's essential, and that is managing a cabinet, managing a party, dealing with the public servants, managing a paper flow across your desk. I mean, you've been a minister, you know what that's like. There's these administrative skills that you have to be able to master if you want to be successful. So, Whitlam was good at, you know, managing paperwork and getting across all the issues, but it's those other things which we can talk about where I think it was sort of, he was let down in his in his personal relationships.

Verity Firth: Yeah, I do find that fascinating, that - it's really clear in your in your book, how much of a loner he actually was. But how brilliant he was too. And he managed in even in his university days, even though he was a bit of a loner, he was still very self-deprecatory in his humour, and that often, you know, earned him respect or at least friendship of a kind from people. That's something that travelled with him throughout his life.

Troy Bramston: Yeah, look, he was a bit shy, and you know, he's six foot four, so a lot of people saw him as aloof and arrogant. And he was that, but often it's because of his height, and so he's literally looking down on people when he's talking to them. And you know, there's the great story I discovered with how he met Margaret Whitlam, which was at a Sydney University end of year dramatic society party. She's six foot three, he's six foot four. So, when they arrive at this party, clearly they're the only people who have almost exact eyeline, right? And so, they got to they, you know, gravitated towards one another. So, there's these sort of personal qualities that you sort of look for too. And you sort of imagine, you know, what I try to do in these books is, is give people an idea of what it's like to actually meet this person. What are they like in their private life? You know, there are quirky things that I found like he always loved to recline on a banana lounge or on a lounge in his office. So, there's a picture on the back of the book with him literally in a suit and tie poolside on a banana lounge. He liked to always take his shoes off. And you know, he pretty much every day of his life, he would eat a steak for lunch and a steak for dinner. So, there are all these sort of things that you that sell -

Verity Firth: And he lived into his 90s. That's obviously good for you.

Troy Bramston: That's right. And he disliked exercise, and rarely did it. And I worked out that he only did rowing at Sydney University because he felt that's what you “should do,” because he wanted to win a college blue, and you know, you have to do multiple things in different fields to win a blue, so that's the only reason he did rowing. So, you look for these sort of personality attributes which help explain the person.

Verity Firth: Was there any discovery in the archives, and you went through and found new pieces of evidence that hadn't been discovered before, but was there any discovery in the archives or interviews that genuinely surprised you, or something that reframed Whitlam entirely.

Troy Bramston: Look, I mean, I was always going to gravitate to the government, which we'll talk about, you know, different aspects of the government for news stories. As a journalist, first and foremost, unlike some historians, I'm always looking for the news angle. What's new here? What's going to surprise people? What's going to allow me to write a newspaper story? And so yes, I'm looking at the government. I'm looking at the Dismissal, of course, but there were two early things that I found out which really shocked me: One was that he was never baptised, so he was a very religious person as a young person but later became an atheist by the time he was a teenager. His parents are very religious, and they're Baptists. And of course, Baptists are baptised at adolescence, not shortly after birth, and so by the time he's an adolescent, he was at a Church of England School, Canberra Grammar. So, he missed the chance to be baptised, but he was confirmed in the Anglican faith. So that's a bit of a scoop. I was quite shocked to find that.

And the other one is his name. So, you know his name's Gough Whitlam. Well, Gough, hardly anybody knows anyone called Gough. It's a bit unusual. But his first name, of course, is Edward. It's Edward Gough Whitlam. It would have often been assumed that he was named Gough because his first name, Edward would clash with his maternal grandfather, Edward Maddox. But the real story is: is that in Melbourne, where he was born, just a few years later, his mother, Martha, was in the street one day, and she came across a group of boys who were teasing another boy. And she said, “Stop teasing that boy. Why are you teasing him?” And they said, “Well, Mrs, his name's Edward, and we're shortening it to Ned and likening him to Ned Kelly.” So, the last thing his mother wanted was for him to be teased and likened to the bushranger Ned Kelly. So, from that day on, he would be known as Gough, and not Edward. So, there are always you know things to discover when you're writing these books. And for me, that was really important to have something new to say.

Verity Firth: Yeah, and express something about the sort of household he grew up in, in terms of his mother's conservatism as well, right? Not wanting to be - yeah.

Troy Bramston: Yeah, and it wasn't that long before that Ned Kelly had been hung at Melbourne Gaol - just a few decades.

Verity Firth: Yeah, exactly. So I am, of course, about to move on to the Dismissal, because that's the one that everyone wants to talk about. But before we move on to the Dismissal, I think we should also look at his reforms. So, education, health, the arts, urban planning. A lot of the reforms that feel so contemporary, right, but really did change the course of Australia. So, I suppose talk to us a little bit about his reforms. What do you think? Which ones do you think were the most consequential and possibly the most difficult to bring about?

Troy Bramston: I think Gough Whitlam really gave Australians a new horizon of ambition. He allowed Australians to see a new future, a bigger, brighter future, and the cornerstone was that was going to be equality and opportunity. And so, he often talked about the “backlog,” right? Was the term he used. There's been so many things happening overseas in other countries that Australia seemed to be very much behind the times. And so, he set about unleashing a reform revolution. And he was very invested in this. And this is not just, you know, a media release that's put out from the Prime Minister's Office or something that's cooked up by political advisors. This is, policies that were worked out with outside experts over many years, and they had to win conference endorsement. The Labour Party was a very rigid organisation. Every policy had to go through the conference, even Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, the famous “It's time” speech had to be checked off by the party's federal executive, line by line to make sure that he was saying things that they approved of. So it’s a very different party and so the reform agenda was difficult and long to get into place. But once they were there, of course, they formed this duumvirate government. Whitlam couldn't wait until a number of seats had finished their counting after winning the 1972 election, so he decided to swear in himself and Lance Barnard, the deputy leader in a duumvirate government. And for 40 days and 40 nights, they ruled Australia as a two-man government. And I only found out just when I was really finishing the book, and I was trying to work out how this had actually happened, and I spoke to his, who would become his Chief of Staff, Jim Spigelman, and was on his staff then, and he said no one had ever talked about there being a duumvirate government. This was very much against Labour Party caucus rules. The caucus selects the ministry, and so on. And then I worked, I found out that Whitlam had just simply sent a memo, sorry, a telegram, to all the Labour MPs on the Sunday after the election, saying, “We can't wait, we're forming a new government.” And people had to catch up, and Australians had to catch up too. You know, the Sydney Morning Herald would publish a “what the government did yesterday” column. So, this is rapid fire government. So, no area of government was left untouched. But the big things, I would say that one of the big things was China. So diplomatic recognition of China, and he did that, of course, started that process in 1971 as opposition leader. He went to China and was criticised by the Billy McMahon government as “this was an outrage,” “this was a disgrace,” “this is a terrible thing.” He said, “Whitlam had been played by Mao Tse Tung, like a fisherman plays a trout.” And then, of course, as Whitlam was leaving China to go to Tokyo, Henry Kissinger was arriving to facilitate Richard Nixon's visit. So that was a big thing. And so, they did that right away in December 1972 but it's other things. It's like needs based school funding. You know, this was really important. I mean, school funding was done on the basis of ad hoc grants and things like that. And now there'd be a new national system where all schools, regardless, whether they were public schools, private schools, religious schools, would be funded on the basis of need. And here's an interesting fact relevant to today: the Liberal and National parties had severed their coalition after the 1972 election, and those education reforms were actually passed with the support of the Country Party, not the Liberal Party who voted against them. So that was a big thing. And of course, universal health care in Medibank really changed people's lives. But we could talk all night Verity about the things. You know, there's so many things where it's Double J, sewering the suburbs, which made a big difference, a new national anthem, a new honours system. I mean, the list goes on and on and on, and that's an important lesson, I think, from this period, which is that even though it was chaotic and scandalised, the reform program rolled on, and left a huge legacy that hasn't been forgotten, and pretty much all of it remains in place.

Verity Firth: That is what's most fascinating. In fact, listening to you then, what it also makes you realise, is all of the, laying all of that groundwork, as painful as I imagine it would have been - taking it all through conference, you know, actually putting the detail around the policy agenda. Think about how light the detail around the policy agenda is nowadays, often for opposition, to entering government. All of that hard work actually paid off in their capacity to just hit the ground running.

Troy Bramston: Yeah, and there was broad public support for a lot of this stuff too, even things like lowering the voting age to 18, no fault divorce. A lot of these things were really strongly debated in the community and in the parliament, but they won broad public support. And one of the things that was sort of really interesting to me to find out, was that we all know that the Whitlam government quickly removed the remaining troops that have been in Vietnam, but one of the biggest decisions, even bigger than that, straight away, was the ending of conscription, and this had a big political impact. There are a lot of young men who are waiting to have their charges heard in court for being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. They were all cancelled. There were some men in jail - they were all released from jail. And you know, right up until 1972 the Liberal Party, which came to office in 1949 had a lock on the youth vote. Can you believe it? So, 21 to 30 they pretty much overwhelmingly voted for liberal and it changed at the 1972 election, and the key reason for that was the abolition of conscription.

Verity Firth: I agree with that there is that generation of “Whitlamite,” some of I imagine, who are here tonight, who absolutely, passionately tell the stories of the changes to their life that happened. It was interesting - when I was an MP, I met Whitlam a couple of times at various fundraisers. What always amazed me is that branch members of mine would always come up and say, “Oh can you introduce me to Whitlam?” I mean, the queue to be introduced to Gough Whitlam was always, you know, right out the door. But always they were going up to thank him about something. And they were all the “Whitlamite” generation, like they were all of that certain age when he was elected. And they were thanking him for free education, a lot of women thanking him for free education, thanking him for Medicare, thanking him for conscription. It's really, I think you're right, it captured a moment that then lasted - that generation, then stuck with Labour in many ways, for years to come.

Troy Bramston: Can I mention just quickly, two things?

Verity Firth: Yeah.

Troy Bramston: I mean, in politics, people go into politics you hope, to change people's lives for the better. And there are two things that really stood out for me in researching this book. One of them was, you know, I interviewed the remaining ministers. I interviewed more than 100 people for this book. You know, ambassadors, public servants, staff, the remaining ministers. And I always remember Bill Hayden saying to me that as Social Security Minister, the thing that people would come up to him, even in the supermarket in the years before he died, was to thank him for the single mother's payment, which meant that a lot of women that were in destructive marriages, relationships, or had children and, you know, facing a really difficult time, could get that temporary transitional support to enable them to start a new life. And so that's changing someone's life. And it was a very modest payment. And I looked at those, and I analysed all of those in the book.

And the other thing is sewerage. I mean, I talked to my parents and grandparents about sewage. I mean, some of you may, may remember, if you wanted to go to the loo in the middle of the night, you'd have to have to go out to the backyard and, you know, navigate the snakes and the spiders and in the dark and do your business, and then, you know, get back inside into your warm bed. Well, I mean, having the sewerage connected to the home was a big change for a lot of people. And some of you may know that Neville Wran, the former Premier had said that Caesar Augustus found Rome made of brick and left it of marble. And Gough Whitlam found the suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane unsewered and left them fully flushed. So, things like that. You know, you never hear about that today: sewerage, but it was a big national program of urban renewal.

Verity Firth: And how obvious, you can't believe that it hadn't been done.

Troy Bramston: Yeah, yeah.

Verity Firth: So, yes, huge legacy, amazing reforms. Let's come now to the Dismissal. And I really enjoyed reading the chapter on the Dismissal, partly because it's a bit like a you know, it's quite paced. It's paced really well, and it sort of gets all exciting. And we'll get Troy to talk you through some of it, because I found there were things I didn't know that were revealed to me. I was telling Troy before I came on board, I was actually there, age two on the day outside Parliament House, where he said, “Well, may you say, God Save the Queen.” And it was because my mother, we lived in Canberra at the time, had been home listening to the radio, and she heard them start calling Whitlam “the member for Werriwa.” And this was the time before, obviously, before social media. And she said she just went, “what do they, what do you mean?” And all she could think of was to bundle the kids into the car and drive down to Parliament House. And so, I was there. I can't remember any of it, but I was there, and when I read your chapter, I was, I was actually realising it must have been when Whitlam was moving the no confidence motion in Fraser that mum was listening to the radio. So, let's talk about that day, because it's a very interesting day. All right. Well, the first obvious question, which you do talk about in your chapter, so let's go there: Could Whitlam have done anything to prevent the Dismissal?

Troy Bramston: Yes, he could have. This is, I'm a Dismissal tragic, right? So, when I was in my year 10 St Patrick's college at Sutherland, I did a year 10 project on the Dismissal. It's 1991 John Kerr had just died. It was front page news. So that started me on my Dismissal odyssey. And I've interviewed and met and spoken to everybody who could have possibly been involved in some way. So, I've been on the case for that long about the Dismissal, and the Dismissal is a train wreck for our institutions. It's fast and it's tragedy. I think what John Kerr was completely wrong and was the wrong solution to the crisis. I'll start at the end. First, no Governor General would do what he did, and that is to resort to an ancient kingly power, the reserve powers, without warning, and implement a surprise Dismissal. That was completely wrong. And even when Jack Lang was dismissed in New South Wales by the Governor, Sir Philip Game, they had talked about the crisis and how it could possibly be resolved. So, there's no deception. And that's where Kerr got it wrong. He deceived his Prime Minister and he ambushed him with a surprise Dismissal. So that's the sort of the starting point. Let me say there are no heroes here. So, what Malcolm Fraser did was torch conventions, shatter precedents, push the political system to the brink. No government had ever had their budget denied to them in the Senate before. He relied on a manipulated Senate - there had been two vacancies in the Senate from Queensland and New South Wales that were replaced with non-Labour senators. So it was, it was a corrupted Senate that he used to do that, and the Budget was never actually voted on. It was just repeatedly delayed. So that was an act of political terrorism in weaponising the Senate in that way against a government that had been elected twice in the in the three years before. So that's the real Malcolm Fraser: ruthless, cunning, scheming. John Kerr's deceptive and paranoid about his own future, and Whitlam missed all the warning signs. So, Whitlam didn't do any contingency planning whatsoever, and his solution to the crisis was defective. So, when he went to Yarralumla at lunchtime on the 11th of November 1975, he recommended a half Senate election. The problem with that is that a half Senate election wasn't going to get the Budget passed. The Budget had to be passed. And if you don't have a Budget, if you don't have supply, you cannot govern the country. That's a fundamental principle of Westminster parliamentary democracy. If you can't fund things, you can't be in power, and you need to recommend a general election. And he didn't do that. And so, he had this half Senate idea, which, even if the half Senate election was held, money would have run out. Public servants wouldn't have been paid. The country would have been in chaos, and I guarantee you he would not have emerged with a Senate majority at the end of that. There's no evidence in any of the polling to suggest he would have got the numbers in a half Senate election. But tracking back, in the weeks prior, he didn't do any consultation with his colleagues, very little. He ignored people who wanted to talk to him about it. He didn't do any contingency planning. I was shocked to see memo, after memo, after memo from public servants saying you are at a Dismissal risk here. Here's a number of things you can do: Talk to John Kerr about the crisis. Don't be condescending to him. Don't refer to him as “my Viceroy” and say and say on national television that “he must do as I say, and he has no other option.” Well, of course, he has other options. He has these reserve powers. And the reserve powers include all sorts of things like, you know, dissolving parliament for an election, terminating a minister. Of course, there's all other reserve powers too. So, he ignored all these memos from the public servants. He didn't talk to his staff. I talked to John Mant, who was his Chief of Staff in 1975 a few years ago, and I said to John, “John, give me an idea about the planning in the office, the discussions about the crisis, how is it going to be resolved, the character studies of the different players, what are their options?” And he just laughed. And he said, “Troy, you've got to understand, there was none of that. We didn't do any of it.” He said, “By November 1975 Goff thought that pretty much everyone was and the term he used was a pissant.” And “the pissant group was large and growing,” and John Kerr was in that group. So, there was no contingency planning. And of course, there are many warning signs. Elizabeth Reid, his Women's Affairs Advisor, said “you can't trust Kerr.” Clifton Pugh, who painted his official portrait, was painting Kerr's portrait at the time, and said “you can't trust Kerr” because of things he'd been saying during the joint sitting about how much he disliked Whitlam and so on. And there are other people too, including Bill Hayden. Can you believe it? Five days before the Dismissal, 6 November, Bill Hayden, the Treasurer, goes out to Yarralumla to brief Kerr on alternative financing arrangements. Right? Instead of a Budget, they were going to do some kind of loan scheme with private banks. Anyway, during that discussion, he started to get very worried, because Kerr started saying, “you know, if there's an election, Whitlam shouldn't be underestimated. When his back's against the wall, he can fight like a lion.” And Hayden, thinking “this is very odd behaviour.” And Hayden had been a police constable in Queensland, and he had his “coppers instinct,” and that went off. And so rather than go straight to the airport and fly back to Brisbane, he went to Parliament House. He extracted Whitlam from a meeting, and he told him, “Gough, I don't trust him. I think he's going to sack us.” And Whitlam looked at him and said, “Comrade, he wouldn't have the guts.” So that was five days before, so it's a tragedy.

And then on the day, can we talk about that Verity?

Verity Firth: Yes, go - 

Troy Bramston: On the day of the Dismissal. So, he goes to Government House to recommend this half Senate election. There's no public servants with him. There's no staff. It's just him and his driver. He's dismissed, and he goes straight to the Lodge, and he eats a steak for lunch. He doesn't tell any of any of his staff, straight away, any of his ministers, doesn't tell any senators. Instead, he starts to summon some people to him. His speech writer, head of the Prime Minister's department, the Speaker, Gordon Scholes, a bunch of other people, and they're losing time to develop a remedial plan of action.

By the time the Senate resumes at two o'clock, no one has told any of the Labour senators that they've been dismissed. The Budget bills come on to be debated, as they usually would, and Labour thinks it's a great, this is going to be a great victory, because the Coalition have indicated they'd be prepared to vote for it. So, the voting takes place. It takes literally two minutes, and the Budget's passed. And Doug McClelland, who was the Manager of Opposition, ah, Manager of Government Business, he's about to turn 100 and I interviewed him for the book, and Doug said that he thought it was, he thought they had prevailed. They had triumphed in the great constitutional crisis of 1975 and he said, “Send word to the Prime Minister's office. We've got the budget passed.” Well, when they went around to the Prime Minister's Office, they're packing up. So, you know this was, this is a tragedy, and it's farcical as well, and it's just the behaviour is inexplicable. I mean, two reactions are important to show you Whitlam’s personality. The first person he told, other than the driver, was Margaret, who was in Sydney. And Margaret said, “You should have torn up the letter, slapped him across the face, and told him to pull himself together.” Now that's Margaret. Of course. He gave that short shrift, and then when I talked to Paul Keating about it, he said he would have put Kerr under house arrest. He would have said, “You're abusing a kingly power you no longer have. I don't recognise this. You've breached your status and your standing in your office, and you're under house arrest.” And he would have contacted the Palace and said, “I've got a rogue Governor General here. He needs to be replaced.” And he would have told the Senate, of course, I mean, he didn't convene the Cabinet, he didn't convene the Caucus, he didn't tell the Senate Leader, Ken Wriedt. It's bizarre behaviour, you know, and there were things that could have been done that afternoon to frustrate the Dismissal.

Verity Firth: So, talk us through that. Because the thing that I found most fascinating about your chapter was this complete focus on the House of Representatives, and this almost just completely forgetting about it - the Senate. So, there was no, as you've already described, capacity or attempt to communicate with the Senate, but there was also just, almost as if they didn't even consider the Senate as important in this. So, talk us through what could have happened that would have frustrated the Dismissal.

Troy Bramston: Yeah, Whitlam had contempt for the Senate as an institution. He wanted it to be abolished, and that actually used to be Labour Party policy right up until a few years before the 1972 election. So, he didn't pay any attention to the Senate - he regarded as a lower grade body. So, it was never really on his radar, is what his staff told me. But there are a number of things that could have been done. So, you know, they could have simply suspended the sitting. So, Justin O'Byrne is a Tasmanian Labour senator. He's the president of the Senate. He could have just resumed after lunch and walked out of the chair and got on a plane and gone back to Tasmania, and the Senate is suspended, so I can't deal with any bills. They could have gagged debate. They could have guillotine debate. These are parliamentary manoeuvres, but essentially, they could have delayed it. And so, Doug McClellan said to me, you know, we could have delayed passage of the Budget. And now Gough Whitlam used to always say “this was a red herring. We were never going to vote against our own Budget.” Well, they didn't have to vote against it. They just had to delay it. And the reason that's important is because one of Malcolm Fraser's conditions for accepting a commission as Prime Minister was that he would get supply passed. And so, if they could have frustrated that, he then had a no confidence motion passed in the House, which your mother heard on the radio, then there's a different scenario you can see developing. Fraser doesn't have the confidence of the house. He doesn't have supply. The places is in flux, and Whitlam had the confidence of the house, but couldn't get supply either.

So, you can see how the Dismissal may have unraveled or been frustrated in some way. And Whitlam also phoned the Palace. He phoned the Palace, and he spoke to the Queen's private secretary, Martin Charteris, and told him what had happened. And Charteris said, “What would you like me to do?” And Whitlam baulked. This is important. He baulked. It shows you Whitlam’s personality. He said, “I just thought you should know.” But if he was Keating, he would have said, “Get the Queen out of bed (because it's 2am) and tell her to sack the Governor General.” So different strategies, you know, could have played out differently. And so, it's, it's kind of sad in a way, to have gone through all this and examine it. And of course, what happens is, the most memorable part of that day is the speech on the steps. And I was able to discover some may know that in, when the 1974 Parliament had been dissolved, Whitlam had struck out from Paul Hasluck's prorogation. Notice of prorogation was that this phrase, and “God Save the Queen,” Whitlam said, “we'll have none of that.” And he crossed it out. I've seen the draft. And so, what was read out in the same ceremony by Sir David Smith a year earlier had no “God Save the Queen.” But of course, when parliament was dissolved on November 11, 1975 Kerr and Smith decided to reinstate “God Save the Queen.” So that's the last thing David Smith said. And when I interviewed David, he said he didn't know that Whitlam was standing behind him at that moment. And so the reason Whitlam says, as you all know well, “may we say, God Save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor General,” is because it was the last thing that David Smith had said, and so he leaped on that, on that phrase, Whitlam was cranky that it was the most famous thing he ever said, and it was not in the Hansard, it was because it was outside parliament. And Graham Freudenberg, his speechwriter, who I was very close to, he said to me, “he was always annoyed that people used to congratulate him for writing the greatest political speech ever,” and of course, he had nothing to do with it.

Verity Firth: So, there was obviously people like my mother heading into the streets and protesting, but there wasn't a general strike and there wasn't mass civil disobedience. Do you think, firstly, do you think that would have made a difference, because I know that there was differences of opinion within the Labour both the Caucus and the union movement, about whether or not general strike should be called, but would that have made a difference? But if an equivalent constitutional rupture happened today, how different do you think the public reaction would be, or not?

Troy Bramston: Look, it's hard to know. We're in a different era, social media, you know. I worry about, you know, our democracy these days. I mean, there's been polling that shows that a quarter of young people under 30 are not sure that democracy is the best form of government, a quarter, one in four. So, I'm worried about, you know, what could happen if we're in a similar situation, but going back to what happened in 1975: so, Bob Hawke's the ACTU president. He's the, also the Labour Party president. He's sitting down to a steak in Melbourne when he hears –

Verity Firth: Everyone eats steak.

Troy Bramston: - When he hears, when he hears the call, and he's told by the restauranteur, and he got on a plane and went straight to Canberra. I should say, of the many people that I have interviewed about the Dismissal, I also interviewed Gary McDonald, who was Norman Gunston. He was sitting down to a Chinese lunch in Sydney when he got the call. So, he got to, he got to Canberra too, and he changed into His Norman Gunston outfit on the plane and went there, and you know about that. But back to the strike.

So, Hawke was under a lot of pressure, but he felt - this is a serious point - He felt that if he had have done that, it would have been “very dangerous.” That's the words he used to me when recalling it. And so, he thought that was the wrong solution. He says, “here we are talking about the maintenance of parliamentary democracy. The last thing we want to do is inciting people to riot.” But there were riots. There were protests in all the capital cities. Liberal Party headquarters was stoned, John Kerr's house in North Sydney was graffitied. There was violence, there were arrests. It happened anyway, but not on the scale of a national strike. So, Hawke was under a lot of pressure to do that, but he maintained that was the right decision. I don't think it would have changed anything and what happened was Labour Party misread the mood, and so, you know, one of the things I was able to uncover was, was Rod Cameron, who was Labor's pollster, he had done some research saying that, if there's going to be an election, because this is what the opposition were calling for, don't think that how they've managed this crisis, or the blocking of supply will have any impact on an election. And so, what happened in the election campaign is Labor's talking about the maintenance of democracy. Malcolm Fraser is talking about turning on the lights: about unemployment, about inflation, about stability, and Whitlam and the Labour Party misread the public mood, and there's no correlation, actually, between the election result and supporting the Dismissal. Most polling’s show, all the polling showed people opposed blocking of supply and oppose the Dismissal. But when they were given a chance to keep the Whitlam government or put the Whitlam government back in power, they weren't going to do that.

Verity Firth: Yeah. That’s very interesting.

Troy Bramston: So, so it's interesting to sort of go back and look at what was happening in that period after the Dismissal.

Verity Firth: Well, I was saying again, in the green room, you can tell we had a good conversation, that that was when my parents joined the Labour Party. As soon as he was dismissed, they basically joined the Labour Party, and then they campaigned for the next, however, many months, for the election, and that, because they lived in Canberra, they were absolutely convinced that he would be elected in a landslide, and it was an absolute shock to them when that was not the case. And I think it's a, it is an interesting lesson about stability and perhaps even the Australian psyche around government. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting what you were saying about the, that those changes were still quite popular in the electorate, but perhaps they had seen too much tumultuousness over the last three years, or?

Troy Bramston: Well, we should know briefly, Verity, that it was a very chaotic government. I mean, there are a lot of scandals: Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi, Rex Connor and the loans affair, and there were others. And you know, it was a chaotic government. There were, there were three treasurers after Gough Whitlam, who was the first treasurer for those few weeks. And it was a messy period. And, you know, I like telling the story about how Whitlam ran. He, Whitlam had contempt for Caucus, right? He thought Caucus was a handbrake on his power. He'd rather not have to deal with any dissent or any questions, or any questions or anything like that. He just wanted to get on with his agenda. You know, when he would pass a key policy through cabinet, he would pull out the party platform and tick it off one by one, because he had business to transact. He had stuff to do. He didn't want to worry with a Cabinet meeting or a Caucus meeting. And there were a lot of rowdy Cabinet meetings. And when I talked to the Cabinet ministers, one of the last Joe Berinson, told me the great story that one day there had been some complaints in Cabinet about the political management of the government and how Whitlam was travelling. And Whitlam quickly tampered down the discussion and said, “Listen, you blokes,” as he's scanning the room, “this government has one thing going for it, and you're looking at it” and so he just, he just treated people with contempt. And so, the public saw this. And you know, it was one of the famous things. His Labour Party supporters in 1975 became experts on sport because they would never read the front page of the tabloid newspapers, only the back, because the news was so dramatic and so scandalous.

Verity Firth: Because you talk about Murdoch having lunch as well on the day of the Dismissal and being very excited about the Dismissal.

Troy Bramston: Yeah well, he, like all the media, had called for the government to go. The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times, The Financial Review. The media were aligned against the Labour government and calling for an election, calling for even for a resignation. I mean, The Age was the first newspaper in October, 1975 to say Whitlam should resign, and the editor who wrote that he had a heart attack the next day and died. So, there's these sort of strange stories that you come across. You know, when you're when you're researching these, these books. But yes, I found out that Rupert Murdoch was in Sydney, in Holt Street, Surry Hills, where I work, was there today. And the news came from Canberra to Mark Day, who was the editor of the Daily Mirror, that Whitlam had been sacked. And he immediately said, hold the front page, which is what every editor loves, loves to be able to say. The headline of The Mirror was “Kerr sacks Whitlam.” They had to have that reset because it's an afternoon newspaper. And then he went into the boardroom where Rupert Murdoch was having lunch with some executives and told them, he just burst open the door. And Mark Day said, Kerr sacked Whitlam. And there was a sort of stunned silence. And the chairman of the company, Ken May threw his napkin in the air and did a “whoop,” he said. I said, “Well, what did Rupert Murdoch do?” And he said, “he just looked at me, got up out of his chair and ran out of the room and got on the phone.” So, it's great to have these stories. And then I was actually shocked to find that back then, they used to print the newspaper in the basement of the building. They now print out at Chullora, and as the newspapers were on the backs of the trucks coming out of the basement of the building to go to all the newsagents, trade unionists and students - wouldn't be from this university, but probably from that rabble rousing Sydney University - tore the newspapers off the trucks and set them on fire in the streets.

Verity Firth:

There might be some people here tonight who were doing that.

Troy Bramston: Yes. We're taking your names later.

Verity Firth: So, we're about to have audience questions, and I know people will be keen. I'm just going to ask one last question before we come to audience questions. And I know this is a bit of a hypothetical, but if Whitlam was observing Australian politics in 2026 especially around areas that he did such great reforms around, you know, race, education, public debate. What do you think would delight him, and what do you think would trouble him?

Troy Bramston: Look, I think he'd be pleased that so much of his agenda remains in place. You know, a lot of this was fiercely contested, whether it's, you know, universal health care. You know, the coalition voted against it: universal healthcare, which is now Medicare, at the joint sitting of parliament in 1974 and said it would “ruin society.” Well, it's now bipartisan in Medicare, and you know, that's cherished by Australians, so he'd be proud of many things like that that have remained in place. The legal reforms, you know, the discrimination reforms, equal opportunity reforms, no fault divorce, all those things. The National Honours System just announced, just had a 50th anniversary last year. So, he'd be very proud of all of those things.

But I think he'd probably be a little bit disappointed that we've lost a lot of courage in pursuing reform. So, he'd be pleased that there's a Labour Government. He'd be pleased that Anthony Albanese is a reelected Prime Minister and pretty dominant with 94 seats in the parliament. But he'd want to see some more courage. And it's not that they're a bad government, but they're not a very courageous one. They're not a very bold reformist government. So, he'd be looking to see more things happening, and more risks being taken, and more bravery, I think. And then the next point to make about that is that you need to be able to sell reforms, right? And so, he used to do a lot of that: radio, one of the first Prime Ministers to use talkback radio; but also television; newspaper interviews. You got to make the case, and it's not just a media release, it's not just a tweet or a Facebook post, it's continual advocacy - explaining why you're doing things and linking policies to values and to philosophies, and talking about why this matters to Australia. So, I think he'd be a little bit disappointed that there's not a bigger vision, and that applies across the political spectrum. I think a lot of politicians in the last decade or two have become reform shy, and he'd be looking for something bolder.

Verity Firth: That's really interesting. Okay, so now's the chance for audience. I like this one: “Is the Dismissal still relevant to high school students today? Should it still be part of the curriculum?” or perhaps it is part of the curriculum.

Troy Bramston: I think it is part of the curriculum. In fact, I think I've done some presentations to high school students, and they tend to discover that they tend to talk about Menzies and Whitlam as to example Prime Ministers these days. So yeah, it is relevant, because this was a convulsive moment for our parliamentary democracy. The political system was pushed to the brink, and I think there's a recognition today that this was not the way to run a country. And so, we need to keep telling ourselves what happened and why it was wrong, so we make sure that it doesn't happen again. You know, and I interviewed Sam Mostyn, the Governor General, over several months, and wrote about that in the in the Weekend Australian, and she came out more forcefully than any previous Governor General, saying she would never do what John Kerr did. So, there's a recognition that what happened was wrong, but we have to keep telling ourselves why it was wrong so that it doesn't happen again.

Verity Firth: One of the questions from the audience was, “what basis did Keating have to say Kerr had no kingly power?” Was it just that it hadn't been used in centuries? Or?

Troy Bramston: There is a Westminster tradition, of course, that the Governor General acts on the advice of his ministers. Now, he does have reserve powers that can be used, but though his argument is that they were used deceptively. And so, there's this Walter Bagehot formulation, the great English writer who wrote a book called The English Constitution, and he wrote that the Sovereign, so in this case, the Representative of the Sovereign has three rights: the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn. And so these are, you know, we are a system that operates, you know, 250 years of Westminster democracy, but we operate largely on convention, and this is a important convention that a Governor General shouldn't deceive his Prime Minister, act secretively and in that way, so that he's kind of looking to those traditions about how the powers can be exercised. I should quickly note that I've interviewed the staff in 10 Downing Street at the time who were working for Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister. They told me they were completely shocked. They thought these powers didn't exist, and said “they don't exist in the United Kingdom, and the Queen would never, and has never exercised them.” So why can they be exercised here but not there? So that's kind of the argument that Keating is looking to, those conventions.

Verity Firth: Another question, which you told me you thought would probably come up, is someone's asked us, “How much involvement do you believe the CIA had in this Dismissal?”

Troy Bramston: I can't do an event without the CIA coming up. Unfortunately, the answer is, none. Look, there was a bit of a security crisis in the relationship. The Pine Gap lease, the security facility was coming up for renewal. There'd been some strong disagreements between Whitlam and Nixon about the Vietnam War and other issues. But I did interview Henry Kissinger - one of the last interviews he did for the book. He was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the time in the US. He said that there was never any plan to junk the Alliance. He said there were tensions, there were disagreements, but we’re too important to the Americans to think they were ever going to sever the military cooperation, the intelligence sharing, or the Alliance structure. And there's just no documentary evidence that the CIA had anything to do with it. And one of the other things I was able to uncover was a couple of chapters from a draft book that John Kerr was working on at the time he died, and he was very cranky with this suggestion that the CIA had anything to do it. He said “they had nothing to do with it. It was all me. I did it. I needed no encouragement, no persuasion.” It was all him. And there's just no documentary proof for that. There's a couple of odd characters who you know, don't have a lot of credibility or made claims, but there's no documentary proof, and it quickly - a few years ago, I was able to get the daily Presidential Brief that's given to the President every day about a summary of security and foreign policy matters. President gets it every day. It comes in a special folder, and for many, many years, it said the content said: Australia - then you went to the page, and it talked about. Kerr dismissing Whitlam, and the last paragraph was redacted. So, I thought, “I gotta find this out.” So, I made a request to the CIA about 10 years ago to get that unredacted. And finally comes in the mail, literally in the mail, open up the envelope, and there it is, unredacted, and it said they told Gerald Ford that they had nothing to do with this, didn't know anything about it, were completely shocked and very surprised about it.

Verity Firth: Then why did they redact that?

Troy Bramston: Because I think they're embarrassed that they didn't know anything about it, and didn't want us to know. That's why it was redacted. Now, of course, conspiracy theorists will say, “of course they would say that,” but look, there's no documentary proof.

Verity Firth: Here's a question about modern environments. “Do you think Whitlam would be so effective today with social media and click bait, and just the whole environment we're in?”

Troy Bramston: I think good politicians adapt to technology. Robert Menzies was very good on radio and became very good on television. Arthur Calwell and Doc Evatt his opposition leaders were terrible on television. They didn't adapt to that. So good politicians managed to adapt and use these new mediums very effectively. We see that - you all know that - on who's good on social media and who's not. Whitlam's staff in the final years of his life told me that one of their regrets was that he never used a computer. So, he didn't have a computer on his desk when I used to go and visit him at 100 William Street. But he loved, he lived his life in the assemblage of details. You know, he would hand index volumes of Hansard every week. Every flight that he took, he recorded in a log book from 1942 up until his death. So, he loved recording information, checking things, reading things. And it's a shame that he could never do that using Google or any other computer based software, but I imagine he would have adapted and been able to use it effectively.

Verity Firth: We've got a real life question.

Speaker 1: Just to follow up on that, Troy –

Troy Bramston: CIA?

Speaker 1: Not about CIA, yeah, not interested. I'm interested in the concept of the Great Leader - has that passed from our politics?

Troy Bramston: I hope not. Look, I mean, a lot of academics don't like the “great man,” theory of history, right? I believe in the “great person,” theory of history, because I really do believe that, yes, there are a lot of forces that shape history, or it could be institutions, it could be social movements, but leaders really matter, and leaders can change history. And the Whitlam example is really an example like no other where, you know, can you really imagine Fred Daly leading the Labour Party to power in 1972, and unleashing a reform revolution. No, you can't. So, Whitlam mattered, and so I'm a believer in this theory that great leaders can shape history. And in any organisation, it could be a business, it could be a sporting group. One person can turn around an organisation and change it fundamentally. So, it doesn't mean that other things don't matter, but leadership is really important. And I think if you look at often election results going back 100 years, you analyse the leaders, and you pretty much would think, “Okay, well, that leader made a better case for why they should be elected.” And so, leadership matters, but I do worry that we're not, we're not producing the kind of people. And, you know, I talked to Bob Hawke about this, and he was worried that a lot of people weren't going into politics to make a difference. They were choosing other professions. They thought universities, charities, international aid organisations were places you could make a difference. He was worried about people not joining trade unions to make a difference. So yes, I worry about that, but I think there are a lot of well-motivated people. I'm optimistic about the next generation. A lot of them aren’t choosing politics, but they're choosing other institutions to be a leader in, and I think that's important.

Speaker 2: I'm a younger person who's involved in local politics, in the Labour Party, in my branch, but I'm not involved in Young Llabour, and it's partly because I've been concerned that it's become sort of a “rubber stamp operation,” you know, and there isn't a lot of creativity. I'm just wondering, what sort of culture should we, should I be trying to foster in Young Labour if I want to get involved where there's a bit more creativity and sort of ambition, but not just political ambition?

Troy Bramston: Well, it's a pretty fiery organisation when we were in it,

Verity Firth: When we were in it!

Troy Bramston: Young Labour, pretty creative and innovative. I mean, I don't really know the answer to that question. I mean, I would hope that any political youth organisation, whether it's the Greens or the Nationals or the Liberals or Labour, are producing young people who have ideas, are creative, are innovative, are bold, are prepared to stand up for their beliefs and advocate things because, you know, young people are needed to make political parties relevant. So, I would hope that that is okay, and people aren't sacrificing their beliefs for their career, thinking it's better to sort of toe the line rather than step out of line every now and then. So, I would encourage you to speak up and get active and say what you think, but I hope that doesn't damage your career.

Speaker 3: You've outlined a very sort of boring upbringing of Gough Whitlam, yet he's become the great reformer. Where did he get all these ideas to reform things, from sewerage to the divorce laws to many, you know, all those changes coming from one person?

Troy Bramston: Yeah, good question.

Speaker 3: Where did, that's the thing that I sort of find hard, to get the growing up as a young guy to being the person that he was, you know, like, it's a big change.

Troy Bramston: It's a good question. I mean, I did note his father. So, his father's a Commonwealth public servant. He became crown solicitor. And so, his father's involved in public service, involved in the world of ideas and trying to make the world a better place. His father was very religious. He's involved in a number of international religious organisations. So, he had a broad humanitarian outlook. So, he no doubt that was, you know, infused into him, living in Canberra, as I say, seeing a national capital and what a government could do. It could build bridges, it could build roads, it could build hospitals, it could build schools that didn't happen anywhere else for the federal government in Australia in those days. So that's an important part of his upbringing. But for me, which we haven't talked about, which was really, really striking for me, was, you know, he had been to World War Two and was very involved in campaigning in his squadron for the 1944 War Powers Referendum. So the Curtin government wanted to extend wartime powers to a range of areas: social policy and economic policy and so on, to help reconstruct the nation after war. That referendum was lost, but it galvanised his interest in politics again, about what a government could do. But at a very practical level, what I learned was Whitlam living in Cronulla first, and then Cabramatta. So, he moved to Cronulla, where I grew up and went to school from 1947 to 1957, so what he saw there was no sewage, no local swimming pool, no local high school for his sons to attend, no general hospital. Can you believe it? In the whole of the Sutherland Shire. And so, he saw all these things, and he lived it. It's his lived experience. And so, when he moved to Cabramatta in 1957 when his seat boundary changed, these inequalities between the city and the suburbs were even magnified greater. So, so he lived it. He lived what a lot of people, young people, particularly baby boomers, who had moved to the suburbs, were experiencing: housing shortages and so on like that. So, he's an amalgam of all of these things, but Cronulla and Cabramatta are really important in being the crucible for the Whitlam government agenda across everything health, education, urban affairs.

Speaker 3: But he never wrote, you never discovered anything of his notebooks or university lec- anything where he's documented any of these ideas at all, had you?

Troy Bramston: Well, I actually, I did. I mean, there's a lot of letters that he's writing to his parents and to Margaret when he's away at war, or when he's a young barrister in Sydney, talking about a lot of these issues and what sort of lodging in his mind. And then interestingly, in Cronulla, you know, he runs for the local council in 1948 and 1950 and runs for the state seat of Sutherland in 1950 and loses all three contests. So, it was really interesting to look at the local newspapers, which don't exist, you know, readily available anymore. And he's talking about all of these issues. He's talking about bus stops and hospitals and sporting fields and swimming pools and local amenities and all these things. So, it's all there. It's all there in the lead up to 1972

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Speaker 4: Thanks for asking that. Mine was very much the same question, how does a white man with quite a lot of privilege? So, if you want to expand a bit on that, in particular land rights, and you know the great statement that you know, “none of us are, we're all diminished if we live in a country where Aboriginal people are diminished,” that that someone at that time would come to that, is there anything more of the genesis on that? And again, women's rights and multiculturalism? Any thoughts on those?

Troy Bramston: Yeah, look, it's also really interesting. And Verity and I were talking a little bit about this earlier, Whitlam wasn't a political activist. So Jim Cairns was a political activist, okay? Whitlam wasn't. He wasn't at the front lines of the Vietnam moratorium marches. He wasn't joining hands with women arguing for equality. He wasn't going to the land rights marches, he wasn't doing any of that, but he was an ally, and he saw it through a different prism. He saw it through a prism of equality and opportunity and anti-discrimination. And so that's where he saw it. And so, they're the policies that he tried to implement.

And you know, some of the women that I'd interviewed, like Elizabeth Evatt, who he appointed to run the Family Court and be an Industrial Relations Commissioner, and Marie Coleman, who ran the Social Welfare Commission, and Elizabeth Reid the first Woman's Advisor to any head of government in the world. They all said, you know, “he wasn't a feminist,” but he was like minded with their agenda. He saw it through a different, different way, saw it through inequality and opportunity. So, he's seeing a lot of these things happening. And yes, he's being informed by his MPs, by social movements, about what he's reading in journals and newspapers. So, he's coming at it from a slightly different way. And so, he very legalistic too. And you know, when he was in World War Two, he was stationed in the Northern Territory and in the western in Western Australia for a while, and so he saw a lot of indigenous people. And he told the story in one of his letters to Margaret that there was a young indigenous man who wanted to be involved with the squadron. He was, he was a RAF navigator and had helped them with their camp, and he wanted to join the squadron, and he wasn't allowed, because obviously he couldn't be in the Air Force, so he saw the discrimination and he wanted to correct it.

Verity Firth: He obviously had a flexible enough mind like to be able to actually empathise and see injustice. It's really interesting.

Speaker 5: My question is something like that. I was very interested to hear that Margaret gave very definite advice, and he definitely did not accept that advice. Was that, excuse me, was that usual a) for her? Was she somebody who gave a lot of definite advice, and b), was it usual for him that he didn't accept it?

Troy Bramston: Yes, it was. Look, it's a very interesting relationship. You know, I met Margaret quite a few times and talked to her and saw them in public quite a few times. A lot of affection there. But, you know, they were, had a bit of a fiery relationship, too, and had some strong disagreements. And you know, many times I saw Gough give a speech that would extend into the second hour, and she would start banging the table or something like that. So, they had a great partnership. But, you know, it's interesting how Margaret conceived her role. She actually gave interviews where, where she said, you know, “I'm not here to tell my husband what to do. I don't try to change his views. I share my views with him, but I don't press them upon him.” So, she's a different generation of woman, but she's very more much more progressive than he is, and one of the things she decided to do was she was doing things like she was hosting TV shows, she was on Beauty and the Beast panels, she was writing a diary for Women's Day. She's doing all sorts of stuff - very prominent person and very well respected and very well liked. And Labour Party polling showed that she was essentially a secret weapon, and Whitlam was advised to spend as much time with her on the campaign trail as possible, because she would soften his image.

But I'll tell you an interesting story that when Whitlam was giving his first press conference, Margaret decided to give her first press conference. This is after they got elected, and she tried to follow the Eleanor Roosevelt model, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt had a collection of women journalists she'd talked to, and Margaret said all these things. Like, you know, she was okay with drug use, she was okay with men and women living together before marriage. And that was a huge scandal, and Gough had to actually put out a statement saying he didn't believe that men and women should be allowed to live together before marriage. So, she's very progressive on lots of issues.

Speaker 5: I remember that.

Speaker 6: I've just seen, like recently, some footage of Whitlam talking about Israel and stuff like that. And I'm just thinking, what do you think? How would he handle the current situation, the Gaza thing, and from an Australian perspective?

Troy Bramston: It's very difficult for me to extrapolate from what someone who's been dead for more than 10 years might think about a hotly contested issue like that. I would say, though, that he was always of the belief that the Palestinian people had a right to their self-determination, and had a right to have their own homeland and their own state. He was always of that view, and he did find the Israeli intransigence on some of these issues in the 1970s to be quite frustrating, and there was a little bit of a division within the Labour Party about this. I mean, Bob Hawke was very, very strong Israel supporter. And it didn't mean that he was against Palestinian people, but he was at a very, known as a very, very strong Israel supporter. And Whitlam had to, a number of times, say publicly that Hawke didn't represent the Labour Party's views on these issues. So, he was very much in favour of what we would now call a two-state solution, and for them to have a right to their own, their own state. I mean, I can't, I can't add any more than that, other than he'd probably still be arguing for that today.

Verity Firth: Thank you for that and thank you everyone for your thoughtful questions and your generosity this evening.

Applause

So, at UNSW, we believe conversations like this matter not because they give us neat answers, but because they challenge us to think more deeply about the society we want to be part of and our responsibility within it. So, if I could leave you with just one reflection from tonight, it's this: join community groups, take part in campaigning and advocate for causes that mean something to you, that will enhance the lives of other Australians.

Whitlam's story reminds us that change is rarely neat or comfortable. It demands conviction, risk and sometimes failure, but it also reminds us that ideas matter, and that agency belongs not only to those in office, but to all of us. The challenge then is what we choose to do next. Not everyone needs to enter politics to make a difference, and I hope tonight has encouraged you to stay curious, to engage generously with opposing views and to participate in our democratic story, whether through your work, your studies, your communities, or the conversations you choose to have. So, thank you again for joining us tonight at Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New. Please join me in thanking Troy Bramston for such a wonderful conversation.

Applause

Troy Bramston: Thank you.

UNSW Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. For more information, visit unswcentreforideas.com and don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.