The personal animosity which flowed from the manner of Gorton’s removal as prime minister was the most intense that I have ever seen in politics. Gorton never forgave Fraser for his perceived betrayal. In March 1975, when Malcolm Fraser was elected Leader of the Liberal Party, Gorton, who had voted for Snedden, immediately the result of the ballot was announced, walked out of the party room, slamming the door behind him, and never returned to the room again. In the 1975 election, sadly, the former Liberal Prime Minister contested a Senate seat from the ACT as an independent.
On two occasions I witnessed the refusal, some 30 years after the events of early 1971, of John Gorton to speak to Malcolm Fraser. One was at a Liberal Party dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House to mark the 50th anniversary of the election of the Menzies Government, when Malcolm Fraser, John Gorton and I, with our wives, were left together as the last entrants to the dinner. Janette looked after the Gortons; I entertained Malcolm and Tamie. The other occasion was a formal dinner hosted by the Queen and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace, where the six of us plus Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke and their wives, Margaret and Blanche respectively, were also present. This dinner was one of a series of events honouring the centenary of the passage through the British Parliament of the Australian Constitution Act. With typical Buckingham Palace efficiency, the seating arrangements made appropriate allowance for all sensitivities, and no difficulties arose. I have reflected since that Her Majesty would not have minded Gorton’s intransigence, because he was the only one of her former Australian prime ministers who would have voted for her in the republic referendum in October 1999!1
Thirty-one years after Gorton’s deposing as leader, Tom Hughes, his former Attorney General, delivered the eulogy at Gorton’s state memorial service in Sydney. It consisted, largely, of a blow-by-blow account of what he saw as Malcolm Fraser’s dishonourable role in Gorton’s downfall. In the eulogy Hughes traversed many of the points of criticism of Gorton contained in Fraser’s resignation speech, rebutting all of them. It was an amazing performance, and largely reflected Hughes’ loyalty towards Gorton.
Towards the end of 1971, Tom Hughes presented me with an unexpected opportunity to obtain preselection for a safe seat in federal parliament. Disillusioned with federal politics, he had decided to retire from parliament and return full-time to the Sydney bar. McMahon had sacked him as Attorney General. Few people saw this as anything other than a pay-off to Gorton’s opponents within the party. It was an unwise and spiteful act. Hughes had been an extremely good Attorney General; on merit he should have been left there. His seat of Berowra was very safe and attracted a huge field. I lived a fair distance from the area, however had lots of Liberal Party contacts there, including my eldest brother, Wal, who was the president of one of the local branches.
Several people encouraged me to stand, including some who wished me out of the way of their own ambitions in other seats they believed would become vacant through retirements within the next few years. The party was fast reaching a stage when there would be a batch of sitting members retiring in seats like Bennelong, North Sydney, Mackellar, Bradfield and Wentworth. These were safe Liberal seats, and a once-in-a-generation cornucopia of opportunity for those wanting to get into federal parliament.
The fact that I did not live in Berowra at the time was not a problem. I had not long married and it would be quite easy for Janette and me to move to the electorate. My pitch to the preselectors was very much that, although young, I had a lot of political experience on my side. Preselection campaigns then were not as ‘full on’ as they are now. Too much overt campaigning could be counter-productive. Making sure that, on the day, the speech delivered and answers to questions were the best possible meant everything — even more so than now.
I didn’t win the preselection; it went to a local resident, Dr Harry Edwards, who was a professor of economics at Macquarie University. It became apparent prior to the ballot that many local branch members wanted somebody strongly identified with the electorate. I did, however, poll much better than anyone expected. I finished third behind Edwards and the local state member, Jim Cameron.
This surprised a lot of people, particularly given the high profile of other aspirants, such as the Commonwealth Solicitor General, Bob Ellicott QC, and Dr Peter Baume, a highly respected consultant physician. They both won seats in parliament at the 1974 federal election. The outcome boosted my stocks in the party. Incidentally, my brother Wal was precluded by party rules from sitting on the preselection committee. The Liberal Party in New South Wales, to its credit, is a lot stricter about family influences than is the Labor Party.
My morale-boosting performance in Berowra was followed by an unexpected request to assist the Prime Minister, Bill McMahon, in the two months immediately prior to the 1972 election. By that time I was metropolitan vice-president of the party in New South Wales. I was asked to go full-time onto his staff, to assist with liaison between his office and the party organisation as well as provide some campaign advice and help out with speechwriting. After some arm-twisting by my two partners (one of them kept saying, ‘John, it’s time'), I secured the necessary leave from my practice and hurled myself into what turned out to be the final weeks of 23 years of Coalition Government in Australia.
I travelled around Australia with McMahon and, despite some hilarious and erratic moments, took from the experience a healthy respect for the dignified manner in which he accepted defeat on 2 December 1972. Janette and I were both with him at his home in Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill, and he showed a lot of grace under pressure. Later, we drowned our sorrows with those great Liberal stalwarts John and Sue Atwill, at their nearby Woollahra home. Whitlam, despite the length of time the Coalition had been in office and the skill of Labor’s advertising campaign, won by only nine seats. As was the case in 2007, the swing in Western Australia was to the Coalition and not to Labor.
Having spent so long in the wilderness, it was natural that Whitlam and his colleagues would luxuriate in the very experience of being in government. Yet shrewder political heads would have detected warning signs in the narrowness of his victory. It was not the clear rejection of the Coalition that the Fraser defeat represented in 1983, and it was narrower than Kevin Rudd’s victory in 2007. And on the other side, of course, it was nothing like the thumping victories achieved by the Coalition in 1975 and 1996. The truth is, despite all the hype and mythmaking of a generation, the Australian public barely thought that it was time in 1972.
The obverse of this was that a narrow defeat for the Coalition left it with a false sense of complacency about the need for fundamental policy reassessment. Both the ALP and the Coalition went to the watershed election of 1972 on the assumption that the good economic times would continue to roll on. In his Blacktown policy speech, Gough Whitlam declared that Labor would fund its vast public sector expansion from ‘the huge and automatic increase in Commonwealth revenue'.2 He fantasised about annual growth rates of 6 or 7 per cent a year, displaying fearful ignorance of the economic task ahead. When the economic upheaval flowing from the quadrupling of oil prices and the collapse of the old Bretton Woods-inspired fixed exchange system hit Australia, the responses of the ALP Government would massively aggravate rather than mitigate their effects. Labor would be hounded from office in 1975, with its economic reputation in tatters.
The early 1970s were a period of huge global economic change and turmoil, yet the two major political parties in Australia contrived in their different ways to ignore this. Whitlam had no coherent economic plan for government; that is why he proved completely unable to handle economic adversity when it confronted him.
Most in the Coalition felt that having only just lost, there was no need for a full policy appraisal. There were plenty of reviews, but there was no fundamental examination of such things as the heavy regulation of the Australian economy, our high tariffs or our increasingly out-of-date taxation system. As for any questioning of centralised wage fixation, that was not even thought to be a problem.
Like most people, I assumed that Whitlam would govern uninterrupted for three years. There was no perception of what lay ahead, or what Labor had in store for the Australian people.
The story of the disintegration of the Whitlam Government has been told