Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Werriwa for bringing this motion on. It's very exciting for those of us who follow Australian history to talk about this, and it must be a great honour to represent an electorate that had such a significant person in Australian politics as one of its former members. I was seven months old when the dismissal happened. I'll give personal recollections at some point. The 1972 election was a significant moment, when the Whitlam government was elected. It had been 1951 since the coalition had previously governed. One of the notable things about when the Whitlam government came in was a sworn-in ministry of two people—a duumvirate—of Gough Whitlam and Lance Barnard passing a lot of the legislation they'd promised in those first few weeks.

There's no doubt the Whitlam government achieved some significant things in modernising Australia, recognising China and having a focus on the arts, and they need to be congratulated for that. Obviously, there was a debate between the two sides of politics leading to a 1974 double-dissolution election, which Whitlam won with a reduced majority but also some very close numbers in the Senate, which was to become such a sticking point as we entered 1975. This is where the Whitlam government started to get into trouble with ministers who, with the probably noble intentions of developing Australia's resource sector, had funny ideas about how to finance that, including Rex Connor and Jim Cairns going to try and get a loan from a Pakistani loan broker, Tirath Khemlani, who promised to finance some of these projects from some pretty strange parts of the word. Of course, that was against the convention of the Treasury at the time. The loans affair did eventually start to cause the Whitlam government a lot of problems.

It was said of Gough Whitlam, I think, that he was a totally honest and decent man who expected everyone else to be as honest and decent as he was, and that was to his own undoing. Anyway, he was forced to sack those two ministers—Jim Cairns and Rex Connor—and that led to the battle of wills between Fraser and Whitlam and the deferral of the money bills, or the appropriations bills, in the Senate. When that couldn't be resolved and Australia was threatened with having a government forced to govern without supply of appropriation money, obviously something had to happen.

What happened will be debated for many, many years by constitutional experts and people who have a different view of things. You can only imagine how dramatic it must have been for Whitlam to drive out to see Sir John Kerr at Yarralumla, to be handed a letter by Sir John Kerr dismissing him and withdrawing his commission as Prime Minister and then, in the next few moments, to see Malcolm Fraser come into the office and be handed a letter commissioning him to form a government. They were incredible times in Australian democratic history.

It's worth noting that people say—and I learned this when I was a kid—that Kerr sacked a democratically elected government, and that's true. However, I think it's worth noting the caveat that Fraser was commissioned to form a caretaker government as long as he promised to call an election, which he did, and that election was won in a significant landslide by the coalition. The Dismissal was a huge moment in Australian history and, as I said earlier, it's debated. I think the Whitlam government was an iconic government. It did some wonderful things and it governed in an irresponsible way throughout 1975. The Governor-General, whether he was right to act or not—somebody had to break the deadlock so those supply bills could be passed.

It's interesting that, when Whitlam was dismissed and went back, he then failed to inform his own team. They still thought they were in government and passed the supply bills to the Senate, not knowing the government had changed. Again, those were crazy times in Australian politics. He was an iconic person, and it was an iconic moment in Australian history. We need to talk about it and celebrate, and I thank you for bringing the motion.

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