Michael Sexton - The Great Crash: The Short Life and Sudden Death of the Whitlam Government

Michael Sexton,

The Great Crash: The Short Life and Sudden Death of the Whitlam Government

Melbourne: Scribe Publications, revised edition 2005

Pp. vii + 343. Paperback              ISBN 1 920769 69 2  

As news spread of the ousting of the Whitlam government, Labor ministers and staffers removed piles of documents to prevent the usurpers from prying into their thought processes. Some of the paper was buried or burnt, but much of it enabled Michael Sexton to provide insights into policy-making at an unusually close point in time to the events. His book, first published in 1979, is now reissued with a thoughtful preface and concluding reflections. Sexton’s interpretation was remarkably even-handed for that torrid time. Many of Fraser’s detractors elevated the ousted Whitlam ministry to heroic status. One Canberra whisper in 1975 was that leading Liberals had confessed they were out to destroy the government because, with Hayden at the Treasury, it would soon be too impressive to defeat at the polls. Sexton painted a more sober picture of a government harried by a hostile Senate, permanently within six months of being forced into an election, and increasingly desperate about survival. Whitlam himself, Sexton now notes, thought the analysis too harsh. Still, the core of the book remains the five magnificent chapters of almost Shakespearean tragedy, portraying the interlocking weaknesses of Whitlam himself, Jim Cairns, Lionel Murphy, Rex Connor and Sir John Kerr. The juxtaposition of the 1975 and 2005 texts is instructive. Thirty years after the upheaval, there is a measure of ironic consensus about 1975. Both the Senate and the governor-general acted within their powers, but it is far from clear that they were right so to do. Despite landslide victories in 1975 and 1977, Fraser’s legitimacy was never wholly accepted, while Kerr was destroyed, both officially and humanly, by the Dismissal. Pace Bagehot, as a constitutional head of state, he had the right to warn, and with tax revenues soon to run out, he had a duty to speak plainly. Sexton examined the devices by which the Whitlam ministry hoped to remain financial, and it is obvious that they were schemes that few lawyers and no bankers would touch. Amazingly, Kerr’s chief concern was fear that if he confronted his prime minister he would merely trigger the famous race to the telephone, as each man urged the Queen to sack the other. To resort to a coup to save his own job was contemptible. Most Australians cared little about concurrent bicameralism or overseas loans. But every Australian knows that players cannot sack the umpire: if Whitlam had fired Kerr he would have destroyed his own standing for ever. Thirty years on, the political landscape looks very different, and Sexton shakes his head with amused disbelief that he should have urged a future Labor government to get around constitutional barriers by establishing state enterprises. In the event, Hawke and Keating deregulated the economy instead. Hence the problem now is not how to win power, but what to do with it. ‘After the Whitlam years, Labor wondered how it could ever do the things that it wanted to do. In 2005 there is a real question as to what a Labor government would want to do.’ (p. 4) The bureaucracy has changed. The public service mandarins of the 1970s, mainly Liberal holdovers with virtual life tenure, have been replaced by contract appointees, all too ready to share the short-termist outlook of their political masters. And, more than ever, Labor parliamentarians ‘now have very little in common with the bulk of Australian society’. (p. 305) Health services, childcare, pensions, immigration, energy, democratic participation – the new agenda cries out for action, but the Whitlam years have made Labor managers wary of hyperactive creativity. Both the original insightful text and the humility of the second thoughts make this a welcome reissue.