Page 3532 - Week 11 - Thursday, 23 October 2014
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That really was his legacy. Whether we agree on all the decisions or not, he certainly made a difference. And I certainly support the initiative of the Chief Minister to name a suburb in Canberra after Gough Whitlam.
On behalf of the Canberra Liberal Party, I pay my respects to the colleagues of Mr Whitlam, offer my condolences to his family and recognise the passing of an extraordinary Australian.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo): We have all heard a great deal about Edward Gough Whitlam in the last couple of days and I expect we will hear quite a bit more over coming days and weeks. He was by all accounts a man of charisma, dynamism and focus. His fans refer to him as the most important Prime Minister in Australian history and even his critics largely accept the breadth and long-term impacts of his social reforms.
The coverage and the eulogies that have flowed since Thursday have one thing in common: they catalogue a long list of achievements from a very short period of government. Gough Whitlam was only Prime Minister of Australia for 1,071 often turbulent days, but in that time he managed to deliver an impressive number of progressive political reforms which many believe catapulted the country into the modern era. To put it in raw numbers, the Whitlam government passed some 504 bills through both houses of government before running into their famous Senate troubles, and that total does not even cover the reforms made through executive action rather than legislation.
Gough had spent decades refining his policy platform and it was full of the kind of big ideas that Australia had not seen for a generation. Without wanting to reiterate too much what has already been said both here and in the media, the Whitlam program extended from free education to Indigenous land rights, from restoring diplomatic relations with China to famously ending Australian involvement in Vietnam, from a new national anthem to a new racial discrimination act, from introducing no-fault divorce to establishing the National Gallery of Australia.
I understand one of Gough’s first acts upon taking office was to release conscientious objectors from prison, conscientious objectors who had protested against conscription at a time when young men were being sent to war but they still could not vote. He did that first because it was quick, it was cheap and it was right. He later also reduced the voting age to 18, thereby removing that disenfranchisement, whilst also stopping national conscription.
As he settled into government, Prime Minister Whitlam began to roll out his extensive program of larger reforms towards equity and fairness. While universal health care, Medicare—or, as it was then known, Medibank—and free university education are some of the big-ticket progressive items that the Prime Minister will always be remembered fondly for, we must not forget that he also delivered a sewerage system to the suburbs of Australia. As Gough himself once said, “I found Australia unsewered and left it fully flushed.” It is that kind of fundamental infrastructure program that is the hallmark of a good and useful government. It is the kind of project that will continue to deliver long after the government itself has been and gone.
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