Monday, June 24, 2013

Whitlam: The Power and the Passion reviewed

Vanguard July 2013 p. 4
Nick G.


ABC TV’s recent two-part series Whitlam: The Power and the Passion was a welcome reopening of discussion about a major event in Australian political life.
 
However, it missed the opportunity to fundamentally analyse the role of US imperialism in orchestrating what was in reality not a simple “dismissal” but a semi-fascist coup.

Neither did it analyse -  and nor could we expect it to have analysed –the role of social democracy in confining the working class to capitalism.
 
Tentative expressions of independence
 
Coming after a long period of pro-British and pro-US servility by conservative governments, and in the wake of widespread opposition to the US imperialist war of aggression against Vietnam and to conscription, Whitlam appeared almost visionary in his decision to withdraw Australian troops and end conscription, recognise the People’s Republic of China, abolish the death penalty, abolish university fees, establish legal aid and Medibank.   There were tentative expressions of a more independent Australian outlook, including replacing “God Save the Queen” as national anthem and creating a national honours list in the place of the imperial system.
 
As if this were not enough, Whitlam and his Minerals and Energy Minister Rex O’Connor instigated a move to “buy back the farm”, focussing on the largely foreign-owned mining industry.  This not only challenged multinational domination of the Australian economy but induced the government to seek finance from the Middle East rather than from the imperialist centres of finance capital: New York, London and Tokyo.
 
US imperialism took umbrage at this insubordination and in 1973 Nixon appointed career coup-master Marshall Green as Ambassador to Australia.  Green had been in charge of the US Embassy in South Korea at the time of the 1961 coup d'état that brought Major-General Park Chung Hee to power (father of the current South Korean president Park Geun-hye).    He was later appointed US Ambassador to Indonesia in time to oversee the toppling of the anti-imperialist Sukarno government and the murder of half a million communists.
 
Narratives of the Whitlam dismissal do not, as a rule, examine the implications of Whitlam’s irritation of the US overlords, concentrating instead on immediate players in the saga such as Whitlam, Cairns, Fraser and Kerr.
 
The ABC TV series is no exception.  A thorough exposure of the role US imperialism played in the constitutional coup would not suit the ruling class although it is very much sensed and understood by the advanced sections of the working class.
 
Failure to rely on the people
 
The anti-Whitlam coup developed as an Opposition move to block Supply in the Senate.

This was scripted in such a way as to require the Governor-General to withdraw Whitlam’s commission to form government. 
 
Whitlam was ultimately complicit in his own sacking.  US imperialism had sent Marshall Green with a hangman’s rope, but it was Whitlam who placed the noose around his own neck by his appointment of Sir John Kerr as Governor-General.
 
Kerr was an anti-working class arch-reactionary and associated with various US-funded institutions.  He had disgraced himself in 1969 by jailing Victorian Tramways Union secretary and CPA (M-L) vice-chairperson Clarrie O’Shea over his refusal to pay fines imposed on his union. As noted by this paper on March 7, 1974, “Sir John Kerr has a very doubtful record in Australian politics.  His appointment does no credit to those who appointed him”. 
 
Throughout 1973 (Green’s appointment), 1974 (Kerr’s appointment) and 1975 (the lead-up to the Supply crisis), our Party consistently and regularly warned the working class that a coup against Whitlam was being prepared.
 
Kerr performed his role and Whitlam was sacked.
 
Addressing a crowd of supporters outside Parliament, Whitlam urged Australians to “maintain your rage”.  But he qualified that and his full statement was: “Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.”
 
Whitlam could have gone back into Parliament House and resumed his seat as Prime Minister of Australia.  This would have been consistent with his view that the Governor-General was bound by custom and practice to act on the advice of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.  He did not believe the Prime Minister and Cabinet were bound to follow the orders of the Governor-General.  Yet that was what he did.
 
For all of his flirtation with the traditions of the labour movement (calling associates “comrade”, for example), Whitlam was, as he proudly proclaimed on more than one occasion, “a bourgeois”.
 
Both as a bourgeois and as a Labor reformist, the idea of encouraging a confrontation between the people and the capitalist state machinery in the streets of the nation was anathema to him.
 
By refusing to stand up to Kerr by continuing to function as the elected Prime Minister, Whitlam gave no focus or purpose to the maintenance of rage other than to wait for the casting of ballots.
 
Treachery to the interests of the people

(above: November 12 1975 and Bob Hawke asks for a day's pay in lieu of mass struggle against US imperialism.)

This was simple treachery to the interests of the people.  And it was matched the following day when the “gruff, abrasive cream-puff” of an ACTU President, Bob Hawke, rejected union calls for a nation-wide strike and urged workers instead to donate a day’s pay to an ALP re-election campaign.
 
The great struggles and national strikes that took place over six days following O’Shea’s jailing forced the ruling class to back down and manufacture an opportunity to have him released.
 
Hawke could have drawn on that legacy and brought the undeniable strength of collective working class action to force a second retreat by the reactionaries.  But his tradition was that of the Victorian and NSW Trades Hall misleaderships who had refused to back the O’Shea general strikes.
 
Fraser now had the incumbency, the time and the complicity of the vanquished to ensure his electoral victory over Whitlam.
 
The troops that had been put on stand-by to threaten blood should stain the wattle were not needed.
 
And we continue to this day to be bound hand and foot to US imperialism having had the one chance to really mount a mass challenge to that rule snatched from us by system loyalists in the leadership of the ALP.

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