Ministerial Statement

Whitlam, Hon. E.G.

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:24): I seek leave to make a ministerial statement.

Leave granted.

The passing of Edward Gough Whitlam, former Australian prime minister and leader—possibly one of our greatest leaders—of the Australian Labor Party, last Tuesday 21 October, marked a significant point in our nation's story. Probably our most daring political visionary in the late 1960s and early seventies, Gough Whitlam captured the national imagination in a way that we have never quite seen since.

The momentum for social change that he created broke a tsunami over the placid world of early 1970s Australia, and that unstoppable impetus and passion for reform he sparked and then led resulted in the historic 'It's Time' federal election victory on 2 December 1972. After 23 years in the political wilderness, the ALP under Gough Whitlam had great plans for reformation on a massive scale. He got stuck into the task with an energy and conviction that Canberra and the nation have never since experienced.

There is no better example of the scope and tone of that transformative ambition than the now classic opening line to his 1972 policy speech, 'Men and women of Australia'. Before that time, a political orator might have referred to 'people' or even in earlier times just 'men' but there was a deliberation to that phrase 'men and women' because in the Australia that Gough Whitlam envisaged, men and women were to be equal partners. It is a measure of how much he changed things that only four decades later this was a revolutionary idea.

One of the Whitlam government's first reforms was to reopen the national wage and equal pay cases. It may seem unimaginable to younger people today, but it was not until the 1972 equal pay case that it was established that Australian women doing work similar to that done by men should be paid an equal wage. Two years later the commission extended the adult minimum wage to include women workers for the very first time.

The Whitlam government also introduced the supporting mothers' benefit. Before 1973 only widows were entitled to pension payments, so that other women who were raising children alone often faced poverty and great hardship. The pension payment gave single mothers choices around the raising of their children. He also appointed Elizabeth Reid as a first adviser on women's affairs to the Prime Minister, the first such appointment to any head of state in the world. Of course this was only the tip of the iceberg.

In just over 1,000 often turbulent, dramatic and exciting days the Whitlam government brought into vibrant existence our modern Australian life. The government instituted universal health care, affordable higher education, Aboriginal land rights, diplomatic relations with China, no-fault divorce, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, introduced multiculturalism and abolished the White Australia policy, ended the death penalty, created the Australia Council and massively boosted arts funding (who could forget Blue Poles?), and that is not the complete list by a far stretch.

These reforms, which catapulted this country into a modern world, have now been woven into the fabric of our lives. They are part and parcel of what it is to be Australian. In three short years Gough Whitlam was able to successfully graft on to our egalitarian tradition and history a set of modern values and institutions, which made us into a confident and progressive nation. He was able to do so because he was driven by extraordinary abilities, a prodigious intellect, a ferocious and at times cutting wit, and an utterly undentable confidence.

He was grandly magnificent, and yet tragic in an almost Shakespearean sense, as the circumstances of his downfall as prime minister at the hands of Governor General John Kerr in 1975 were to prove. For all of these qualities he was loved. As Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody said in their inspiring song about Vincent Lingiarri and the Gurindji land rights claim, I think from the song 'From little things big things grow':

Till one day a tall stranger appeared in the land

And he came with lawyers and he came with great ceremony

And through Vincent's fingers poured a handful of sand

Edward Gough Whitlam was that tall stranger who appeared in our land and, by the time he departed this land last week, he was no longer a stranger to us. He was and is irrevocably part of our sustaining national mythology—optimistic, generous and ambitious for what it is to be Australian and for what we could be as a nation. His actions changed the way we thought about ourselves.

It is only right that the death of Gough Whitlam prompts us to reflect on his inspired political leadership and the extraordinary legacy he left this country. At a deeper level, his legacy challenges us to make the very best of our lives and to imagine what is possible through determined political vision. Perhaps that is Gough's greatest gift to us—a sense of the possible for Australia. He dreamed of grand ideas and then made them into reality, and they live with us still. Vale Gough Whitlam.