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From the always superb Guy Rundle at Crikey:

Born in 1916, when the Labor Party was not much more than a decade old, the son of a senior public servant, he grew up in Canberra, when it was not much more than a pseudo-English village. He went on to Sydney University in the ’30s, where he became a perpetual college resident and editor of the literary magazine Hermes, in the years when it was one of the most important of Australian literary periodicals. Like countless young men and women, he was politicised by the Second World War, serving as a navigator in bombers. He was decisively swung to Labor by conservative campaigns against John Curtin’s wartime referendum, which had sought to take a whole range of social development into the federal remit.

For a haute bourgeois young man to commit himself to the Labor Party in 1944 was not nothing; there was no easy conduit for left-leaning members of the elite to commit to a party that saw itself as a representative of the working class only. But neither was the party guilty of reverse snobbery, and as the member for Werriwa from 1956, he became one of the party’s star parliamentary players, with both a lightning-quick wit and a commitment to serious policy development…

…it was Whitlam and those around him, particularly Mick Young and Race Matthews…enacted a raft of legislation that would set the country on a different path. Out of Vietnam, higher education opened to all, Medibank underway, urban and community development. When full government was established, this would be followed by a reorientation of foreign policy, an embrace of multiculuralism, women’s rights, land rights, no-fault divorce, killing of censorship, a broadcasting revolution, a turn to the environment, and much more. Many in the Whitlam government were not natural radicals; some of them became so under pressure of relentless resistance from entrenched power. This was an era when Australia’s then-attorney-general Lionel Murphy could stage a raid on ASIO in an attempt to bring its right-wing insurgency to heel.

…Whatever Tony Abbott brings himself to say in the coming hours and days, one truth above all will remain: that the sort of Australia he and his ilk wanted preserved, deferential, limited and grounded in conservative fantasy was forever put beyond possibility by the Whitlam revolution. That did not happen everywhere else, not nearly. If what we thrill to in the memory is the bearing, the audacity, the wit, what we should also remember is the root-and-branch reconstruction of our institutions, the battle to open up opportunity, to go to war against received notions of what a white imperial outpost, a two-century improvisation, could and should be. To write this from a motel in Colorado, where the waitress at the truck stop next door earns $2.50 an hour plus tips, and the battle is to stop an amendment that would criminalise all abortion, is to remember that progress can be measured by the battles that no longer need to be fought, and to remind ourselves that audacious change has happened on our shores, and can do so again. What is owed to the memory of Gough, and all who made the era that goes under his name, the myth and the reality, is to find no shame in defeat, only in caution, to crash through or crash.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.