I was a year twelve student
in 1972, and had a bright orange It's Time sticker on my school bag. I remember
that after he won the election one of my schoolmates said to me that while he
was keen for Gough to win, Gough would not be able to put an end to Australia's
involvement in Vietnam, and to conscription, any time soon. I was crestfallen
by this, and delighted when only a day or two later Gough's two-man Cabinet did
precisely that.
His leadership and vision
for Australia was one of the key things that inspired me to join the Australian
Labor Party, which I did in 1974. It was against the run of play, as Gough's
government was thrown out comprehensively at the end of the next year.
But his legacy has proved to
be so longstanding that I think he can rightly claim to be the most influential
Prime Minister of the past 50 years. It was such a monumental body of work that
I cannot do justice to it, but there are a number of features of it which I
want to single out. The introduction of free tertiary education. It made such a
difference to the lives of so many. The more I look at it, the more I think it
was a mistake to move away from that.
Medibank, which was of
course the predecessor of Medicare. It gave Australia quite possibly the best
health care system in the world, where everyone, rich and poor alike, has
access to high quality health care.
The protection of the
environment. Gough took the National government into the area of environment
protection, preventing drilling of the Great Barrier Reef, ratifying the World
Heritage Convention, the RAMSAR Convention, and passing the National Parks and
Wildlife Conservation Act.
Indigenous Affairs. Gough
passed legislation to abolish discrimination against aboriginal people, and
granted land rights to indigenous people, and returned lands in the Northern
Territory to the Gurindji people.
People will always draw on
the aspects of someone's legacy that are consistent with their own views, and I
am no different. In that vein I point out that in 1974 he wrote that traditional
forms of democratic government are under challenge, and listed population
growth as first among these. Later in that article he said “I do not envisage
any dramatic increase in our present population, and indeed I would not wish to
see one". I think he was absolutely right in that assessment. And indeed
he cut migration numbers during his time as Prime Minister, which is perhaps
not widely known.
I had a number of
conversations with him, and there are two that stick in my mind. The first is
when I rang him as a young Member of Parliament with an interest in fixed-term
Parliaments and knowledge that Gough had championed this cause, including a
proposal for simultaneous Federal and State elections. I was pleased that my
call was put through, and astonished that Gough was able to rattle off, without
any forewarning of my call and in the days before the Internet and Google, the
electoral arrangements for many of the states of the USA.
Later on I won an afternoon
tea with Gough in a Labor Party raffle. This time he did know I was coming, but
it was 2002 and he was by then 86. I was again astonished to see that at the
ripe old age of 86 he had gone to the trouble of looking me up on the Internet
and coming to the afternoon tea extremely well informed about my background and
interests.
No doubt Gough made
mistakes. But the fact is that anyone in public life makes decisions every day,
and it is unreasonable to expect every one of those decisions to be correct.
And a Prime Minister makes hundreds, even thousands of decisions. Yes he was
defeated decisively after three years, but that should be understood in the
context of coming to power after a 23 year absence for Labor, and bumping into
a world which had been shaped by and was dominated by his political opponents.
After the change of government Malcolm Fraser acknowledged the need to make the
Senate more representative and sponsored a referendum to require State
Parliaments to fill Senate casual vacancies with the nominee of the Party the
Senator had belonged to. And it should also be understood that Gough was newly
in power when the OPEC oil shock of 1974 hit - this generated inflation and
unemployment, and most Western governments unfortunate enough to be in power at
the time did not last for long.
Gough's struggle with
Malcolm Fraser was titanic. I remember United States commentators at the time
remarking on the ability of the two men, and wondering why American politics
was not throwing up leaders of comparable calibre.
The best thing we can do to
honour Gough's monumental legacy is to protect it. Whether it is tertiary
education, or health, or environment protection, or indigenous affairs, we
should honour and protect his legacy. Most of all I hope we remember his
commitment to politics as an honourable profession. It is unthinkable to
imagine Gough taking on a job as a corporate lobbyist or company director in a
post political career. The idea of using a parliamentary career as a stepping
stone to a cushy corporate job would have been anathema to him.
I hope his life and example
continues to inspire Australians to undertake public service, and to believe in
the capacity of the political process to produce good outcomes, to make people’s
lives better, for many years to come.
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