The months following the May 1974 double-dissolution election were not a vintage period for the Whitlam government. The close election result was followed by jockeying for positions in the new ministry and bitter caucus debates about important policy commitments. Key pieces of government legislation were still being defeated in the Senate despite their affirmation by the Australian people at the election on 18 May. The press was comparing the government with that of Jim Scullin, whose tenure had been characterised by a “restive caucus,” a “remote” prime minister, a hostile Senate and global economic shocks — hardly a welcome comparison for Whitlam.
For all that, his government had every reason to think it had a friend in the Australian Constitution. Whitlam himself had long considered that document to have potential. Now, faced with a bitter opposition and an intransigent Senate, Labor was determined to make full use of section 57 to pursue its program.
Shaped by the colourful history of Australia’s colonial politics and much older traditions of British bicameralism, section 57 was designed to resolve deadlocks between the two houses of parliament. Under its provisions, a bill defeated twice in the Senate (with a three-month interval in between) can be put to the people at a double-dissolution election; if defeated a third time, the matter can be decided at a joint sitting of all parliamentarians.
The government had used six bills, each twice rejected by the Senate, as the basis for the election. The Commonwealth Electoral Bill (No. 2) was designed to reduce the allowable variation in the number of voters between federal divisions from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. The Senate (Representation of Territories) Bill and the Representation Bill were intended to grant two Senate seats each to the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory, and to exclude those new senators from the constitutional “nexus” that requires the House to be roughly double the size of the Senate. The Health Insurance and Health Insurance Commission bills were intended to establish a system of national health insurance, Medibank, along with the commission that would administer it.
The sixth of the bills — which aimed to establish a Petroleum and Minerals Authority to cultivate greater national ownership of Australian resources— faced a particular obstacle. There was some doubt as to whether it had been properly “rejected” when first put to the Senate in December 1973, before its further defeat the following April.
Labor had been returned in May with a reduced majority of five in the House, while the Senate was evenly split. The government and opposition had twenty-nine senators each, and the two independent senators were both former Liberals with very different dispositions. Although the government would continue to suffer in the Senate, it could muster a majority of three in the event of a joint sitting even if both independents voted with the Opposition.
The six double-dissolution bills were guillotined through the House and defeated again in the Senate in mid-July, by which time Australia had a new governor-general. Paul Hasluck’s successor, the highly ambitious former NSW chief justice Sir John Kerr, had spent much of his life on the peripheries of party politics.
Kerr’s vice-regal correspondence tells us just how discomforted he was by Whitlam’s request for a joint sitting to decide the fate of the bills. He worried especially about the Petroleum and Minerals Authority Bill and the uncertainty over its original defeat. Kerr was also unsure about the legitimacy of storing up multiple bills under section 57. But the government had its own legal advice and Kerr begrudgingly accepted their counsel. On 30 July he issued a proclamation requiring all parliamentarians to attend the House of Representatives at 10.30am on Tuesday 6 August to “deliberate” and “vote together upon each of the said proposed laws as last proposed by the House of Representatives.”
That proclamation was immediately challenged in the High Court of Australia by two opposition senators who hoped either to invalidate it entirely or confine the joint sitting to deliberation on a single bill. They sought to exclude the Petroleum and Minerals Authority Bill on the grounds that it failed to meet the three-month requirement of section 57. The conservative Queensland government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen attempted to join this case against Whitlam and his attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, but ultimately lacked sufficient standing.
On the eve of the sitting, the court ruled that it could go ahead. But some justices were critical of several aspects of Kerr’s proclamation and troubled by the “extraordinary lawmaking power” afforded to a joint sitting of parliament. Further legal contests were to come.
Nothing about the logistics and practicalities of this first joint sitting was self-evident to anybody. No fewer than thirty-six issues needed settling beforehand, and few international precedents existed. The leader of the House, veteran Labor MP Fred Daly, quipped that with so few established rules it was “just like a Surry Hills preselection.”
Preparing for the sitting offered a brief reprieve from the bitter partisanship of the era. The government and opposition quickly agreed on four debates spanning four hours each. The Speaker of the House, the venerable and witty Jim Cope, would be elected chairman unopposed and then dragged to the chair in line with the customary ritual that followed the selection of a new Speaker. Bills would be put up for affirmation (or rejection) without proceeding through a first, second and third reading. Seating plans were to be made to squeeze all 187 parliamentarians on to the green benches of a lower house that normally accommodated sixty bodies fewer. The event was to be captured in colour by four cameras stationed in the chamber, and the government’s intention was that this footage would constitute an “an audio-visual archive” of great significance.
In a novel experiment, the sitting would also be broadcast on ABC television. MPs were required to speak from rostrums on either side of the chair to convey to viewers a “balanced presentation of the affirmative and negative arguments.” Temporary lighting facilities were set up in the chamber (prompting a couple of MPs to don sunglasses) and a broadcast van sat on the Senate side of the building. The chamber resembled a movie studio as never before. The television coverage was, of course, still in black and white; colour would only arrive the following year.
The twenty-ninth parliament made for unusual television. In addition to the thirty-odd new MPs on the backbenches, two former prime ministers, John Gorton and William McMahon were among the assembled parliamentarians. The party leaders of both houses sat at either side of the table. David McNicoll, in the Bulletin, thought “the members were buffed up to a degree I have not witnessed before.”
But the need for a joint sitting was not a matter of satisfaction for Whitlam, at least by his own account. “[T]he reasons for it,” he explained in his opening address, “are not a matter for pride.” Rather, the joint sitting was “a last resort” in the face of repeated obstruction in the Senate. It was fitting, then, that Whitlam’s speech would also open the debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Bill (No. 2), which would, he explained, “enshrine the principle of one vote, one value” and enhance the quality of Australian democracy. After all, this was a goal that went back to the very earliest years of the NSW Labor Party, whose original platform in 1891 began with a commitment to “equal electoral districts on adult population basis.”
In reply, Snedden taunted Whitlam with the prospect of another double-dissolution election and described the joint sitting as “an anticlimax,” rather like the Russian parliament “discussing the colour that the… clergy should wear while Lenin was taking over the country.” It took education minister Kim Beazley to point out, somewhat pedantically, that Snedden had his aphorism all wrong: it was the synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, not the parliament, that had been so occupied during the revolution.
The lists of government and opposition speakers were carefully organised. David McKenzie, whose Diamond Valley electorate was particularly affected by rapid population growth and infrequent redistributions, spoke in support of one vote, one value. Ministers and MPs who represented the ACT and the Northern Territory were allocated to the debate on Senate representation for mainland territories. A combination of senior stars and rising talents argued the case for and against the Petroleum and Minerals Authority. The distinctive political swagger and biting turn of phrase were already in clear view in the case of thirty-year-old Paul Keating.
Three of the five newly elected women featured in the health debate, and it was arguably Joan Child, Labor’s new member for Henty, who made the strongest contribution. MPs tended to agree, though, that Liberal MHR Jim Killen, with his rhetorical flourishes and sparkling putdowns of daring interjectors, was the most effective performer overall.
The television cameras temporarily cooled the atmosphere of parliament. With his opening speech, Whitlam struck a deliberately statesmanlike posture. His Labor colleagues invoked Enlightenment philosophes, modern American jurists and Australian government reports to bolster their arguments on electoral reform. Bill Hayden, as social security minister, and Rex Connor, the large and formidable minister for minerals and energy, were both remarkably measured despite the lengthy scare campaigns they had faced over the Medibank and petroleum bills. Some commentators judged the SA Liberal Movement senator Steele Hall, who evoked the “atmosphere of an early Frank Capra film,” the “star” of the broadcast, but his televised contribution comes off as a little grand, perhaps even a bit sanctimonious. He was really no Jimmy Stewart.
In an effort to make political capital out of the joint sitting, Snedden’s contributions to the electoral and health debates were heavily punctuated by gesticulations and theatrics. Coalition speakers described the electoral bills as Labor’s attempt to secure itself in office through a “Dalymander,” in ironic homage to Fred Daly, the minister in charge of them. The member for Kooyong, Andrew Peacock, warned that if the government granted Senate representation to the mainland territories it might allow “one man on a met station” in the Coral Sea Islands to become his own senator too.
For his part, Liberal MP Bruce Lloyd hypothesised that Labor’s health scheme would allow “dictatorial power” over religious care institutions, which would be forced to provide abortions. In their attacks on Connor’s petroleum bill, the opposition raised the spectre of covert nationalisation, bureaucracy and socialism, and an all-out assault on states’ rights. This seemed like the 1947 campaign against bank nationalisation all over again.
Newspapers, which still played a dominant role in the reporting of political news, gave the sitting generous coverage, exploring the legislative substance of the event as well as its quirkier human side. Journalist Alan Fitzgerald noted that the bald head of Labor’s Gil Duthie gleamed under the harsh lights, and a young Niki Savva reported that it was five hours before a member, Bill Wentworth, nodded off. There was no want of energy, though, in Wentworth’s attempt to disrupt proceedings with an urgent debate about inflation and industrial relations, which was promptly shot down by the chairman. (Daly suggested that the idiosyncratic MP was posturing for the cameras and the “strange people in his electorate” who kept returning him to parliament.)
Commercial media companies exercised their right to use soundless video of the debates, but they had to submit their scripts to the relevant parliamentary committee for vetting lest the footage be used for improper purposes such as satire. Not every portion of the footage made for great television, though, and it was noticed that when telecasting ended members who had seemed “alert and interested” before “suddenly found they were wanted elsewhere” — notably in the private members’ bar.
In the days after the joint sitting the Australian Broadcasting Control Board surveyed a sample of 146 Melbourne residents by telephone to gauge their reactions to it all. Fifty respondents reported that they had viewed part of the broadcast, while a further fifty-odd said another member of their household had done so.
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph hinted that viewers at home saw the sitting as “a great big yawn.” Housewives were said to have “preferred the soap operas and daytime movies”; some reported watching for a while and then switching over to something else because it was “too boring”; and one woman declared that Number 96, the risqué late-night soap, “was far too important to miss for a parliamentary debate on electoral boundaries.” Certainly the Joint Sitting featured no Number 96-style nudity, although the secretary of the Old Age and Invalid Pensioners’ Association, Albert Thompson, suggested that MPs might consider appearing “in the altogether so their constituents can be more intimately acquainted with them.”
The joint sitting effects on Australia’s political affairs were immediate. An older Paul Keating later reflected that the occasion had “something of a salutary effect” on Labor MPs, for whom “the constitution was seen to have worked.” That seemed to matter not least because Labor had often, until the 1970s, been at war with the limitations of that document. The events of 1975, however, would prevent any complete reconciliation.
In the longer term, the sitting led to “senators for the Territories,” “one vote one value” and “regular redistributions of electorates,” changes that strengthened democratic norms both within and beyond the federal political sphere. It also established the forerunner of today’s Medicare.
The Petroleum and Minerals Authority was less fortunate, falling down in the High Court on a section 57 technicality. But when conservative state governments came knocking in the hope of nullifying the Senate (Representation of Territories) Act and the Commonwealth Electoral Act (No. 2), the justices upheld both bills. The court also established the precedent that multiple proposed laws could be legitimately “stockpiled” for the purpose of a double dissolution and a joint sitting, and that no “temporal limitations” could be invoked to circumscribe that process.
With the joint sitting, the Whitlam government displayed its characteristic commitment to using the institutions of Australian democracy to the fullest extent to advance meaningful reform. For a brief moment, it was possible to imagine that joint sittings might even become a more common process of government, in what the constitutional scholar Geoffrey Sawer called “government by double dissolution.” That has never come to pass. Nonetheless, this historic occasion continued the adaptation of British traditions to Australian federal demands and gave flesh to the bones of a section of the constitution whose day might yet arrive again. •
This is an edited extract from Frank Bongiorno and Joshua Black’s fiftieth anniversary Legacy Paper, That “Historic Occasion”: The Joint Sitting of 6–7 August 1974, published by the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University. It follows the extract published yesterday by Jenny Hocking with Allison Cadzow, “The Election That Never Was.”
