In November 1975 the Dismissal seemed the biggest of big deals in Australian political history. For years after, you could still, without great difficulty, find the “rage” Gough Whitlam had asked his supporters to maintain during the 1975 election campaign.
The passionate ones survive today, but in dwindling numbers. Few who rallied for and against Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser in November 1975 could have foreseen that before the end of the century those two men — political giants and fierce enemies in the 1970s — would collaborate in support of a republic, among various causes, and even appear together at public events, as they did at Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008. But the Dismissal itself faded into a distant, blurry history — passing, as even dramatic events must, from current affairs to living history to collective memory.
The egyptologist Jan Assmann’s distinction between two types of “collective memory” — “communicative” and “cultural” — might be helpful in understanding how to think about where the Dismissal now sits in Australian life. Communicative memory is the product of everyday interactions that lead to “numerous collective self-images and memories” and is distinguished by “its limited temporal horizon.” This variety of memory might last three or four generations: say, eighty to one hundred years. “Cultural memory,” by way of contrast, is characterised by its “distance from the everyday,” as well as its role in constituting a social group’s identity. It might be seen as shading into “legend” or even “myth.”
The fiftieth anniversary of the Dismissal suggests that the event, as well as the brief, turbulent history of the Whitlam government itself, still lives within communicative memory. People will tell you where they were when it happened. They will tell you how they felt. They might tell you what the Whitlam government meant to them, and what its Dismissal signified and signifies. Such memories are held, and communicated, in and beyond families and other small groups, even allowing for Australians’ reputed reluctance to tie their identity to political history or civic life.
But I would also like to suggest that the Dismissal is moving towards what Assmann calls cultural memory, with its greater abstractions. It will continue to play a role in telling us something about who we are: but as an event capable to shaping everyday action and understanding, as a truly lived history, it is fast fading.
One test of this is how we talk about our democracy. There is now an entrenched discourse that celebrates the robustness of Australian democracy: it is there in the ABC program, Civic Duty, hosted by Annabel Crabb. It is there, too, in the use of the term “democracy sausage,” which began not much more than a decade ago and seeks to connect the Australian way of life, represented by the pleasures of the barbecue, with to the act of voting, represented as the epitome of democratic fairness.
This discourse equates democracy with voting. It ignores trade union and social movement activism. It hides the decidedly undemocratic way political parties so often operate, including the large donations they receive from vested interests that won’t be revealed until well after election day, if at all. It tells us nothing about the actual exercise of political power, the quiet lobbying and buying of access, the marginalisation and exclusion of voices politicians don’t wish to hear, the oppressions experienced by those without wealth, status, connections and power. It has nothing to say about social and economic inequality.
It also has nothing to say about the Dismissal. That would surprise the generations of 1975, those enjoined to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm” — and perhaps even those who loathed the Whitlam government and were glad to see the back of it. The nation left the Dismissal behind, tucked away in the back of the wardrobe along with safari suits, flared trousers, wide collars and other unfashionable legacies of the 1970s — to be retrieved, perhaps, for the occasional 1970s party.
Each anniversary of the Dismissal was still dutifully noticed in the media, but the idea that the events of November 1975 might carry deeper meaning for one’s judgements about the quality of Australian democracy seemed to be less in evidence as the years passed. New books came out, along with the occasional media documentary. New discoveries about the inner workings of the Dismissal were made possible by historian and Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking’s long legal fight for the release of the Palace Letters, the correspondence between governor-general Sir John Kerr and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris. But the task of demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the Dismissal had become tough.
This disconnect could not easily have been imagined in November and December 1975. The generations of 1975 fought for a version of Australian democracy they believed to be under threat. They believed that vested interests had mobilised, the media had played dirty, a chief justice had betrayed his claim to neutrality, opposition parties had thrown aside propriety, and a representative of the Queen, a “colonial relic” who should confine himself to opening the occasional fete, had sacked a democratically elected government using powers most considered had fallen into disuse.
Part of the process of submerging the Dismissal was to normalise it. The Coalition parties worked that way in 1975: they framed their actions, and Kerr’s, as a working out of the democratic system, the constitution displaying its capacity to resolve a crisis. As we saw in some fiftieth-anniversary public statements by Liberal politicians, including shadow education minister Julian Leeser, and right-wing media commentators, this remains integral to their defence of the Dismissal: that it was legal, proper and, even if hardly a common event, nonetheless a normal and acceptable process.
The work I’ve been doing with James Watson, thanks to support from the Whitlam Institute, tells another story, although not via the usual means of closer study of the elite actors — Whitlam, Kerr, Fraser and chief justice Garfield Barwick — or their principal actions. Rather, we turned to social and political movements, and the engagements of citizens and activists.
There is one sense in which their responses to the Dismissal were indeed “normal”: we are seeking to recover the Dismissal less as a unique constitutional event than as an emblematic and supremely important example of the wider popular politics of that time. It was an era of social protest, political mobilisation and industrial militancy.
We need to recover the history of the Dismissal as part of a more expansive sense of the possibilities of democratic citizenship in the 1970s, and on a less happy note, to see in the course of the protest movement of 1975–77 a harbinger of the disarming of much of this radical hope in the later 1970s, 1980s and beyond.
A gathering crisis
When the Coalition deferred supply on 16 October, it broke a convention of parliamentary politics that many Australians felt was central to the health of their democracy. Few Australians would have believed that a government with a democratically elected majority in the lower house should be blocked by the Senate from governing, despite there being some recent precedents, at least at state level.
The Cain Labor government in Victoria had lost office in 1947 when supply was blocked in the upper house but then forced its way back into government in 1952 by denying supply to the Country Party. Similarly, the Tasmanian Legislative Council had forced an election in 1948 by refusing supply to Robert Cosgrove’s Labor government. And in 1970 Whitlam himself had defended voting against a budget in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in an effort to “destroy the government” (a quote that was often used against him by Kerr and his supporters after 1975). But it is one thing to talk in such terms in the heat of parliamentary debate and in the absence of a Senate majority, and another to actually do it.
In response to Fraser’s denial of supply, Australia’s unions organised large-scale protests. The massive, powerful and militant Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union held “spontaneous strikes.” Sydney members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation announced a twenty-four-hour stoppage for Friday; 1000 of them marched from the union rooms to the rally addressed by Whitlam and the ACTU’s Bob Hawke, the Labor Party president, in Hyde Park.
Outside Parliament House in Canberra on the Thursday, while the budget bills were being considered by the Senate, Hawke told a crowd of 2500 that if the opposition refused to grant supply, “the Australian trade union movement may very well think about withholding supplies from them.” Was that a threat of a general strike? Probably not, given the meeting had considered and then rejected a motion for such action. Still, the National Country Party leader Doug Anthony accused Hawke of “incitement to lawlessness.”
The role of the perceived potential for social disorder in the events leading up to the Dismissal has been underestimated by historians. At the beginning of October, with the plan to block supply on the opposition’s informal agenda but not yet a reality, Liberal Movement senator Steele Hall publicly warned Fraser he would fail to build a “popular base” for his leadership if the community “contained the bitter and growing discontent of Labor supporters who believed the ballot box had lost its democratic function.” Kerr himself, writing shortly after the first rallies and strikes following the blocking of supply in mid-October, told the Queen’s private secretary: “As the money runs out many problems will arise and the reaction of the trade unions has to be considered. There are threats of protest strikes and industrial ‘war’.”
Ian Macphee, a leading Victorian Liberal moderate, wrote a couple of weeks later along similar lines: if the Coalition won an election “stemming from the present crisis we will have the outright hostility of nearly 50 per cent of the electorate.” He worried especially over the unions, which “would feel justified in destroying our government as they believe the Senate destroyed their government.” The confrontation involved, he said, was “frightening to contemplate.” The Labor senator John Wheeldon told the Senate during the budget debate on 16 October:
This government has been trying to maintain the economy of this country on an even keel, by advocating wage indexation and by restraint in public expenditure. If we are removed, will opposition members be able to convince the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union or the Miners Federation to restrain their wage demands? Why should the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union or the Miners Federation restrain their wage demands if they know that they are living in a society in which anything goes.
Fear of violence and disorder was real, even while the rallies and protests held in the immediate wake of the blocking of supply were mainly orderly and peaceful. But at a Liberal rally at Brisbane’s Festival Hall on 31 October, Liberal MP John Hughes was punched in the stomach and on the nose after he tried to snatch a placard from Labor supporters. A picture of his bloodied face appeared on the front page of the Courier Mail the next day. The ugly confrontation, although isolated and minor, exposed the danger of peaceful protest degenerating into physical violence amid an increasingly passionate politics.
The Dismissal and its aftermath
Many Australians would later remember where they were when they first heard about the Dismissal, usually reporting a sense of shock or disbelief. Some simply couldn’t believe what others told them or had heard over the radio. When the news did sink in, some were relieved and others angered, but anyone with even a basic appreciation of the country’s political culture understood they were witnessing something unusual and momentous. A young journalist, Niki Savva, described the scenes in Canberra that followed Fraser’s parliamentary announcement as “memorable, awesome and frightening.”
Demonstrators began assembling outside Parliament House — a few thousand by late afternoon — with smaller numbers going to Government House at Yarralumla where they lowered the flag to half-mast. The Canberra protests were peaceful overall, although demonstrators yelled “Sieg Heil” at Coalition politicians and invited those watching from the upper balcony of Parliament House to jump. When Fraser walked down the building’s famous steps to visit Government House for the second time that day, some protesters tried to punch him. Angry crowds also surged around his car on his return.
Good humour infused the remarkable appearance of comedian Garry McDonald, in character as Norman Gunston, who had flown from Sydney to join in the excitement. His appearance outside Parliament House delighted the crowd, to whom he made a well-received and rousing speech asking if the Dismissal was an “affront to the constitution of this country” or “just a stroke of good luck for Mr Frazier” (possibly confusing the new prime minister with the famous boxer). That people — even a leading player such as Bill Hayden, recently appointed treasurer — could find humour in these moments of high tension probably says more about the basic serenity of the country’s politics than any detailed account of the more aggressive forms of protest.
While Australia’s stock exchanges “went berserk” at the news of the Dismissal and “launched into the biggest buying spree” since the mining bubble of 1970, the events of 11 November raised the spectre of serious civil violence for the first time since the Depression. Protests occurred in the country’s capital cities over the following days, perhaps the largest and most destructive occurring in Melbourne on the 11th.
There, a pro-Whitlam protest at Liberal Party headquarters “erupted into one of the most violent demonstrations ever seen in the city” — according to the Australian — as protesters clambered over police cars and “kicks and punches were freely given.” Police were “led from the taunting crowd bleeding from head wounds and with their shirts torn.” A police wagon drove through the melee, knocking down protesters and police, while a horse used repeatedly to charge through the protesters was “battered with sticks and stones.” Glaziers refused to fix the broken windows of the party offices. “Each time they are asked to repair them, they just can’t quite seem to bring themselves to do it,” a helpful Furnishing Trades Society secretary explained.
In Sydney, about 2000 marched that day, mainly students, with scuffles but no arrests. Smaller protests were held in Adelaide and Brisbane.
Unions and the general strike
At a time when about 55 per cent of workers belonged to trade unions, by far the greatest potential for social disorder came from the possibility of mass industrial action. Sam Oldham has shown in Without Bosses: Radical Australian Trade Unionism in the 1970s that the decade was a period of significant labour movement militancy, not all of it securely under the control of union officials. Ideas of industrial democracy gained a significant foothold in many industries and contributed to shopfloor militancy. As Phil Griffiths has suggested, general accounts of the Dismissal mainly ignore the strikes that did occur and greatly underestimate the potential for mass action.
The Commonwealth Labor Advisory Committee, chaired by Bob Hawke and including the party’s federal parliamentary leaders and officers, ACTU leaders and representatives of the public service unions, met at John Curtin House in Canberra for several hours on 11 November. It passed a resolution expressing a “total dedication and determination to have the Whitlam Labor government re-elected.” Critically, there would be no support for a general strike.
Left-wing unions were most put out by what they saw as the unseemly haste of the rejection of mass strikes, the blame for which they laid squarely at the feet of Bob Hawke. The Melbourne branch of the Waterside Workers Federation, disagreeing with Hawke’s “reaction to the fascist onslaught on Australian democratic government,” urged that “industrial strength must be organised to move Fraser now.” The Federal Council of the Builders Labourers’ Federation donated a massive $20,000 to Labor’s election fund but also found “words hard to describe your [Hawke’s] gutless and cowardly statements regarding the current drive to fascism by Fraser. You have only strengthened current view that you are in the hands of the multinationals.”
The South Australian branch of the Australian Building and Construction Workers’ Federation wanted “an immediate general strike to demonstrate our disgust and complete opposition to the fascist moves of Fraser, the Governor-General and the multinationals.” It also called for “abolition of the colonial positions of Governor-General and State Governors, the expropriation without compensation of the multinationals and resolve to establish Australia as a truly Independent Republic, ruled by the working class, free of Imperialist domination.”
The Australian Railways Union rejected the “passive role” of the ACTU and called for “immediate and positive leadership.” Several unions wanted a twenty-four-hour stoppage, others forty-eight hours, but many others expressed their support for Hawke’s position, which had received subsequent endorsement by the ACTU executive.
Many unionists walked off the job on the afternoon of 11 November to attend hastily organised rallies, and hundreds of thousands went on strike in the days that followed. Seamen walked out, thereby tying up ships in the country’s ports. E.V. Elliott, veteran federal secretary of the Seamen’s Union and a communist, detected echoes of Hitler and Mussolini in Kerr’s actions and reported that many of his 5000 members had walked off the job on the 11 November, with some crews collecting as much as $1000 for the struggle ahead. Many of those at sea had radioed in their objections to Kerr’s actions.
On the 12th, hundreds of members of the union as well as some kindred maritime unions crowded into Sydney’s Trades Hall, where they pledged support for the re-election of Labor, promised at least a day’s pay and continuing political activity, and then marched through Sydney’s streets to Chifley Square. They returned to their ships on the 13th. Meanwhile, waterside workers began a twenty-four-hour strike at midnight as the 11th turned into the 12th.
Other workers — in the metal trades and railway workshops of Sydney and Newcastle, for example, and about 2000 at the Newcastle State Dockyard — spontaneously walked off the job soon after the news of the dismissal reached them. But the leaders of several large unions stood behind the ACTU’s support for the ballot box over strike action. The leaders of the Australian Workers’ Union, the Federated Ironworkers’ Union, and the Australian Postal and Telecommunications Union — all right-leaning — either opposed striking or said that any action needed to await further consultation between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement.
Among other white-collar unions, the Council of Australian Government Employee Organisations federal president, Ken Turbet, called on federal public servants to refrain from strike action. His position that “government are our employers, not political adversaries or friends, who should be served loyally and impartially” received the fullest commendation of one of its large constituent unions, the Administrative and Clerical Officers’ Association, which insisted on the political neutrality of public servants despite some pressure from the rank and file. If public servants had walked out, they could well have disrupted arrangements for the transition of the Coalition to caretaker government from 11 November and the 13 December election. Another group of public employees, ABC staff, held a four-hour stoppage on 14 November to protest against the management’s handling of reports on the crisis.
An emphasis on fundraising emerged quickly. Unions announced fundraising drives among their members and approved large donations to support Labor’s campaign, or in the case of the Teachers’ Federation to highlight the differences between the parties on education.
It is important not to see these actions through our knowledge of their ultimate fruitlessness, given the magnitude of Labor’s defeat on 13 December, because that was obviously not how matters appeared to many observers at the time. With the Whitlam government’s position improving in the opinion surveys, pollster Gary Morgan predicted a close result.
It was the maritime unions — seamen and waterside workers — who provided the strongest counterpoint to the emphasis on overturning the Dismissal at the ballot-box. They remained on strike for several days, while a walkout of Queensland meat workers closed many abattoirs. The massive Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union required its members in the metropolitan areas to walk off the job for at least four hours on Friday 14 November, a day of nationwide protest. In Melbourne, it and other left-wing unions called out about 400,000 workers that day, contributing to the strong attendance at Defend Democracy rallies.
Isolated calls for a national strike continued, but even the left-wing unions appear to have realised that the time for any such action had passed, if indeed it had ever existed. On 25 November Pat Clancy, federal secretary of the Building Workers Industrial Union and a member of the Soviet-line Socialist Party of Australia, placed before the ACTU executive a call for a national strike during the election campaign as a last-resort response to “provocation” from the political right. But Hawke had already won the debate, and that victory would have consequences for Australian politics well beyond the election of 13 December 1975.
Grateful campaigners
The 1975 election campaign really began when a bomb blew out the right eye of Keith Macfarlane, a clerk in Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Brisbane mailroom. On 19 November, just as the day was starting, Macfarlane called over a colleague, Garry Kross, to look at a white envelope addressed to the premier and marked “press release kit.” Inside were white wires. When Kross put the envelope down “a flash and a whoosh” blew a hole in the desk and cut his face and hand. Another envelope had been sent to Fraser the same day, but in that case an x-ray machine caught the bomb before anyone could be hurt. Two days later, a third was sent to Kerr’s office.
These acts of terrorism attracted understandable attention, but the larger story was of peaceful campaigning, drawing on the capacities for social movement mobilisation already well demonstrated in recent years and the credibility the government had built up in such quarters. On the very day of the Dismissal, 8500 women insurance workers had gained equal pay as the result of an Arbitration Commission decision creating a common salary scale in their industry. The Whitlam government had supported equal pay from the moment it came to office in December 1972 and its record of achievement for women had, in the end, exceeded the initial expectations of many feminists.
That was in no small part due to Elizabeth Reid, women’s adviser to the government — a world first at the time of her appointment in 1973. Reid had resigned on 2 October 1975, frustrated at relentlessly negative and sexist media coverage that had eroded support for her among the men advising Whitlam.
The Women’s Liberation Movement was an ambivalent campaigner in 1975, choosing to support Labor as the better alternative to a Fraser-led Coalition government. CAMP, the major pro-gay rights organisation in New South Wales, displayed a similar attitude, its executive having decided during the supply crisis in late October “to strongly urge all members” to support the Labor government at rallies and elsewhere, because compared with Coalition governments, it “has been shown to be the only instrument for reform in Australia.”
Women’s groups also rallied, with “Women for Whitlam” groups emerging around the country. In Melbourne, seventy women representing twenty-one women’s organisations resolved to support Labor and Whitlam, acknowledging that “over the last three years, and especially in International Women’s Year, women’s issues had received recognition for the first time in Australia’s history.” In the same city, Margaret Whitlam addressed a Women for Democracy rally, declaring that “[f]or the first time an Australian Government has dedicated itself to the principle that every woman has the right and should have the opportunity to choose the way of life best suited to her.”
In Adelaide, Women’s Liberation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom formed a Women’s Action Group with Labor women and held a lunchtime rally in Rundle Mall; it also decided to door-knock “in swinging electorates.”
In Sydney, 1500 members of a People’s Action Coalition met at a Hyde Park rally where speakers represented Women’s Liberation, CAMP, the Australian Union of Students and the Italian community. Members of these organisations then marched with resident action and environmental groups to a rally in the Domain being addressed by Gough Whitlam. Stop Fraser committees were formed among Greeks, Italians and other migrant groups; at the big Sydney Domain rally addressed by Whitlam, “We want Gough” was said to have been heard in almost as many languages as there were migrant groups in Australia. Students and academics also mobilised.
There was gratitude, too, for what the government had done for First Nations peoples. Whitlam had only recently, in August, handed back land to the Gurindji people of the Northern Territory. Yolŋu artist and activist Wandjuk Marika now announced that his people, who lived on the Gove Peninsula, would give the Labor campaign $12,000 raised from the sale of their paintings “because Labor is for the people. If Labor gets in we will get land rights.”
When it came, the election result — a massive Coalition majority in the House and Senate — was a crushing blow for Labor supporters. Many felt betrayed, powerless and depressed. Guido Barrachi, whose career in radical politics stretched back to the first world war and its aftermath as a founding member of the Communist Party, had come out of retirement as an activist to hand out election material for Labor, wandering the hot streets of Penrith with a sign around his neck. Lugging his heavy sack of paper on a hot summer’s day proved too much. He collapsed and died that night, just as the political analysts were calling a victory for Fraser and the Coalition.
Memory does its work
As C.V. Wedgwood warned, history is “lived forwards, but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” We know that Australian democracy was not destroyed by the Dismissal. There was no outbreak of mass violence. There was no revolution. There was no republic. We know that the Coalition won the 13 December 1975 election in a landslide. But the major actors could not be certain of that result on 11 November. The Dismissal and 1975 election weighed heavily on Labor supporters and the left, who believed their democracy was coming undone before their eyes.
Yet it is possible to discern in the events that followed something of the political order that would take shape in the 1980s. “With passing of time I maintained the rage but its heat diminished,” Labor senator John Button explained. “I could forgive but not forget the indulgences of the Whitlam government. I was convinced that the next Labor government could not be as undisciplined as the last. It would need strategies and patience.” Many of the Labor politicians who, like Button, would do so much to reshape the country from 1983 seem to have drawn similar conclusions from the experience.
Most significantly, there was Bob Hawke. One can detect in his campaigning in November and December 1975 the first stage of his bid for the Lodge. While, as we have seen, some left-wing unions were unhappy with Hawke’s dampening of mass industrial action, there was nonetheless wider support for his position among ordinary members of the public. Hannah Sweeney, a Queenslander, wrote at 11pm on 13 December to congratulate Hawke for the way he had fought the election:
I did not vote for your party, but I admired the spirit of moderation and of true democracy which you showed in many of your public speeches, and which were dangerously lacking in the statements of some other public figures of both parties. When our country has been so deeply divided, we need responsible leaders to heal our divisions. You have helped do this.
Another Liberal voter, Robert Ellis from Melbourne, was deeply impressed by Hawke’s conduct during the election night coverage, admiring the courage with which he endured defeat and his capacity to stay cool despite “unnecessary needling” from Billy Snedden. Ellis continued:
Both the extreme Left and the extreme Right of Australian politics have the potential to threaten the Australian people and are to be feared. I believe that you can do more, by reason and persuasion, to prevent the excesses of both extremes, than can almost anyone in Australia… On Saturday, you proved, at least to me, that you are one of the people on whom the future of this country depends.
We don’t know if Hannah Sweeney or Robert Ellis voted Labor in 1983. We do know that these citizens saw in Hawke’s politics the appeal of a consensus that would form the centrepiece of his appeal to voters a little over seven years later.
For many years, certainly through the Hawke and Keating era, the manner of Whitlam’s demise and the character of his response would dominate collective memory of his government. At some point, though, probably from the mid-1990s, the Dismissal became more marginal to Whitlam’s reputation. He was no longer mainly the martyr of 1975. As he became older, he became ever more venerable, associated more with a great transformation in Australian life he had helped bring about than with the chaos of his government’s demise. The government’s legislative record, achieved in just three years, was remarkable and enviable by later standards.
Fraser’s reputation, too, improved over time as he moved leftward and reconciled with Whitlam. People associated him with his various public stands — now often against the Liberal Party under his former treasurer John Howard — and less with the Dismissal. Kerr, who died much earlier than the others in 1991, was left to carry the worst of the Dismissal’s reputation, as he does today. By displacing responsibility from Fraser to Kerr, it became easier to see the Dismissal as the handiwork of a man of poor character and judgement — possibly a drunkard — rather than the product of a flawed democracy.
Australians have made and remade the events of October to December 1975 in their national imaginary, exercising the kind of agency in evidence during the crisis itself. Today, they are more likely to note that Whitlam gave them the chance of a university education than to recall much about the events of 11 November or the weeks surrounding the dismissal. Many of them were there saying as much outside the Sydney Town Hall in 2014 at the service to celebrate Whitlam’s life and mark his death.
The people were not mere extras in a play acted out by Whitlam, Fraser, Kerr, Barwick and Hawke. Rather, they were at the centre of the drama, just as the nature and quality of their democracy was at the heart of what was in contention. But although the Dismissal remains in the living memory of many older Australians and is still conventionally regarded as the most significant single event in the country’s political history, it paradoxically seems to have very little influence on how most of us regard our democracy today. Is that just Australia’s famous complacency? Are we so easy-going, so practical and matter-of-fact as a people, that we simply decided to put it behind us and move on, letting bygones be bygones?
Yet democracy is now probably more central to Australia’s national self-image than it was in 1975. In a world where democracy is in decay, Australians have been increasingly inclined to celebrate the robustness of the Australian version, with regular and affectionate nodding to the democracy sausage as shorthand for a pride in their success in holding free and fair elections and producing governments with popular consent and legitimacy. In 1975, however, Australian democracy seemed a more fragile thing.
The basic institutional design of our system remains unchanged from those turbulent times. Much of the union protest that occurred in 1975 would today be impossible unless the leaders concerned were prepared to risk massive fines. In some ways, and certainly in that respect, our democracy is less healthy than it was as spring turned to summer in 1975. We would perhaps do well to regard it with a more critical eye, and with a more careful vigilance, than has become fashionable in the land of the democracy sausage. •
