If prime minister Gough Whitlam had hoped, as he signed his provocative Blue Poles Christmas cards for 1973, that the Coalition would “accept the conventions that bind it in defeat” and settle into a more established role as Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, he was wrong. His government’s second year began much as the first had ended, with a welter of reform legislation to put before the parliament and a truculent Senate intent on rejecting it.
It ended where no one had predicted. By the end of 1974, Labor had won a historic second election victory — the first under the same leader — at the double dissolution election of 18 May 1974; the hostile Democratic Labor Party had been consigned to electoral oblivion; both houses of parliament had for the first time sat jointly under the constitutional provision that enabled the election; and, most significantly, the six bills that triggered the election had been passed by that sitting.
Those six bills — two establishing Medibank, two relating to the granting of Senate representation for the ACT and Northern Territory, a bill to reduce the permissible variation in electorate population size from 20 per cent to 10 per cent to ensure “one vote one value” and another establishing the Petroleum and Minerals Authority — were central to the Whitlam government’s legislative program. The PMA, for instance, aimed to introduce a degree of public ownership and control over the minerals and energy resources that previous governments had subsidised at over $341 million a year.
The passage of these six bills was the very outcome the opposition had sought to avoid when it twice rejected or “failed to pass” them in the Senate. For these transformative outcomes alone the 1974 double dissolution deserves closer scrutiny than it has received. Otherwise, as Whitam himself commented in 1985, “the 1974 election is in danger of taking its place in Australian political memory as the election that never was.”
The Labor Party’s re-election campaign was unusual and in some respects difficult to manage. It called for an uneasy mix of positive and negative messages: optimistically reciting what the government had achieved and how much more was still to come while also conveying a sense of the opposition obstruction that had driven the government to an early election. This polarisation between progress and obstruction was reflected in the respective themes adopted by the major parties — “a fair go” being central to Labor’s campaign in contrast to the Liberal Party’s anodyne and reactive “think again.”
Several campaign slogans were considered, ranging from the alliterative: “Give Gough a Go” and “Great Going Gough,” to the functional: “Go Ahead — Mathews for Casey” (which was adaptable to every candidate and every electorate) to the more directive: “Go Ahead — Vote Labor.” What they all had in common was a sense of movement, of advance, and of a government that had not yet been given a “fair go.” These positive slogans were juxtaposed with others framing a more personal attack on the prospect of Liberal leader Billy Snedden as prime minister: “I’m dreadin’ Snedden” and “Snedden PM — You’ve got to be joking” were popular bumper stickers.
In the end, the slogan most commonly used was the simplest: “Give Gough a Go.” It captured the “fair go” element while also portraying a sense of momentum, of a government moving ahead and looking to the future. The fairness mantra became a key focus of campaigning over the next five weeks.
As the campaign began in earnest the biggest problem for the Coalition was that, despite pushing the government to an election for months, it was unprepared for its own campaign. Snedden was effectively forced to pause the campaign during the first week in order to undertake that basic policy rebuilding, handing Labor a highly effective campaign target: an opposition, unprepared for government, that had devoted just three days to drawing up its key policies, some of which risked inflaming inflation.
As the opposition dealt with its policy issues, Whitlam left for Palm Cove, north of Cairns, for a short break over Easter to prepare the campaign launch and key speeches away from the distractions of Canberra. There was another, more sinister, aspect to that move: as Whitlam and his wife Margaret were now under twenty-four-hour police guard following a series of anonymous kidnapping threats.
Whitlam delivered Labor’s policy launch at the Blacktown Civic Centre on 29 April — the same venue where, eighteen months earlier, he had given the “It’s Time” speech launching the 1972 election campaign. The hall was once again full, with more than 2000 people inside and hundreds more crowded at the windows straining to see Whitlam speak or gathered outside to listen. Labor president Bob Hawke was a popular warm-up, stepping on stage to thunderous applause to remind the crowd of the Liberal Party’s absent policy platform: “The Liberals had to slink to Melbourne, lock themselves up for three days and try to find some policies!”
The 1972 It’s Time song was performed by Col Joye and the Joye Boys to loud cheers — although this time the enthusiasm of the party faithful was tempered by an edge of restrained anger at having to face another election so soon. As Whitlam reminded them:
The government you elected for three years has been interrupted in mid-career… Everything we promised, everything we have achieved, everything you expected of us — all this is suddenly threatened. It is threatened by the actions of men you rejected a mere seventeen months ago. It is threatened by the actions of men elected to the Senate not in 1972 but in 1967 and 1970. It is threatened by men who refused to stand by the umpire’s verdict — your verdict — to give us a chance, to give you a chance, to give Australia a new chance.
Beyond that opening salvo, the focus was on achievement, on the progress already made in the implementation of “the program,” and on the reforms achieved in the face of obstruction: women’s rights, Aboriginal people’s rights, greater equality of opportunity, electoral reform, and improvements in the arts, education and health. The government’s greatest achievement, Whitlam said, was in education, with preschool and childcare provisions, a fourfold increase in expenditure on education and free tertiary education.
The Coalition’s campaign initially focused on the economy and declining economic conditions. Inflation was running at 11 per cent, unemployment was just starting to rise and wages had increased significantly in the last year, bringing Labor’s economic credentials into question. Opinion polls reflected the early success of the Coalition’s focus on inflation as voters swung away from the government in the first two weeks of the campaign.
In early May, Labor strategists called an emergency meeting to assess the problems emerging in the campaign. Labor’s national secretary and legendary campaign manager Mick Young excoriated the campaign as too negative, not giving sufficient emphasis to the government’s achievements and failing to call out the divisions and weaknesses in the Coalition. The strategy was adjusted to focus more clearly on economic matters, with new proposals to restructure tax for low and middle-income earners and additional anti-inflation measures.
The “fair go” was to become less prominent in the final weeks of the campaign as inflation and the cost of living took centre stage. Whitlam pledged to deal with excessive wage demands and to make greater use of the Prices Justification Tribunal to control prices and profits.
The polls shifted again, and a Morgan Gallup poll released that week showed the strategic adjustments to Labor’s campaign were having an effect. After the initial swing to the Coalition, the opposition was falling behind. The Bulletin reported that “the PM was holding his position in elector favour while opposition leader Snedden was slipping back.” The magazine noted in the final week of the campaign that support for Whitlam was “rock solid” and his approval rating just over 50 per cent.
The Coalition’s campaign was beset by internal divisions — over state and federal issues, personalities, policy direction and campaign strategy. The conservative NSW branch and premier Robert Askin endorsed a series of incendiary advertisements highlighting the fearful spectre of the “socialist Labor government.” Devised by Sydney advertising mogul John Singleton, they featured several “vox pops” of apparently random disaffected Labor supporters speaking to camera of their experiences of socialism — which they now saw as mirrored in the Labor government.
The (in)famous “Estonian woman” was one of these, and her high-rotation televisual spectre of fear turned voters away:
I come originally from Estonia, the Baltic State… I have lived enough under communist regime, so I left and came to Australia… Then about sixteen months ago the Labor Party came to power, and I thought so, it is still a free country, but now I can see how wrong I was. Today I can see Labor is disguised socialist but for me it is disguised communist.
As the Age’s Creighton Burns remarked, “plausibility is the critical test of the effectiveness of any political campaign.” These attempts to link Canberra circa 1974 to Soviet Russia failed that test.
Singleton and a variety of unnamed business interests raised $250,000 for the largest-ever television advertising spend in any election, running their thirty-second “socialism” claims as an adjunct to the Coalition’s campaign. With $2 million available for its own advertising, the Coalition outspent Labor by two to one. Its television ads were broadcast across every channel several times an hour, augmented by Singleton’s “socialist” sound bites, which ultimately served to annoy rather than persuade the voters.
The Country/National Party’s campaign slogans failed to gain traction. The simple “Vote National Party” was hardly inspiring, and it was difficult to know what the slogan “Let’s Live Like Australians” even meant. As the impact of its economic focus waned the Coalition campaign became increasingly driven by fear and division — fear of the government, of socialism, of immigration and of urban privilege against rural constituents. It sought a return to the past, a pre-Whitlam restitution, vowing to remove the new national anthem, prioritise private health insurance, reinstate the superphosphate bounty and increase support for the mining and resources industry.
Country Party leader Doug Anthony claimed that a future Labor government would “endanger the way we live.” Italian-Australian voters were targeted with leaflets in Italian claiming the “socialist” Labor Party was going to take their farms, their houses, and their businesses.
These extreme claims reflected and encouraged an unsettling and at times dangerous element in this highly polarised campaign. They fuelled existing divisions over immigration and multiculturalism, which had flared with the government’s introduction of a range of measures broadening immigration and supporting people of non-English speaking backgrounds. Groups agitating against those changes called for the reintroduction of the white Australia policy and funded overtly racist campaign advertising fliers. Racist advertisements proliferated in papers in the NSW Riverina district, where Al Grassby had been the Labor member since 1969. Grassby was seen as “the father of multiculturalism,” having presided over the removal of race and nationality from immigration and citizenship laws, among many wide-ranging reforms.
Grassby had proudly announced that “the white Australia policy is dead. Give me a shovel and I’ll bury it!” For this effrontery he and his family received hate mail and death threats and were assigned a bodyguard for twenty-four-hour protection. The volume of hate mail increased dramatically after the election was announced and Grassby’s wife, Ellnor, collapsed after taking a telephone call in which the caller threatened to cut their daughter’s throat.
A week out from the election, the Age reported its latest polls showing Labor and Coalition still neck and neck. But polling in twenty-five key seats over the final week suggested a better outcome for the government. Factors cited by swinging voters pointing to the success of the government’s campaign strategy: Whitlam had only had seventeen months in the job and should be given a fair go, and it was their support for Whitlam that was critical in their voting decision. “Mr Whitlam became part of the reason why Labor ‘deserved’ a fair go,” concluded political scientist (and future Liberal MP) David Kemp.
If it could hold its seats in the cities then Labor could afford to lose a couple of rural seats, while the Coalition needed to gain five seats to form majority government. These figures were complicated by the addition of two new electorates following a redistribution, with the new seats of Tangney created in Western Australia and Fraser in the Australian Capital Territory. Both these seats were seen as nominally Labor gains, assisting the government in its quest for a second term. With eighteen- to twenty-year-olds voting for the first time, the usual polling inferences were further confounded.
As polling closed at 6pm on 18 May 1974, the only certainty was that this was going to be close.
The El Toro Motel, an incongruous faux-Spanish establishment with internal courtyard, archways, bougainvillea and white-washed brick in Sydney’s west, was the setting for Labor’s election-night vigil. Whitlam and the party entourage were nervously ensconced before a bank of televisions as the results came in. In the early hours of counting the result looked like a victory for the government — until at around 10pm the trend unexpectedly started to change. Postal votes and rural electorates were much stronger for the Coalition, and three of Labor’s seats in Queensland seemed endangered by a strong swing in that state.
As counting continued over the weekend, the result remained unresolved; although the government increasingly looked to have been returned, a number of seats remained too close to call. By Monday, though, Labor had clearly won a historic second successive victory under the same leader, and Gough Whitlam became the first Labor leader to achieve that distinction. The government’s majority was reduced from nine to five, with Labor losing five seats, including Al Grassby’s, and picking up four, including the two new seats. Most importantly, the government was returned with sufficient numbers in the House and Senate combined to ensure the passage of the six trigger bills at the subsequent joint sitting.
In many respects the double dissolution was a typical Whitlam move — bold, brash, and politically fraught — that succeeded on several levels: the government was returned; the six “trigger bills” were be passed in August; the DLP was despatched to electoral oblivion and finally, while the Senate result — twenty-nine Labor, one Liberal Movement, twenty-nine Coalition and one conservative independent — fell short of Labor control it also denied the Coalition a majority.
Whitlam had dealt with the obstruction, delivered the reforms, faced off the opposition’s threatened refusal to vote on Supply in the Senate, and taken the great risk of a new election for the entire parliament — and won. And yet, the obstruction would continue unabated. It was eleven days before Snedden acknowledged Labor’s victory, and even then his concession was hardly a concession at all: “We were not defeated. We did not win enough seats to form a government,” Snedden told astonished reporters.
Within days of that historic second victory, the Coalition was already acting as though the 1974 election had never happened. As Whitlam wrote later, “Our opponents no more accepted the people’s verdict of 1974 than they did of 1972.” •
This is an edited extract from Jenny Hocking and Allison Cadzow’s fiftieth-anniversary Legacy Paper, “The Election That Never Was”, published by the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University.
► Frank Bongiorno and Joshua Black on the historic August 1974 joint sitting of parliament
