When he was invited to work for Gough Whitlam in September 1967, Race Mathews was thirty-two, a teacher and Education Department speech therapist, married with three children. He’d been active in the Labor Party and served on the local council in the outer-eastern Melbourne suburb of Croydon.
As secretary of the Fabian Society, he’d briefly met Whitlam and his principal private secretary, John Menadue. When Menadue stepped down to take up a job with Rupert Murdoch — who was then politically left-of-centre — he recommended Race take his place on Whitlam’s staff. And so, in September 1967, began “the most tumultuous, and by far the most rewarding, five years of my career.”
Just minutes after Race had installed himself in his office, the door to his new boss’s office burst open. “Whitlam emerged,” he later wrote, “shouting for me to produce from Hansard — a publication with which I then had no more than a nodding acquaintance — the answer to a question on notice about the DFRB — an acronym of which I had never heard, and which he did not explain.” Whitlam’s shouting continued “while I fumbled and failed to comply, and his face turned more and more purple, until a tactful intervention by another staff member defused the situation and he vanished again behind the door.”
Race’s rescuer was one of the secretaries, Barbara Stuart, who would become a good friend, like all the Whitlam staff. Hansard was the official record of parliament and the DFRB was the Defence Force Retirement Benefits scheme. Gough’s explosion wasn’t personal, Barbara explained, and Race shouldn’t take offence.
“I was to learn that such episodes were a way of relieving his frustrations with the still largely inert majority of his parliamentary colleagues,” recalled Race, “and the shambles in which he had inherited the Labor Party from Calwell, particularly in Victoria. Sweetness and light would prevail again ten or so minutes later, but the heat was fierce while it lasted.”
Whitlam had become leader of the party in February that year and was determined to change things. But Labor was at a low point and there were many problems to overcome, including the hostility of the Victorian branch. The caucus was far from united behind Whitlam, and would not be until Labor made great gains in the 1969 election. His loyal staff felt he was in an almost impossible situation and it was part of their job to put up with his tantrums.
Deposed leader Arthur Calwell, meanwhile, remained in the parliament, totally embittered. “He was in his early seventies, but always wore a black tie in memory of his son Arthur, who’d died in 1948, at the age of eleven,” Race later told journalist Garry Sturgess. “Calwell used to haunt the corridor outside our office; sitting on the green leather couches against the wall. If you walked past, he’d seize you by the arm, sit you down, breathe whisky over you, and deliver a tirade of criticism about Gough. He was like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. You learned to keep walking and not make eye contact.”
Whitlam had only six staff, a tiny number compared to the opposition leader today. Graham Freudenberg, his adviser on political strategy and foreign policy, wrote the great parliamentary and campaign speeches. He was immensely well read, and Race found it a pleasure to watch him and Gough together. Both had an encyclopaedic knowledge of history.
Besides being principal private secretary, Race was the second-string speechwriter as well as working on policy initiatives and expanding the great network of advice Menadue and the ANU sociologist Sol Encel had initiated.
Whitlam’s assistant private secretaries were Peter Cullen — an acquaintance of Race’s who had once lent him a copy of Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism — and, later, Dick Hall. They were the troubleshooters, maintaining the office’s party and union links and dealing with the throng of individuals and interest groups who increasingly clamoured for Gough’s attention.
As Race later recalled, “It pained Whitlam that his staff had mostly chosen to educate themselves in unconventional ways, and were therefore — as he reminded us in moments of exasperation — ‘educational dropouts.’ Even so, our deficiencies were not without their uses. When the embittered Calwell attacked Whitlam for having ‘an office full of long-haired academics,’ Whitlam was able to retort that none of his staff were university graduates, and one of them was bald.”
As well as a receptionist, the office had two secretaries, Barbara Stuart and Carol Summerhayes, both of whom Race found to be a joy to be around — funny, clever, well informed and resilient. Carol worked mainly for Freudenberg, while Barbara assisted everyone else.
The Whitlam staff bonded closely and there was a lot of laughter; it was a way of letting off steam after Gough’s rages. They called him “Leader,” while he called them by their first names. They treated each other as equals, and socialised together.
“I went into the job with high hopes, and was never disappointed,” Race told Sturgess. “There was huge job satisfaction attached to it, and the feeling of making the sort of contribution I’d always wanted to make. I developed a pretty good rapport with Whitlam, and there were joyous occasions along the way. I was constantly learning and growing. We were a sort-of extended family and worked as a team. We all had our own jobs and were self-directed. We knew what we had to do and got on with it.”
Race’s life had changed dramatically. He was picked up in Melbourne at about 7am on Monday mornings, returned home around 7pm on Friday evenings, and often travelled with Gough on weekends. Before taking the job, he’d discussed it with his wife Jill, who was supportive. Both of them were Labor “true believers” and saw his job as a cause for celebration, but initially they had no idea of the actual intensity of the job, or what it would be like with Race living away from home so much of the time.
Gough was on the campaign trail every weekend, accompanied by one of the three male staffers and a secretary, so Race was away one weekend in three. “I spoke on the phone every night to my family and that was my lifeline. Gough understood, because he was in the same situation, with [his wife] Margaret bringing up the children almost single-handedly in Sydney.”
Race learned a great deal about speechwriting from Whitlam. “The starting point was usually a note or oral briefing from Whitlam, complete with references,” he told Sturgess. “In the first instance, a Whitlam line on a key topic was likely to have been laid down in earlier speeches that had the status of revealed truth, and could only with extreme difficulty be changed.”
After Race had given him a first draft, Whitlam would send it back “heavily annotated, or say something like, ‘you haven’t referred to my question of 23rd April 1964,’ or ‘have a look at such and such government report,’ or ‘have you talked to so and so about this?’” The drafting would continue until Whitlam was happy with it.
“I learned about ‘scansion’ or the rhythm of a speech,” said Race. “He was fond of alliteration and liked short phrases that could be used over and over again. As a speechwriter, you need to look at the world through the eyes of the person for whom you’re writing, and you’ve got to catch the cadence, or inflection, of their voice. I used to read his speeches in Hansard to see the way he spoke, and when I got better at it, I felt empowered.
“And the funny thing is that unconsciously I started to speak a bit like Gough. Not the deep, breathy voice we used to mimic when he was not around, but the way he enunciated very clearly and stressed certain words.” He wasn’t the only one: according to Whitlam’s biographer, Jenny Hocking, Graham Freudenberg “drew uncannily close in manner, speech and ideas to Whitlam.”
Because he and Gough shared the experience of living in facility-starved outer-suburban areas, Race particularly enjoyed writing speeches on urban and regional development. “The Liberals sneered at this,” Race told Sturgess. “They thought it was the business of local councils, and why hadn’t he just become a mayor, if that’s what he was on about.”
When he was in Canberra, Race had a room in Brassey House, a guesthouse mainly for public servants. He left there at about seven or eight in the morning and walked up to Parliament House, “dive-bombed by magpies in the nesting season.” At night he usually left for Brassey’s at 11pm. “It was glorious to walk through the big front doors into the night, looking out over the lake to the lights of Civic beyond. Canberra’s cold, dry air in your face was so invigorating that you felt you could go back in and do another day’s work.”
Race’s policy work was particularly focused on education and Medibank (later Medicare). “Race Mathews was the coordinator of policy and, to a degree which he has never claimed for himself, the originator of policy,” Graham Freudenberg wrote later.
When Race joined Whitlam’s office the Labor leader was busy attacking the Coalition government’s voluntary health insurance scheme, which was heavily subsidised by the government but deeply flawed and inequitable. The scheme was not designed to reduce the expenses of patients, the Labor leader declared, but to guarantee the fees of doctors.
Whitlam has been criticising the policy for years, mainly through the questions on notice that he’d put down annually since 1960 to successive health ministers. He had elevated these questions on notice to an art form. How many claims were accepted or rejected by the medical benefit funds that year? What were the reasons for rejecting a claim? If accepted, what percentage of the cost was met by the fund and what percentage by the Commonwealth? What were the reserves and operating expenses of the funds?
Whitlam had not yet come up with an alternative, but he had been impressed by ideas for a national health service put forward by Moss Cass, a young research doctor at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, whom Race had met in the early 1960s. Like most people on the left at the time, both were impressed by the National Health Service, introduced by the British Labour Party in the late 1940s.
When Race became Fabian Society secretary in 1960 he commissioned Cass to put his ideas into Fabian pamphlets. The first, “Reform in Medicine” (1961), advocated a national health scheme centred on public hospitals and health centres and staffed by full-time salaried doctors. Cass published more details in a second pamphlet, “A National Health Scheme for Labor” (1964), written when he was director of a trade union clinic in Footscray.
Impressed by the fact that Cass was focused on healthcare delivery and not just health insurance, Whitlam’s principal private secretary, John Menadue, had studied for himself the literature on different healthcare schemes. The evidence showed that private, fee-driven medicine resulted in excessive treatments and high costs.
Whitlam embraced the essence of Cass’s proposals. In his 1961 Curtin Memorial Lecture he said that “the best way to achieve a proper national health service is to establish a national hospital system.” The core of the program would be free treatment in public hospitals. Whitlam wanted a tiered system, with a major teaching hospital in each region and smaller local hospitals and community health centres, all staffed by salaried doctors. Although hospitals were a state responsibility, the scheme would be driven by Commonwealth grants to the states under section 96 of the Constitution.
In mid 1966, Menadue arranged for Whitlam to meet with Cass and two young researchers from the Institute of Applied Economic Research at the University of Melbourne, Dick Scotton and John Deeble, who had done groundbreaking research on hospital costs and health insurance. Among the several other doctors present was Rod Andrew, dean of medicine at Monash University. The discussion was mainly about the shortcomings of the government’s health insurance scheme.
As the meeting was about to conclude, Whitlam said, “Well, you’ve described the problem. Have you any solutions?” Scotton and Deeble said they had some general ideas but had not yet put anything in writing. At Whitlam’s urging, they agreed to do so.
Whitlam continued his attacks on the Coalition’s scheme after he was elected opposition leader in February 1967. The following February, Scotton and Deeble sent him a fifteen-page document outlining a universal, compulsory health insurance scheme, to be funded by a tax levy.
Soon afterwards, Whitlam received an invitation to speak on healthcare policy to the resident medical staff at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. He asked Race, who had taken over as principal private secretary, to draft a speech on the national hospital system outlined by Cass.
“I was completely sold on the national hospital idea,” Race told me decades later, “but had developed a standard procedure when writing a speech, that I’d go back to Menadue’s files. I found the Scotton and Deeble paper and could see it was absolutely right. Because you couldn’t jump from this decrepit, dysfunctional, private insurance scheme to a totally free, regionalised set of hospitals.”
Meeting with Scotton and Deeble in Melbourne, he discovered that the two researchers — inspired by a royal commission in Saskatchewan, Canada — had now written a paper setting out a universal health insurance scheme. “So instead of writing the speech about the national hospital system, I wrote about both schemes, with the emphasis on Scotton and Deeble’s health insurance scheme.”
Whitlam wanted to focus on Cass’s hospital proposal but eventually agreed to promote both schemes. Race drafted a speech titled “The Alternate National Health Program” and gave the first draft to Whitlam. “When Gough finally signed off, it was very close to the deadline. I showed it to Graham Freudenberg, who said, ‘You’ve won us the 1969 election!’”
Whitlam delivered the speech over lunch at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital on 5 July 1968. Despite the importance of the announcement, it was “one of the worst days of my life,” Race later wrote:
Fogs at Canberra Airport have tormented politicians and public servants for years. I had stayed on the night before the speech was to be delivered, in order to add some finishing touches, and supervise the printing. Fog duly closed the airport the following morning, and continued to do so until noon, while telephone calls from Whitlam in Sydney became increasingly terse. By the time I arrived at the hospital, Whitlam had been ad-libbing for half an hour, and I was anything but popular. Insult was added to injury when a doctor was overheard to comment afterwards on how much better the speech had been before the prepared version of it had finally been handed up to Whitlam.
The media coverage, including publication of the scheme in the Medical Journal of Australia, was good. Given that the scheme was not yet Labor policy, Scotton and Deeble were astonished when they read reports of the speech. Scotton later wrote that he and Deeble had expected their proposal to find its way into “the byzantine processes of policy formulation in the Labor Party, from which it would emerge, if it did at all, in an unrecognisable form.”
Whitlam had gone ahead in his usual “crash through or crash” style. Race recalled:
It was a huge success, because it created this terrific brawl with the Australian Medical Association. They immediately denounced it and embarked on a classic exercise of lobbying and disinformation. Prime Minister Gorton attacked it, along with Jim Forbes, the Minister for Health, especially in question time.
They set about dealing with these attacks:
We needed to get onto the public record a clear picture of what we were proposing, while fine-tuning the scheme to meet criticisms. Gough made a major speech to parliament about it and from then on until the 1969 election, we got more information via answers to ‘Questions on Notice’, which strengthened our criticism of the Government’s scheme…
“If I hadn’t found the Scotton and Deeble paper and persuaded Gough to run with their proposals,” Race later recalled, “we would not have had a health insurance policy for the 1969 election, only the hospitals policy. To that extent I can claim to be one of the midwives of Medibank.”
Labor came to the brink of power at the election, with health insurance one of the key contributors to its surge in support. Bill Hayden became the shadow social security minister and, with Whitlam, carried the Medibank policy into the following election, in 1972. Moss Cass, meanwhile, had entered federal parliament as the member for Maribyrnong and later became Whitlam’s environment and conservation minister.
Medibank was established on 7 August 1974 in a joint sitting of federal parliament. The national hospital system would come later. •
This is an edited extract from Race Mathews: A Life in Politics, by Iola Mathews (Monash University Publishing).
