OPINION: The Albanese government must understand that any Whitlam-style social agenda needs to come with a Hawke-Keating-style economic agenda to pay for it.
Half a century after it was elected to office on December 2, 1972, the Whitlam government remains the model for many of the Labor Party’s “true believers” of what a socially ambitious Labor government should aspire to be.
But after three years, the Whitlam government had become mired in perpetual chaos and ministerial scandals; the head-shaking Loans Affair, which prompted ruthless Malcolm Fraser to block supply in the Senate, culminated in Mr Whitlam’s Dismissal as prime minister by governor-general Sir John Kerr on November 11, 1975.
To his credit, Mr Whitlam was a self-declared “Rattigan-man” – after the anti-protection chair of the Tariff Board, Alf Rattigan – and the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent across-the-board tariff cut in the 1973 budget put the first dent in the walls of “Fortress Australia”.
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