Webdiary columnist [1] John Miner writes: "I'm a journalist who has worked as a press secretary to Labor Premiers in NSW and Victoria and was a senior adviser to PM Paul Keating. I have a communication consultancy in my home town of Newcastle, and am a founding member of The New Institute, which argues for a place in national debate for Australians who live beyond the capital cities." His IR power to the feds: the Australian people always say no [2] is a good read after the rallies of last Tuesday. John's last piece for Webdiary was John Miner on Brogden's media and Cuming's case [3].
Coming soon to Webdiary: Linda Stanhope's review of The Great Crash, ex-NSW Solicitor General Michael Sexton's book on the Dismissal.
The Dismissal and the legacy
by John Miner
Remembrance Day 1975 is not about Gough Whitlam's being sacked as Prime Minister.
It's not about Malcolm Fraser, or those eminent figures who get trotted out on every anniversary of The Dismissal.
It's about my first vote being torn up.
My first vote, cast with care and deliberation (do you remember that unprecedentedly vast Senate voting paper in NSW?) on 18 May 1974, was effectively torn up by the unelected Governor-General.
I was hardly Robinson Crusoe. There were 823,576 more voters on the electoral roll for the 1974 election than there were at the 1972 election.
This was the result of the 1973 decision to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. So, not only all Australians who had turned 21 from December 1972 to the cut-off of the roll in 1974 had become eligible to vote - which was the normal thing - but so had everybody who had turned 20, 19 or, like me, 18.
You can't tell how many had died, moved, or otherwise fallen off the roll, so we know only that at least 823,000 were new voters. Even that number is about one voter in nine, an extraordinary percentage.
Neither is it possible to tell how many of those first-time voters chose Gough Whitlam's ALP and how many preferred the Coalition led by Bill Snedden and Doug Anthony. I would assume that more than half supported the party which had given them the vote and which still held considerable appeal among younger voters.
I felt on 11 November 1975 that my value as a citizen was nil - when I had been implicitly told, when the officer at Charlestown handed me the two ballot papers on that Saturday morning in May, 1974, that my country considered me sufficiently mature and important to the community to have a say in the election of its government.
There must be a couple of hundred thousand still with us who remember the experience.
Some of us have no respect for politics. Some don't trust politicians, some don't trust the system.
I do. I am a member of the Australian Labor Party. I have worked for three Labor Premiers and for the most recent Labor Prime Minister.
I believe the system we have works better than any other, at least in part because we don't have any other, so what are you going to do?
It works better, when you examine it, than many of its alienated critics like to say, and it works better than a lot of other systems.
It's wonderful to read that Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser have so much in common these days, agree on so many things, and don't hate each other. We shouldn't hate each other.
But Malcolm Fraser and the late John Kerr are responsible for breaking the Australian people's faith.
If, as is commonly said, people don't trust politicians, it could be the fault of many politicians; but if, as is equally apparent, they don't trust the political system, nobody bears more of the blame than the late John Kerr.
Decades of largely decent and relatively effective government have failed to repair the socio-political fabric. The mirror cracked from side to side, to quote Tennyson's poem, and the curse is come upon us - "us" being the largest single influx of first-time voters since women got the vote, the last of the baby-boomers, a highly significant bloc of Australians who have had a hard time believing for the past 30 years that we have a system that they can trust, and who have not hesitated to tell others that they shouldn't trust it either.
John Kerr is dead, Garfield Barwick is dead, Kep Enderby, Sir Frederick Wheeler, Jim Cairns, Rex Connor, Pat Field, Cleaver Bunton, Bill Snedden: so many dead, and so many more happy to be forgotten. What's the point of arguing again over what they did or didn't do?
The story was never theirs, really.
The Dismissal of the Prime Minister, the very term, has blinded political writers, students and analysts to the other event of 11 November: the tearing up of so many votes, the destruction of so many new voters' democratic illusions.
The tricorn symbolism of Kerr keeping Fraser in the kitchen while he met Whitlam; the proclamation on the steps of the House: these are irresistibly powerful symbols that cause us to forget that they are not democracy.
Democracy is what the rest of us had.