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We The Jury:
The Trial Of Gough Whitlam
Part 1

  (based on David Atwell’s “Australian War Of Independence” timeline)

By Chris Oakley

******

Up until November of 1975 the very idea of a sitting Australian prime minister being prosecuted in a Nuremburg-style tribunal would have seemed so far-fetched as to be unthinkable. But that was before a financial crisis hit Australia and threw the country into its worst political emergency of the 20th century; the government of Australian Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam imploded as Whitlam’s critics took to the streets to protest his refusal to comply with Governor- General Sir John Kerr’s November 11th letter dismissing Whitlam from office and appointing Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser as head of a caretaker administration. Whitlam, unwilling to comply with what he viewed as an unconstitutional directive on Kerr’s part, became locked in a standoff with Frasier’s “rump” government that touched off wider unrest in Australia and at its height threatened to plunge the nation into civil war.

There was no hope of getting assistance from Great Britain to resolve the situation-- the Westminster Act of 1971 explicitly barred London from intervening in the crisis. As for the United States, it was still recovering from the Watergate scandal and its ignominious exit from Vietnam; there wasn’t much hope of relief coming from that quarter. And the Soviet Union certainly wasn’t going to do anything to discourage the unrest the crisis had provoked; if anything, a sizable part of the Kremlin elite was secretly rooting for the total collapse of Australia’s political structure in hopes that such an event would pave the way for the installation of a Marxist(or at the very minimum socialist) government in Canberra. For days much of the world simply watched from the sidelines as Whitlam and his political allies holed up inside Parliament House-- although India, Singapore, Malaysia, and China did recall their ambassadors from Canberra to protest Whitlam’s actions during the crisis.


Matters finally came to a head on December 2nd, 1975 when regular Australian Army troops stormed Parliament House at Frasier and Kerr’s directive after Whitlam’s repeated refusals to leave the building. His two chief lieutenants during the long siege, deputy prime minister Jim Cairns and treasurer William Hayden, managed to escape one step ahead of the troops chasing them. Whitlam himself wasn’t quite so lucky; two civilian police officers spied the soon-to-be former prime minister as he was trying to slip out a side door and restrained Whitlam until he be taken into custody. Within minutes after Whitlam’s arrest, a squad of military police had brought the deposed prime minister to a waiting UH-1 helicopter for transport to prison and additional army troops had started moving out in all directions to search for Cairns and Hayden. Cairns eluded police and military authorities for four and a half days before he was finally captured in Brisbane on December 7th; Hayden, for his part, would remain at large until December 18th, when he was caught by Sydney police just two blocks from the Canadian consulate, where he had intended to seek political asylum.


It’s hard to envisage with any degree of accuracy how the course of Australian history might have run had Whitlam succeeded in making good his escape from Parliament House. Since at least 1977 students of both real and counterfactual history have been debating with one another on the topic of what effect Whitlam’s escape might have had on the crisis besetting his country; one side insists that civil war would have been unavoidable, while the other argues the crisis could just as well have fizzled out and Whitlam and Frasier eventually worked out some kind of compromise. But both sides in the debate agree on one point: Whitlam’s arrest effectively pulled the plug on his hopes of remaining in office as prime minister. Whitlam’s detractors savaged him as selfish at best and a traitor at worst, and even many people who had previously backed him conceded his actions on and before December 2nd had done more harm than good. The rest of the Australian public just wanted to return to their normal lives and enjoy the Christmas holiday without the threat of an armed insurrection hanging over their heads.


Thus there was little objection raised when Frasier finally moved his government into Parliament House on December 20th, two days after Hayden’s arrest. Frasier’s first official act following his arrival at Parliament House was to request an update on the medical condition of Queensland premier Jo Bjelke-Petersen, who’d been badly wounded in an assassination attempt the same day Jim Cairns was arrested; his second official act was to announce he intended at the earliest possible date to have the Australian federal attorney general formally charge Gough Whitlam with treason. Australian TV and radio networks transmitted the announcement live that afternoon; Australia’s major newspapers carried it as their lead story on the front page the next morning.


Within 48 hours of Frasier’s announcement BBC-TV newsreaders were commenting on the potential legal and political ramifications of the impending trial and American newspapers were printing dramatic front page headlines like “THE PEOPLE VS. WHITLAM”(New York Daily News) and “AUSTRALIA’S EX-PRIME MINISTER IN THE DOCK”(Washington Post). Over in Australia’s neighbor New Zealand, the Australian embassy in Wellington became the scene of raucous demonstrations by Australian expatriates-- some demanding that Whitlam be set free at once and restored to power, others calling for him to be executed immediately, and yet others that urged the Frasier government in Canberra to refer the Whitlam case to the U.N. for international arbitration. Prime Minister Frasier’s only response to these demonstrations was to assert that no final decision on Whitlam’s fate would be taken until the treason charges against him had been heard and adjudicated within the parameters of the Australian legal system.


******


For the Australian Labor Party, Gough Whitlam’s arrest spelled disaster on multiple levels. Not only was the party’s leader branded as a criminal and a potential Judas, but the party itself was seeing a wave of defections from its ranks as members tried desperately to escape the stigma of being associated with a figure who was deemed to be responsible for pushing Australia to the brink of a disaster from which it might never have recovered. As if those things weren’t enough of a headache for the beleaguered ALP senior leadership to cope with, the remaining rank and file of the party were at each other’s throats over what direction the ALP should take to save its future. A reporter with the Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra bureau aptly described the growing chasm within the ALP’s ranks as “perhaps the biggest political schism the world has seen since Mao broke ranks with Khrushchev”. Even as Whitlam was being led to his prison cell there were rumors some of the ALP’s younger members might secede from the main body of the party to form their own political organization.


And in fact there were concrete steps taken towards that end just after Malcolm Frasier moved his administration’s offices to Parliament House. On Christmas Eve afternoon, a group of twenty-five people known as the Committee for the Preservation of Australian Democracy issued a statement announcing plans by the most prominent of the ALP dissidents to chair a meeting in Sydney after New Year’s Day 1976 at which there would be extensive discussions on the topic of whether the unorthodox elements of the ALP should organize a separate political party. Among the ranks of Australia’s more conservative political parties this news was greeted with mixed emotions: while on the one hand the right wing delighted in seeing the ALP elite having to put down a mutiny in their own ranks, on the other hand every conservative politician worth his party membership card understood all too well that what was happening within the ALP could just as easily occur one day inside the rank and file of Australia’s right and center parties.


Whitlam’s dwindling but still-loyal followers in the ALP greeted the prospect with passionate and highly vocal outrage. As far as they were concerned it was the CPAD and its supporters, not Whitlam, who’d committed the real act of treason. On January 3rd, 1976 a group of more than twenty of these supporters picketed outside Parliament House to protest both the upcoming trial and the CPAD-sponsored Sydney meeting. Denouncing the trial as “a fraud” and “a Marxist conspiracy to destroy our country”, they marched for nearly three days before being arrested by Australian Capital Territory police for trespassing and disorderly conduct. (Upon their release from jail, eighteen of the twenty people who took part in the original picket would return to Parliament House for another demonstration, this one lasting a full week and demanding Malcolm Frasier’s resignation as prime minister.)


On January 5th, the CPAD and two hundred of its supporters met in Sydney for what would ultimately be a week of intense debate and heavy soul-searching. That meeting was the second-biggest news story of the month in the Australian media, topped only by Gough Whitlam’s January 7th indictment before Australia’s highest criminal court on a number of counts ranging from treason to larceny(the federal attorney general had convincingly argued that Whitlam’s occupation of Parliament House between November 11th and December 2nd could technically be regarded as theft of government property). The dissidents gathered at the Sydney meeting were on the horns of a political dilemma; they were faced with a Hobson’s choice between staying within the mainstream ALP and having little if any hope of salvaging the ALP’s old ideals from the Whitlam crisis, or splitting off from the ALP main body and becoming political outlaws. In the end, they chose to become outlaws, voting by a margin of 133-67 to secede from the mainstream ALP and form a breakaway party they would later call the National Reform Party.


A New York Times reporter who’d been covering Australia since the late 1950s and had closely followed U.S. presidential politics before that was moved to compare the NRP’s creation to the historic decision by anti-slavery Whigs in 1854 to leave their old faction and establish the Republican Party. While his analogy was somewhat flawed, his main point essentially rang true: the creation of the NRP had just as great an impact on Australian politics as the birth of the Republican Party had on American politics. The ALP had broken in half, and Australia’s political landscape would never be the same again.


******


As President Gerald Ford met with the Australian ambassador to the United States the day after Whitlam’s indictment and listened to the ambassador’s debriefing on the latest political developments in Australia, he counted himself-- and America --extremely fortunate that the Watergate scandal hadn’t led to anything like the maelstrom which had split the ALP and destroyed Whitlam’s administration. Australia’s political situation still looked to Ford to be somewhat insecure even with(some of his advisors might have said especially with) the former prime minister incarcerated. He was sufficiently concerned about it to authorize his Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, to quietly draw up plans for evacuating the staff of the U.S. embassy in Canberra if worst came to worst. Kissinger’s evacuation plans would never be put into action as it turned out, but they were nonetheless a reflection of the anxieties he and the president shared about what was happening in Australia.


Ford and Kissinger weren’t alone in their worries; a Washington Post poll that came out January 10th found 52 percent of those surveyed believed there was still a genuine risk of civil war in Australia. The fear of being caught in the crossfire of an armed revolt prompted many Americans who’d had plans for vacationing in Australia to change those plans or even cancel them outright. Indeed, overall foreign tourism to Australia had seen a 50 percent drop as a consequence of the events at Parliament House and their aftermath-- but that decline would shortly be reversed thanks in part to worldwide fascination with the salacious

circumstances leading to Gough Whitlam’s arrest and indictment...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be continued

 

 

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