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We The Jury:
The Trial Of Gough Whitlam
Part 2

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

By Chris Oakley

******

Summary: In the first part of this series we reviewed the chain of events leading up to Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam’s 1975 arrest and the resulting political crisis which split the ranks of Whitlam’s Australian Labor Party in two. In this chapter, we’ll look at the early phases of Whitlam’s trial for treason and the further effects of his indictment on the ALP.

The largest police detail in Australian history up to that time gathered at a Canberra courthouse on March 14th, 1976 to begin the job of providing security for the treason trial of Gough Whitlam. Backing up the police was a contingent of Australian Army troops trained in everything from emergency medicine to anti-terrorism tactics. Given the identity of the defendant, one couldn’t fault federal authorities for wanting to take every possible precaution to maintain order at the Whitlam trial. Just twenty-four hours earlier, in fact, there had been a rash of bomb threats from both pro-Whitlam and anti-Whitlam fanatics and authorities didn’t want to run the risk of somebody making good on one of those threats.

Whitlam himself, meanwhile, adamantly maintained that he hadn’t done anything wrong; in the lone interview he granted before the start of his trial he had memorably asserted it was not himself but Malcolm Frasier who should have been arrested and tried for treason. Whitlam’s comments were met with laughter by most of Frasier’s allies and utter outraged disbelief by Frasier himself. In his memoirs years later, an aide to Frasier would describe the prime minister as “visibly shaking” with fury in reaction to Whitlam’s comments; Frasier wasn’t alone in his reaction, if the torrent of protest letters and phone calls which poured into the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s offices the day after the interview was broadcast is any indication.

The massive police presence at the courthouse was matched by an equally massive contingent of print and broadcast journalists. There hardly seemed to be a newspaper, television channel, or radio station in the free world which didn’t have at least one reporter on hand to cover the start of what was developing into the biggest criminal case Australia had seen since the 1955 Wilson and Grimwald assault trial. The Sydney Morning Herald alone sent no less than 11 correspondents to cover the opening statements by the prosecution and defense as well as the first day of testimony by the witnesses.

In addition to the print and broadcast journalists who were on hand at the courthouse for the start of the Whitlam trial, there was also a documentary film crew present to shoot the proceedings as part of a larger project to record the history of the crisis that had brought Australia to the brink of revolution. They certainly got an earful; supporters and opponents of the deposed prime minister both rallied outside the court to argue their respective cases, and one local eccentric even turned up to take advantage of the sizable media presence in Canberra to stage an impromptu audition for a spot on Australia’s hottest TV game show. Whitlam himself arrived at the courtroom flanked by a multitude of guards and Australian Army MPs, greeting his backers with a jovial wave better suited to a rock star coming into town for a concert tour than a political leader standing trial for alleged sedition against his country.

The chief prosecutor’s opening statement to the court didn’t mince any words in its description of Whitlam; calling the ex-prime minister a “modern-day Judas” and a “malevolent rogue”, the prosecutor insisted Whitlam was guilty on all counts and urged the jury to give the former ALP leader the harshest possible penalty for his crimes. Under Section 24AA of the Crimes Act 1914, this meant that if Whitlam were convicted of the charges against him he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. Conspiracy theorists in the more radical sections of Australia’s left wing were certain Malcolm Frasier was secretly pulling strings to make sure Whitlam went to prison forever-- a charge Frasier pungently answered by saying the person who’d done the most to ensure Whitlam’s conviction for treason was Whitlam himself. And in truth, Whitlam had indeed given prosecutors a great deal of circumstantial evidence with which to argue he was an insurrectionist.

For example, there was that now-notorious moment early in the Parliament House standoff when he had stood on the Parliament House steps and told a throng of cheering supporters “Well may we say God save the Queen. because nothing will save the Governor General!” That alone had given many of his fellow Australians cause for concern about Whitlam’s intentions during the crisis. Then there were the somewhat cryptic and ominous remarks that Whitlam had given to the press after negotiations to peacefully end the standoff had collapsed on November 21st, 1975; in a ten-minute statement delivered largely by radio(since at the time Whitlam was making it the phone lines to Parliament House bad been cut on Frasier’s orders), Whitlam made a number of comments which by themselves didn’t mean very much but put together could well be used by the prosecution to argue that the former prime minister had even in those early days been contemplating a revolt against Frasier and governor general Sir John Kerr.

On top of that there were the secret dispatches Whitlam had sent to top Australian military commanders and defense ministry executives during the Parliament House standoff. Attorneys for Whitlam’s defense team insisted he was simply seeking reassurance that the armed forces wouldn’t try to impose military rule; the prosecution countered these dispatches were in fact an attempt to enlist the armed forces’ backing for a rebellion against Frasier. In any event, they would be a source of almost endless controversy right up until the trial ended.

******

The first witness to testify for the prosecution in Whitlam’s case was a secretary who’d been working in Malcolm Frasier’s office at the time Frasier began his ill-fated negotiations with Whitlam to resolve the Parliament House standoff before force had to be used. Under oath, the secretary remembered that while both Frasier and Whitlam had both been firm in their respective positions during those negotiations, it had been Whitlam who, by and large, had taken the more confrontational stance during the failed talks. Despite the best efforts of Whitlam’s defense attorneys to pick her testimony apart during cross-examination she held firm to her account, and the chief prosecutor backed her up claims by presenting to the court a series of transcripts of telephone conversations held between Frasier and Whitlam during the crisis.

Next on the stand was the chief of staff for the Australian Army. He testified that two of his field commanders, each one in charge of a unit entrusted with defending Sydney in time of war, had secretly been contacted by Whitlam and asked what they thought of his stance in the Parliament House crisis. The phrasing of those questions, said the chief of staff, implied Whitlam was attempting to solicit these commanders’ backing for armed resistance against Frasier and Kerr if the standoff had escalated into civil war. Whitlam railed against the chief of staff and had to be physically restrained from charging the witness stand; as it was, the ex-prime minister just barely managed to avoid a contempt of court citation.

Back at Parliament House, Malcolm Frasier didn’t pay quite as much attention to the trial as some of his fellow Australians were-- he was too busy trying to steer his country, and his government, through the aftermath of the ’75 financial crisis. That didn’t mean he was totally uninterested in the proceedings, however; messengers kept him abreast of them via written notes and the Australian federal attorney general gave him daily half-hour debriefings on the witnesses’ testimony. And if he needed further glimpses into the Whitlam trial, all he had to do was watch the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly TV reports live from Canberra.

And it wasn’t just Australians who were watching the Whitlam trial with great interest; many of Australia’s Commonwealth allies were also keeping a close eye on the proceedings in Canberra. The verdict in the trial, no matter which way it went, would have dramatic implications for all Commonwealth countries in years to come. The Parliament House standoff and Whitlam’s subsequent arrest on treason charges had called into question nearly everything the Commonwealth’s citizens had long taken for granted in regard to the stability and effectiveness of that commonwealth’s legal and political systems. Few Commonwealth countries felt this dilemma more acutely than Canada, where old tensions between the Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian communities had nearly touched off civil war just a few years earlier-- prime minister Pierre Trudeau had said at the height of the Parliament House standoff that he felt a disturbing sense of déjà vu regarding the events in Canberra. The Soviet Union shamelessly exploited the propaganda opportunity presented by the Whitlam trial, citing Whitlam’s prosecution and the Parliament House standoff which had preceded it as signs of what the official government newspaper Pravda the “hopelessly decadent” nature of “bourgeois” Western democracy and the superiority of the Communist system of government. The KGB funneled vast sums of money to socialist and Marxist organizations in Australia in hopes that Whitlam’s trial might eventually pave the way for the establishment of Marxist rule in Canberra. And the Australian embassy in Moscow became the focal point for daily Kremlin-sponsored rallies deriding that country’s political establishment.

In Great Britain, a certain Conservative MP from Kent had begun rising to greater national prominence thanks to a series of newspaper commentaries she’d written about the Parliament House crisis and the arrest of Gough Whitlam. Margaret Thatcher, who’d served in Parliament for nearly seventeen years at the time Whitlam’s trial began and was three years away from making history as Great Britain’s first female prime minister, had been shocked by the political upheaval triggered by Australia’s 1975 budget crisis; to her Whitlam’s standoff with the Frasier government had posed a mortal threat not only to Australia but to the Commonwealth’s very existence. Now that he’d been removed from office and indicted for allegedly instigating a revolt against Malcolm Frasier’s government, Mrs. Thatcher was steadily gaining a reputation as the most severe critic of Whitlam’s actions toward Malcolm Frasier other than Frasier himself...

******

Next to Whitlam’s trial, the leading story in Australia’s major newspapers that spring was the ongoing breakdown of the Australian Labor Party. Between the wave of multiple defections that had thinned the mainstream ALP’s ranks shortly after Gough Whitlam’s arrest and the subsequent establishment of the National Reform Party, it seemed to some people as though the ALP was destined to fade into extinction no matter what the jury’s eventual verdict in the Whitlam trial. And to be sure the bonds of party unity were considerably more fragile in the aftermath of Whitlam’s indictment by the Australian federal courts than even the worst case scenario could have envisioned prior to the ex-prime minister’s arrest. Not only were ALP recruiters failing badly in their efforts to attract new members, but ever-growing numbers of longtime ALP stalwarts were breaking ties with the party; most of the people who quit the ALP between Whitlam’s January 1976 indictment for treason and the start of his trial two months later would either jump to the upstart National Reform Party or abandon the political arena completely out of disgust with the way the ALP seemed to be turning on itself.

On March 20th, six days into Whitlam’s trial, the newspaper The Age published an article whose title posed a question that many people on all ends of the Australian political spectrum had been asking from the moment Gough Whitlam first announced his refusal to vacate Parliament House. Called “What’s Wrong With The ALP?”, the article painted a grim portrait of an organization coming apart at the seams under the strain of the now-nearly constant infighting within its ranks. One especially pessimistic ALP state branch official in southern Australia was quoted as saying it might be only a matter of months, if not weeks, until the party itself ceased to exist altogether. As if his comments had been a stage cue for further upheaval, the members of the Melbourne local ALP branch voted overwhelmingly on March 22nd to secede from the nationwide organization effective immediately; the next morning the one remaining pro-Whitlam senior executive in the New South Wales ALP state chapter tendered his resignation from the party amid cries of “Good riddance!” and a growing malaise within all levels of the party.

Indeed, the ALP was in such dire shape that in a diplomatic cable sent on March 27th by the High Commissioner’s office in Canberra to the British Foreign Secretary in London, Britain’s second-highest ranking diplomat in Australia suggested the party might well disband for good within a year if not sooner. What happened during the coming weeks and months after the cable was sent would do little to challenge its grim assessment of the ALP’s future....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be continued

 

 

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