The descent of the ALP to rump party status has been quite aptly described as an aftershock of the political earthquake touched off by the Parliament House crisis. Like Norma Desmond, the tragic heroine of Sunset Boulevard, the party was living in the wreckage of its former grandeur and yearning for a comeback. Meanwhile, the rest of Australia was scrambling to redraw its political map to reflect the realities of the ALP’s substantially diminished status. They were also awaiting the verdict in Gough Whitlam’s treason trial: after nearly two and a half months of testimony and evidence presentation, it was almost time for Whitlam’s case to go to the jury. Both the government legal team which was prosecuting the ex-prime minister and the defense lawyers fighting to get him acquitted were nervous about which way the jury would go-- even Whitlam himself couldn’t tell what they were thinking, given that they had maintained a Sphinx-like stoicism throughout his trial.

The crowd of press correspondents that assembled at the courthouse to hear the verdict in Whitlam’s trial was even bigger than the throng which had been present for the start of the trial, and that was saying quite a bit considering the substantial media contingent that had been present to hear the opening statements by the prosecution and defense counsels. As one Australian Capitol Territories policeman would later be moved to comment, it was something of a miracle they managed to get the jury inside the courtroom.

Adding to the already gargantuan mass of humanity gathered at the courthouse were squads of Australian Capital Territory police deployed to maintain security until the jury’s verdict was read and Whitlam had either been acquitted and freed from federal custody or convicted and returned to prison to serve out the rest of what would most likely be a life sentence for the crimes with which he’d been charged. But while the verdict might have still been in doubt to some people outside the courtroom, one thing was absolutely clear to everyone both in and out of the courthouse: Whitlam’s political career was over. No respectable national leader would touch the ex-prime minister with a 10-foot pole after what had happened since November 1975, and the party of which he had once been the standard-bearer was in tatters, ripped apart by the infighting it had suffered after Whitlam’s arrest. His reputation had deteriorated to the point where legions of people on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum were calling for him to be exiled from Australia forever; although such exile would never come to pass, the idea was a reflection of just how thoroughly the Parliament House crisis and the treason trial had shattered his standing in the eyes of his fellow countrymen.

It was just after 10:30 AM on the morning of Monday, June 1st when the presiding judge in Whitlam’s trial turned to the jury foreman and asked the traditional question “Have you reached a verdict?” To which the foreman offered the customary response: “We have, Your Honor.” All across Australia people clustered around television sets and radios to hear the climax of what by this time had come to be viewed as the most important judicial trial in modern Australian history. Among them was Malcolm Frasier, who’d had a radio brought to his office at Parliament House so he could hear the jury’s decision the moment it was given to the court. The chatter in the courtroom had given way to a silence so deep that, as one correspondent for The Age put it, you could actually hear the jury foreman open the sheet of paper on which the verdict had been written.

The next thing radio listeners heard after that was the foreman’s voice saying: “On the first count, treason against the Commonwealth of Australia, we find the defendant, Gough Whitlam...guilty as charged.” With those words the ex-prime minister was once and for all officially branded a traitor; Whitlam, who even at this late hour had still held out a small shred of hope he might yet be acquitted, visibly collapsed in his seat when that first “Guilty” verdict was read. Now he was all but assured of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Bill Hayden and Jim Cairns, incarcerated at an army prison elsewhere in Australia and awaiting prosecution for their own actions in the Parliament House crisis, learned of their former boss’ fate from a guard who’d listened to the news on a transistor radio; both Cairns and Hayden recoiled in shock at the news.

Once the first ‘Guilty’ was read out by the jury foreman, the others followed in rapid succession; barely ninety seconds passed between that moment and the arrival of police personnel after the final ‘Guilty’ verdict was read to take Whitlam back to his cell to await the court’s official decision on his sentence. The legions of press who’d assembled to hear the verdict practically tripped over each other to file their reports on the jury’s decision, and printing presses all over Australia were fired up to publish extra editions of newspapers recounting the verdict for those who’d missed it the first time.

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Those papers carried headlines as varied as the geography of Australia. The tabloids tended to have the more pungent headlines, with the particularly notorious rags expressing sentiments such as “Sod off, Gough!” or “Good riddance, you bastard”. Among broadsheet publications, the most memorable front page was the one for the June 2nd Sydney Morning Herald, which summed up the feelings of many trial- weary Australians in four simple words-- “Thank God It’s Over.” With Whitlam found guilty of treason, political cartoonists were even more savage than before in mocking him; the cartoonist for one Queensland daily paper went so far as to liken him to infamous Norwegian fascist collaborator Vidkun Quisling.

While their court cases didn’t attract quite as much publicity as the Whitlam trial had, Cairns and Hayden would experience their own glaring media spotlight when they went on trial for their roles in the Parliament House crisis. Bill Hayden in particular would be the subject of an unflattering series of articles by The Australian and the focus of a 1977 TV documentary by what is today known as the Nine Network. By the time the verdict in his case was finally given, Hayden had become the second-most photographed man in Australia.

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In the next Australian federal legislative elections after the Whitlam trial’s conclusion, the Australian Labor Party found itself in a four-way battle royal with the National Reform Party, the Federal Union Party, and a Country/Liberal alliance for control of the Senate and House of Representatives. While most mainstream Australian experts believed the Country/Liberal coalition would most likely win the day, the NRP had succeeded in making major inroads among the voting public by way of a meticulously planned and ingeniously carried out American- style media blitz; the media campaign’s effectiveness is all the more impressive given that it was conducted largely on a shoestring budget.

When the final vote count had been tabulated, the experts turned out to be right: the Liberal/Country alliance held 91 House seats and 36 Senate seats. What was truly remarkable was the ALP’s performance: despite the blows it had suffered as a result of the Parliament House crisis, it had managed to retain 22 seats in the House and 15 in the Senate. The NRP gained eight House seats and six in the Senate; as for the Federal Union Party, its debut on the national electoral stage got it six House and six Senate seats. (One Senate seat ended up going to an independent candidate.) With the 1977 federal legislative elections in the books, NRP and FUP strategists set to work studying the lessons of their parties’ successes and failures to see what could be done to improve their electoral performance next time around.

Gough Whitlam, however, wouldn’t be present to see the application of those lessons. Already close to sixty at the time of the Parliament House crisis, he was broken not just emotionally but physically by the verdict in his treason trial; six months after his conviction, Whitlam suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized. That heart attack marked the beginning of the former prime minister’s final decline; he would spend many of the final months of his life bedridden and finally died on September 12th, 1977-- less than two months shy of the second anniversary of Sir John Kerr’s fateful letter calling for Whitlam to resign as prime minister. His funeral was sparsely attended, with most of the mourners being either relatives or die-hard Whitlam stalwarts who even at that late date utterly refused to abandon their faith in the disgraced ex-prime minister. Jim Cairns and Bill Hayden were both conspicuously absent from the memorial service; Cairns had been put on suicide watch the day before the funeral and Hayden was in a Melbourne hospital recovering from a stroke.

In the spring of 1978 Hayden and Cairns were both found guilty of conspiracy to commit treason as well as the act of treason itself and aiding and abetting acts of insurrection against the Commonwealth. The two ex-Whitlam cabinet members were both sentenced to life in prison; their attorneys promptly appealed their convictions, setting in motion a legal battle that would span years. Although almost nobody realized it at the time-- least of all Cairns and Hayden themselves --a change in the electoral balance of power was coming which would significantly tilt the odds in that battle in Cairns and Hayden’s favor.

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1980 saw another multi-party fight for control of the Australian House and Senate; the Liberal/Country coalition was not only squaring off with all the same challengers from the 1977 elections but also had to contend with a new rival: the Liberal Democrats(later to be renamed the Australian Democrats), a group of former Liberal Party stalwarts who had grown disenchanted with the Frasier government in general and Frasier himself in particular. Five years on from the Parliament House standoff, a certain revisionist line of thought had taken root within the ranks of some younger Liberal Party members that Frasier had been just as much to blame as Whitlam-- if not more so --for the chain of events which had pushed Australia to brink of civil war. It was these revisionists who had been the main force in creating the Liberal Party and would be its dominant figures in the first years of its existence.

In the 1980 elections the NRP was able to retain seven of the eight seats it held in the House and picked up two additional seats in the Senate, while the Federal Union Party lost two of its House seats and saw its presence in the Senate reduced from six seats to three. But perhaps the biggest electoral news that year was how the ALP fared-- it not only retained all of its Senate seats but won a dozen new seats in the House to expand from 22 to 34. Given all the blows the ALP had sustained during the Parliament House crisis and the Whitlam trial, this was a remarkable accomplishment, and some of Australia’s top political commentators suggested this might mark the beginning of a renaissance for the Australian Labor Party.

And to a significant degree they were right; the ALP was indeed gradually starting to regain much of its old popularity and prestige. Many former ALP loyalists who’d defected from the party following the Parliament House crisis were returning to the fold, and ALP recruiters were noticing a steady increase in new party memberships. While still not quite the political superpower it had once been, by the same token the ALP was beginning to shed its rump party status. A cartoon printed in the Sydney Morning Herald in early 1981 reflected this fact; in the single-panel drawing the ALP was depicted as a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Whitlam trial.

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Yet while a great many things may have changed in Australia as a result of the 1980 elections, one thing did not change-- the Liberal/ Country coalition, despite losing control of the Senate, was still the top dog in the House of Representatives, holding 79 seats in the House vs. 46 seats for all the opposition parties combined. And despite his critics’ denigration of his policies, Malcolm Frasier remained safely ensconced in the Lodge as prime minister of Australia. He’d won a good deal of respect among the electorate for successfully reining in what under Whitlam’s administration had been runaway inflation that hobbled the Australian economy, and with the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West entering its critical final decade he was viewed in some quarters as Australia’s best hope of safely navigating its way through the turbulent waters of East-West relations.

But just two years later a global economic recession would throw cold water on Frasier’s hopes that the Country/Liberal alliance could recapture the Senate. Indeed, Frasier himself would soon be out of a job as voter discontent with his administration reached critical mass and propelled one of his fiercest political rivals into office in what one recent Australian book on the Parliament House standoff has called “Gough Whitlam’s revenge”...

To be continued