When Bob Hawke was re-elected as Australian prime minister in 1987, few people would have been brave enough or crazy enough to suggest that just two years later the world would see a seismic geopolitical shift as the Soviet Union, the standard-bearer for the Communist bloc for nearly six decades, began its final irreversible descent towards eventual total collapse. Conventional wisdom at the time predicted the USSR would most likely continue to endure for years, maybe decades; certainly Hawke was hardly much inclined to bet his country’s future on the notion that the world’s oldest and most powerful Marxist country would simply blink out of existence.

    Conversely, by the same token, everybody and his grandparents were prophesying that the consequences of the judicial reviews of the Cairns, Hayden, and Whitlam trials would be one of the dominant factors of the Australian political scene in the coming decade-- and they were right on that score. The Liberal Party was in decline while the ALP was enjoying a major upswing in its prestige; of the three breakaway parties that had been established as a result of the Whitlam trial and its aftermath, the National Reform Party was seen as having the greatest potential of being what one might call an “X factor” in future parliamentary votes. The NRP had come a long way since its creation eleven years earlier, evolving in that time from a motley faction of anti-Whitlam Laborites to a bona fide major force on the Australian left. Indeed, its basic platform regarding many of the critical domestic and international matters facing Australia leaned even further left than the ALP’s.

    One of the most notable demonstrations of this tendency was the NRP’s 1988 resolution condemning a proposal by a certain right-wing Senator to trim back Australia’s federal welfare programs. In a decade when “fiscal conservatism” was the political watchword of the day and world leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were preaching that big government was the problem rather than the solution in social matters, the NRP was taking precisely the opposite tack-- what society needed was more welfare spending rather than less, they insisted. This attitude drew heavy criticism from their right-wing foes but earned them the admiration of many younger leftists who saw in the NRP the best hope for turning back conservative efforts to shrink or dismantle the welfare state. NRP membership applications, which had been in a steady decline since 1985, began to rise again; by the time the 1991 Australian federal elections were held NRP membership had doubled among younger Australian voters.

    In 1989, as the inauguration of George Herbert Walker Bush as the 41st President of the United States and the Tienanmen Square massacre in China dominated most international headlines, the primary issue on the minds of most Australians was how to cope with the new tidal wave of immigrants coming to their country’s shore. Not surprisingly given their respective ideologies, the NRP tended to favor an “open borders” policy while the Federal Union Party pushed for the tightest possible control of Australia’s frontiers in order to bar so-called “undesirable” aliens from entering the country; while the Liberal Democrats tended to be somewhat more pragmatic on the immigration issue than the NRP, they too backed an “open borders” stance and in many cases would support the NRP in opposing Federal Union Party attempts to harden government policy towards immigrants.

    When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait the following year, the immigration question became more urgent than ever. Suspecting at least some of the refugees fleeing Kuwait would seek to gain asylum in Australia, the Federal Union Party argued for diverting such people to remote areas like Woomera lest they put further strain on the already tightly stretched resources of Australia’s cities. This idea outraged the NRP, which considered it tantamount to “warehousing” the Kuwaiti exiles; the Liberal Democrats argued against the idea mainly on financial grounds, saying it would be onerously expensive to execute the FUP’s diversion proposal.

    As for the ALP and the Liberals, they weren’t exactly silent on the immigration question either. The Liberal Party backed the FUP diversion proposal; the ALP joined the Democrats and the NRP in opposing it. When the diversion bill came up for a vote in the Australian Parliament late in October of 1990, prominent Blaxland Labor MP Paul Keating joined two of his NRP colleagues in organizing a full-court press to keep the bill from being passed, while Bennelong Liberal MP and future prime minister of Australia John Howard joined forces with key FUP legislators in their struggle to get the bill passed. Some political analysts since then have suggested that the quarrel between Howard and Keating over the diversion bill may have a dress rehearsal for both men’s respective later runs for the prime minister’s office.

    Certainly many of the ALP faithful wanted to see Paul Keating take up residence in the Lodge one day. An internal poll commissioned just before the start of the Persian Gulf War indicated that at least fifty percent of all those questioned would support Keating should he choose to make a run for the prime minister’s office; some of the younger ALP faithful banded together to organize a “Draft Keating” movement, and by the time the first U.S. and Allied ground troops started engaging Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait a growing segment of Australia’s print and broadcast media were treating the Blaxland MP as a serious contender to eventually succeed Hawke as prime minister-- or at least as head of the ALP.

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   During the summer of 1991, as the world struggled to adjust to the realities of the post-Gulf War geopolitical climate and the Soviet Union lurched headlong toward its final dissolution, the legacy of the Whitlam trial once again reared its head in the Australian courts. But this time it would be a civil case, not a criminal one-- the late Gough Whitlam’s family was suing the now-retired prosecutor from the original trial for compensation for the emotional and financial hardships they’d endured as a result of Whitlam’s prosecution. That the family was entitled to some recompense was never in doubt; the bone of contention was over what the precise amount of that compensation should be. The plaintiffs sought AU $1 million, while the defendant’s attorneys argued that at most he only owed them AU $600 thousand.

   Opening arguments in the civil case were heard in early August of 1991; as had been the rule in past court hearings relating to Whitlam and would likewise be true in later trials, the lawsuit immediately drew the attention of the national and global media. And by then there were even more media outlets than had existed at the time of Gough Whitlam’s treason conviction, which meant this would be the most widely followed legal proceeding connected to Whitlam since his original criminal trial fifteen years earlier. There was certainly no shortage of attorneys who were willing to take the family’s case-- within hours of declaring their intention to file the lawsuit, their home phone was bombarded with calls from civil attorneys offering to argue on their behalf.

    And it wasn’t only Australian barristers who’d been looking to take on the ex-federal prosecutor; a well-known Los Angeles private attorney flew to Canberra in July of 1991 to meet with Whitlam’s widow about the possibility of representing her in the lawsuit. And a London lawyer who was an expert in both the Australian legal system and emotional distress compensation suits phoned the family twice a day for three days seeking to convince the Whitlams to let him take the case. In the end, however, the family opted to go with a Sydney barrister who’d been recommended to them by Bill Hayden for his work in helping to get Hayden’s name cleared eight years earlier.

    The Whitlam family’s civil suit would last far into the early months of 1992, when the jury in the case found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded the family AU $825,000-- an amount which, while short of the AU $1 million they’d been seeking, was still noticeably more than what the defendant had wanted to pay. By then Paul Keating had been in office as prime minister of Australia for more than three months; although he had little to say about the verdict publicly, in private he was elated by it-- he’d long thought the decision to prosecute Whitlam on charges of treason had been monumental stupidity at best and outright cruelty at worst. The defendant may have sensed he’d be courting PR disaster if he challenged the decision, or he might have just been too emotionally and mentally worn down by the stress of the civil suit to think of mounting any kind of appeal; in any case, he declined to contest the damage award once the court had rendered its decision.

    While the damages were being paid out to Whitlam’s family, an issue that had been on the political back burner in most Western nations since the late 1980s was coming back to the forefront: the environment. Global warming had been a concern of scientists for nearly two decades, but in the 1990s a newly intensified public debate on the topic was starting to take place as storms became both more frequent and more severe. In light of their roots as an insurgent faction it may have been inevitable that the National Reform Party would take the most radical position in regard to fighting climate change; indeed, during Keating’s 1995 reelection bid the NRP would urge the incumbent prime minister to make this issue a top priority of his next term in the Lodge.

    The Federal Union Party’s position, on the other hand, was that the government should wait for further evidence to be obtained on the causes of climate change before taking any drastic action where the environment was concerned; the prevailing sentiment among most FUP members was that the science regarding climate change was far from settled. This attitude triggered many a bitter argument with those who felt major intervention was needed right away in order to prevent global disaster in the future. It was also one of the major bones of contention between Keating and his chief rival for the premiership, John Howard.

    In the end, however, it would be not climate issues but legal ones that decided the 1995 national elections. Just three weeks before voters were due to cast their ballots a mentally disturbed young Tasmanian man opened fire on visitors to the former prison colony at Port Arthur; when the smoke cleared thirty-seven people were dead and twenty-eight people were seriously wounded. The Keating government unleashed a firestorm of public criticism when the incumbent prime minister announced his intent to push for the most stringent firearms ban in Australia’s history; the largely pro-gun Australian electorate, viewing the proposed restrictions as a gross infringement of their civil rights, responded with a barrage of protests rivaling anything seen during the budget crisis twenty years earlier. Keating’s poll numbers slipped, and when the votes were counted he had little choice but to accept a coalition government.

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    It was a coalition whose members were at each others’ throats almost from the day they were sworn into office. Gridlock became all too common in the Australian House and Senate as the FUP partnered with the Liberal and Country parties to fight left-wing initiatives tooth and nail while the NRP joined forces with the Labor Party and the Australian Democrats to oppose the conservatives’ agenda at every turn. In this atmosphere Keating had a hard time getting much of anything done on the domestic or international fronts-- and his political rivals were quick to attack him for his failures both real and perceived. John Howard in particular was ruthless in criticizing the incumbent prime minister on his growing list of political fiascoes; with terrorism superseding Communism as the main threat to Western security in the second half of the 1990s, Howard repeatedly and vehemently accused Keating of being ill-equipped to deal with the terrorist danger. Keating didn’t hesitate to fire back, calling Howard “a desiccated little coconut” who was “reliving the Yellow Peril Days of his childhood”, and by October of 1998 many national print and broadcast media outlets in Australia were predicting that an electoral rematch between Howard and Keating would be a bruising affair if or when it came to pass.

   At least one of those media outlets was regarding it as a foregone conclusion that Howard and Keating would battle at least one more time for the Lodge. No sooner had Keating’s notorious “coconut” quip hit the press than The Australian published an article from a well-known veteran political analyst who bluntly said “within three months from today, four at the most, the bell will clang for Howard vs. Keating, round two.” And by their private statements as well as their public ones, it was readily apparent Keating and Howard were both eager to make that prediction into reality.

    Knowing that a battle for control of the Lower House of Australia’s parliament could make or break his ambitions to unseat Keating as prime minister, Howard deemed it a top priority to aid his political allies in keeping the Lower House seats already held by conservatives and winning a substantial number of new ones in order to shift the balance of power in the conservatives’ favor. Conversely, by the same token, Keating and his progressive comrades waged a relentless campaign to keep the Howard camp at bay in the Lower House.

     The struggle finally reached the boiling point in mid-February of 1999. In one of the most tightly contested general elections Australia had seen in at least half a century, the conservatives took control of the Lower House, clearing the way for Howard to replace Keating as the Australian prime minister. For Keating’s supporters, who had expected a repeat of his 1995 triumph, it was a bitter pill to swallow. The blow to the ALP’s morale was the sharpest the party had endured since the arrest of Gough Whitlam nearly a quarter-century earlier, and the mood within the ranks of the National Reform Party and the Australian Democrats was almost as grim; by contrast, the prevailing emotion amongst Australian conservatives was one of raucous elation, a sense that(from their point of view) the country was finally getting back on the right track after the wrong turns of the Hawke and Keating administrations.

To be continued