It was surely one of the most staggering moments of hypocrisy in Australian history: in the same week that the Labor government connived to censure a former PM for the first time since Federation, it was indulging in an orgy of lionising former PM Gough Whitlam. Where’s the hypocrisy? Whitlam was guilty of breaches of not just parliamentary standards, but the law, that makes Morrison’s peccadillos fade into nothing by comparison.
If the Coalition in 1972 had been as nasty and opportunistic as Labor today, Whitlam would not just have been censured, but quite possibly jailed. The Dismissal, for all that the left are still whining and moaning about it, was frankly letting Whitlam off lightly.
First, some background: what did Morrison actually do?
It emerged, after the election earlier this year, that during the pandemic, Morrison had secretly had himself sworn in as joint minister of some six ministries. In some cases, even his co-ministers were unaware. Certainly, it was a weird move and an unprecedented one — but wholly legal. For all the Labor hyperventilating about a “power grab”, Morrison only intervened in a single portfolio on one occasion.
All in all, it appears to have been typical of the deranged panic that gripped the political class during Covid. Unlike others, though, it didn’t involve truncheons, house arrest, teargas, or excercising dictatorial powers on a whim.
It might also be pointed out that, after scraping in at the 1972 election, Whitlam and his deputy Lance Barnard held 21 portfolios between them for a time. “Ah!” Whitlam’s hagiographers cry. “But it was done openly!”
The same can’t be said for some of Whitlam’s other actions. Principally, what became known as the Khemlani Loans Affair.
As midnight approached on Friday, December 13, 1974, EG Whitlam QC, the 21st prime minister of Australia, convened a meeting of the Federal Executive Council that shredded both the appearance and the substance of legality.
Present along with the prime minister when the meeting was convened were the attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, and Rex Connor, the minister for minerals and energy. Jim Cairns, deputy prime minister and newly appointed treasurer, stumbled on the gathering entirely by accident, as neither he nor any of the government’s other ministers had been informed of Whitlam’s decision to convene the council.
Nor, for that matter, had the governor-general. That certainly wasn’t because Whitlam didn’t realise that the council could meet only if the governor-general’s approval had been secured. On the contrary, the secretary of the Federal Executive Council had reminded him, that very day, of the legal requirements.
So, why did Whitlam knowingly breach the law with his secret midnight meeting?
Like all socialists, Whitlam was very good at spending money — not so good at making it. He and his Minerals and Energy Minister Rex Connor wanted to spend up hugely on massive projects. Instead of going through the Constitutionally-required channels, Whitlam and Connor went to a dodgy Pakistani undischarged bankrupt carpet-bagger, who was to be the bagman for Arab states who were to be the source of the money.
The size and terms of the proposed loan make a payday lender look like a model of propriety.
The sheer size of the loan – $US4bn at the time, or about $34bn at today’s prices – was not its only remarkable feature.
There was, to begin with, the fact that principal and accumulated interest were to be repaid all at once in 1994-95, when the government of the day would have to disburse, in a lump sum, a staggering $US18bn (nearly $50bn in 2022), which was 80 times the maximum amount any Australian government had paid overseas in a single year.
Even more staggering was the commission: the government was to guarantee the intermediary a fee of $US100m – nearly $850m in today’s money – regardless of whether the loan was ultimately raised.
If Whitlam had got away with it, he would at a single stroke have quadrupled Australia’s international debt.
That’s not even touching on the breaches of law and parliamentary standards. Whitlam not only breached the Constitution, he misled his own colleagues and the parliament.
So, the Governor-General having rightly dismissed a disastrous government, and the caretaker having been delivered a whopping vote of confidence at the ballot box, did the new government kick the ex-PM while he was down? (As they were entirely within rights to do.)
To call that a scandalous attack on parliamentary oversight would be an understatement. Yet the Fraser government, on coming to office in December 1975 and discovering the almost bewildering extent of the transgressions, decided not to pursue the matter.
Having won the largest majority in Australian history, it could easily have moved a censure motion shaming Whitlam – who had become leader of the opposition – and condemning actions that were irresponsible at best and illegal at worst.
They didn’t — and for good reason.
Firstly the democratic jury, the voters, had passed their verdict in spades. But there was far more at stake: the sober, conservative refrain from subjecting even the most odious political transgressors to what amounts to a Star Chamber.
Censure motions have long been frowned upon in Western democracies, because they amount to, as the US Supreme Court said, inflicting punishment on named individuals without a judicial trial. The SCOTUS rightly dubbed censure motions “bills of attainder”.
Even centuries earlier, Edmund Burke and James Madison had condemned censure motions, on the grounds that they inflict dangerous harm on the political culture.
The harm that caused was apparent last year when the Coalition – under intense pressure from the MeToo movement – supported Labor’s Senate motion censuring Bettina Arndt.
As for Labor, it has plainly relished the opportunity to strike a blow against Scott Morrison in the first censure motion to target a former prime minister.
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As with the Democrats’ repeated, petty and plainly vindictive resort to impeachment on the flimsiest ground, the effect has been to coarsen the political discourse and inflame divisions.
And, as the Coalition found out, and the Democrats are also likely to in the next two years, swords swung recklessly cut both ways.