By Shirley Winton
11th November marks the 50th anniversary of the bloodless semi-coup of the popularly elected Whitlam government in 1975. As the tide for an anti-imperialist independent Australia is building up, what lessons can we learn from the Whitlam dismissal 50 years on.
This was a bloodless coup unlike the fascist coups in Indonesia (1965) and Chile (1973) where thousands were killed by the military. The three coups all had one thing in common – they were engineered by the US to crush people’s progressive and revolutionary mass movements that were threatening the US and British imperialists control of their countries. The US/UK engineered bloodless semi coup that overthrew the progressive Whitlam government used British colonial vestiges to create a constitutional crisis, and was executed by the Queens representative, John Kerr, Australia’s governor general and head of state at that time.
The Whitlam government was the most socially and politically progressive Labor capitalist government Australia ever had before, or since.
With a huge majority it was swept into government in 1972 on a wave of six preceding years of massive grass roots people’s movements and struggles pushing for progressive change: against the Vietnam War, conscription and US imperialism, against the anti-worker and anti-union penal powers and the Clarrie O’Shea-led militant working class struggle, against South African Apartheid, against Pine Gap and US bases, against the dominance of US and UK culture, for land rights, women’s liberation, free public health and education, for Australia’s independence and many socially progressive reforms demanded by the people.
The Whitlam government brought in many socially progressive reforms that benefitted the people, and it also started to take small tentative steps towards Australia’s political, economic and cultural independence from the US and UK. Whitlam objected to the US controlled Pine Gap intelligence spy base and ASIO’s involvement with the CIA in covert operations in other countries, including orchestrating the 1973 bloody military coup in Chile. He told the US he may close down Pine Gap, and his Attorney-General raided ASIO’s offices.
Rex Connor, Minister for Minerals and Resources in the Whitlam government, tried to take Australia’s natural resources and agricultural land out of the hands of foreign corporations (mainly US and British eg Vestey Holdings) by “buying back the farm”, and placing them in public ownership.
But the Whitlam government was not threatening capitalism. It was a progressive national bourgeois government and didn’t pretend to be anything else. Reforms that the government started to introduce were within the confines of capitalism, but they did open up visions, and potentially could have led, to far more reaching demands by the people. Demands for reforms that the US monopoly dominated capitalist class, the core of Australia’s ruling class, could not tolerate or accept. Especially at the time of an economic downturn.
The powerful US and UK interests started to worry that public enthusiasm for greater national independence and more reforms would threaten their expropriation of surplus value from Australia’s working class.
In November 1975, after 3 years in government, the popular Whitlam government was dramatically overthrown in a bloodless constitutional coup secretly engineered by the US/CIA and UK.
Mass anger against the Dismissal
As word spread of the Dismissal, outrage broke out across the country. Tens of thousands of angry working people immediately walked off their jobs, schools, universities and homes across the country. The numbers swelled ten times the following days. They gathered in public places, outside state and federal parliamentary offices demanding reinstatement of the Whitlam government and called for the sacking of the Governor-General. Workers and students were threatening wild cat strikes until their elected, popular government was reinstated.
In stepped Bob Hawke, the then ACTU President, directing workers and students to go back to work, universities, schools and homes, to cool off and wait for the next election. Hawke saved the day for US imperialism, UK colonialism and reactionary forces, from the people’s wrath. Hosing down working class struggles and delivering working people to capital was Hawke’s trade mark throughout his entire period as ACTU President and Prime Minister.
For a brief moment in history, the Whitlam Dismissal exposed and shone a spotlight on US and UK control over the country and the centre of political and economic power. It also showed the role of social democracy in reining in and strangling people’s mass movements and struggles.
Since the 1975 US/UK coup, the economic, political and military stranglehold of US over this country has tightened and expanded. The most powerful and decisive sections of Australia’s ruling class are US multinational corporations and local comprador bourgeoisie dependent on US for their survival and expansion. The most powerful sections have always been those tied to and dependent on foreign finance capital.
From Hawke to Albanese – the US grip tightens
Since the constitutional coup of the Whitlam government, US control of this country has been strengthened by every Labor government from Hawke to Albanese. We see it economically, politically and militarily. We see it in giving away our natural resources, rare earth and critical minerals, destruction of local industries, environmental destruction, our culture and foreign policies. We see it in the US-Australia alliance and the US-led AUKUS military pact which is stealing more than $400 billion from the needs of Australia’s working people, only to support the US and UK languishing ship building industries and imperialist war.
The global “neo-liberal” policies of finance capital, implemented by Hawke and Keating governments in Australia in mid 1980s – early 1990s opened doors to foreign capital, private banks and wholesale privatisation of state instrumentalities, hospitals, child care, aged care, social and community services, public transport, energy and power.
Many hard won workers’ rights have been dismantled and new draconian anti-union laws brought in by Labor governments. Hawke’s famous 1983 Accord froze workers’ wages whilst the bosses pocketed bigger profits. The Hawke government weakened workers’ struggles that led the way for the Dollar Sweets and Mudginberri attacks on workers. The Hawke government deregistered the militant Builders’ Labourers’ Federation and used Air Force as scabs in the 1989 Ansett Pilot’s strike.
In 2007 the Rudd Labor government rode on the backs of another nationwide working class struggle against the Liberals’ anti-union and anti-workers’ Work Choices. Immediately after riding into power on the workers’ backs, the ALP and ACTU dismantled the powerful Your Rights at Work are Worth Fighting For mass movement. Despite promising to abolish the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission if elected to government, the Rudd and Gillard governments both kept the ABCC, laws prohibiting secondary boycotts and restrictions on unions’ Rights of Entry.
This is not because of individual leaders’ personal characters or politics, although it does matter. But it is mainly because the real and most decisive power does not lie in parliament, but with the most powerful section of multinational corporations and financial institutions in this country, mainly US. Parliament serves the needs of capitalism.
In 2010 the then Labor Prime Minister Rudd tried to introduce a 40% resources super profits tax on big miners and minerals corporations. The super profits tax did not challenge capitalism. But in a major campaign by the Mining Council, mining corporations, and the Murdoch media, Rudd was dumped as PM and replaced by Julia Gillard who immediately dropped the minerals super profits resources tax. The resources super profits tax had enormous public support, including unions who started campaigning for it, but like Whitlam before him, Rudd did not mobilise the people and fight for it.
Under the Gillard and Albanese governments, the US stranglehold on Australia is driven by the US, whose global dominance and spheres of influence are being challenged by capitalist China’s economic expansion.
The 2011 US Pivot into Asia Pacific, announced in Australian parliament by Obama with fawning PM Gillard by his side, fully opened the doors to the US turning Australia into its major US military base in the region in its preparations for a war with China. The 2014 Force Posture Agreement, gave the US unimpeded and secretive use of all of Australia’s military, defence and civil infrastructure and instillations. The US controlled Pine Gap has doubled in its size since Whitlam, and is openly transmitting intelligence to assist Israel’s genocide in Gaza and suppress Palestinian resistance to occupation. The US controlled AUKUS Pillars 1 & 2 and military interoperability lock Australia into a US-led war with China and allow nuclear weapons carrying B52 bombers and nuclear submarines to be based in the Northern Territory and Australian Ports close to major cities.
Lessons from the Whitlam Dismissal
The Whitlam Dismissal has shown that even small progressive steps towards independence and progressive social reforms that threaten to restrict profit making are quickly removed either by a “coup” or by immense main stream media propaganda, or both.
The Dismissal sent a warning to future governments “Don’t step out of line in your service to capitalism and imperialism”.
The coup ensured that the interests of monopolies, the US alliance, bases, were protected and Australia continued as its servile vassal state economically, politically and militarily. It ensured that US continued as the dominant section of Australia’s capitalist ruling class.
This is in no way to diminish or reject rank and file members and supporters of the ALP, most of whom genuinely long for and work for a Labor party and government that truly represent and fight for working people.
Organising for anti-imperialist independence
Whitlam’s progressive social reforms and a few steps towards Australia’s independence, and later Rudd’s mining super profits tax, won huge public support. But neither Whitlam or Rudd, as Prime Ministers administering and protecting capitalism, could, or wanted to, mobilise that massive public support, fearing where it would lead.
For the people, the only alternative is building independent and united people’s organisations and mass movements for an independent, anti-imperialist Australia politically, economically and militarily.
Lessons for working people is don’t let the ruling class divert, divide and manipulate working people’s struggles into parliamentary graveyards. People’s struggles that are kept in the hands of the people have shown the real power of mobilised and organised working people – the Clarrie O’Shea penal powers, the Vietnam war and conscription, many workers’ struggles, anti-war struggles, uranium mining, land rights, Franklin River, the 1998 MUA waterfront struggle, Your Rights at Work, BLF, and many others.
Build the movement to end US-Australia Alliance.
