Visions and values of Australia's Governors-General

On 18 June 1970 Whitlam's Leader in the Senate, Lionel Murphy, told the Senate of Labor's proud tradition since 1950 of attempting to use the Senate to defeat a government's money bills for the sole purpose of forcing the government to an early election, and he had the list incorporated in Hansard. The last two of those 170 attempts were by Whitlam himself, in 1967 against the Holt Government, and again in 1970 against the Gorton Government. On both occasions Whitlam told the Parliament that a government that could not get supply from the Senate must resign and recommend an immediate election.

As Jack Kane, one-time federal secretary of the Australian Democratic Labor Party and former DLP Senator for New South Wales, wrote in 1988:

There is no difference whatsoever between what Whitlam proposed in August 1970 and what Malcolm Fraser did in November 1975, except that Whitlam failed. ... Senator Murphy, for Whitlam, sought the votes of the DLP senators, unsuccessfully. That is the only reason why Whitlam did not defeat the 1970 budget in the Senate and thus fulfill his declared aim to destroy the Gorton government.

So when Whitlam told the nation that the Senate's action in refusing supply to his Government was unprecedented, he may literally have been telling the truth, but he was not telling the whole truth. While 1975 was the first successful attempt, the truth of the matter is that, over a period of twenty years, Labor had established 170 precedents, albeit unsuccessful ones, for what Fraser did in 1975, and Whitlam himself had been the architect of the last two of those precedents. Clearly, 1975 was a case of the biter bitten. The Labor Party's mythology about the 1975 supply crisis and the dismissal of the Whitlam government has no basis in fact.

The next time Professor Evans writes or lectures about the 1975 supply crisis and the "hitherto accepted understandings of the constitutional conventions" I hope he will remember that both Gough Whitlam and Senator Lionel Murphy repeatedly declared in Parliament that a government that cannot obtain supply from the Senate must resign and recommend an immediate election. The learned professor might also make clear whether his reference to constitutional conventions is to those that apply when Labor is in government, or to those that apply when Labor is in opposition, for it would seem that the two are quite different.

I also hope that Professor Evans will be less selective and more forthcoming about all of our constitutional conventions, and not just confine himself to those that sustain his political biases and prejudices. As Chancellor of The Australian National University he owes his audiences nothing less.