Bob Ellis: A lot of lies were told yesterday, many of them in the documentary The Whitlam Years, whose ‘witnesses’ were lit like horror-film villains and whose Judy Davis narration was in its every sentence shallow, snide and sneering. We were told that Gough till his arrival in politics had ‘led a sheltered life’. But he had been a bomber-navigator in World War 2, whose plane was once on fire, and crashing. He had lived in a two-man tent in Gove for three years. He had raised four children in Cronulla and Cabramatta. He had campaigned for three years among the migrant people of the outer suburbs. He had been expelled from a Canberra boarding school, and gone to another, in faraway Sydney. He had studied Greek, acted in revue, appeared as an extra in movies, and rejected Christianity. He was a twenty-six-year-old ‘perpetual student’ when he joined the War. He did Basic Training, for Christ’s sake. Another was that he was in some way ‘arrogant’. He was the most genial, attentive and involved conversationalist I have known. He sat an an angle that allowed him to look up at you, not down. He crafted jokes for you alone. The jokes he made about being God’s rival, and so on, were jokes, raillery, in the manner of Noel Coward, and showed the opposite of arrogance, a willingness to mock himself. Another was that his government fell because it was incompetent. It fell because a Senator, Bert Milliner, died, and a Country Party Premier, Joh Bjelke Petersen, appointed against all precedent Albert Field, an anti-Labor unionist, in his place, and Field voted with the Liberals to hold up Supply. A stolen dead man’s vote brought Gough down. This was never mentioned by anyone yesterday. Nor was the ‘reprehensible’ sum Rex Connor sought to borrow, in order to buy back ALL of Australia’s mineral wealth, four billion dollars, to buy it back outright, forever, two thirds of the amount that Abbott’s baby money now costs, each year. How much that wealth could fund today. Nor was Murdoch much mentioned, though his relentless jeering headlines — about Cairns and Morosi, about Tierath Khemlani, about Gough and Margaret’s marriage ‘breaking up’ — contributed a lot to the momentum that swept him out. Nor was the burning of crucial film of the day of the sacking which I, for one, witnessed, crowds jeering Fraser in King’s Hall, the crowds marching on Parliament House, the gallant, funny speeches of Fred Daley, that would have changed the momentum, and, possibly, the result. Less than a minute of that footage now exists. Imagine if only fifty seconds of 9/11 now existed. That much was destroyed. Nor was the idiotic decision of David Combe not to criticuse John Kerr. He said he had 75 percent approval in the latest poll. I said ‘But that poll was taken before the Sacking.’ He said, ‘Yes, but it’s the only poll we’ve got.’ I proposed a slogan, ‘Tell the hijackers where to get off’. He preferred ‘Shame, Fraser, Shame’. There was also the suggestion that had the Budget not been passed by the Senate, unawares, it would have somehow all been different. It would not. Fraser had already agreed to ‘advise’ a Double Dissolution, a condition of his appointment. Had the Budget not passed, he, as PM, would have advised it , as agreed. It would have been the same. Kerr corruptly, or drunkenly, had made the decision, and Fraser had colluded in its execution, on Garfield Barwick’s ‘advice’. The die was cast. Whitlam could have torn up the letter of dismissal, and called the Queen, got her out of bed, and advised her to sack Kerr. She may or may not have agreed to do so. But he was a legalist, a constitutionalist, a proper man. He had also had no sleep for fifty hours, and a whole hour ticked by while he had a steak at the Lodge, and nobody knew what had happened. I was in Parliament House that day, and I remember that lost hour well. And I don’t like the lies told about it. Or about Whitlam. And so it went. Source: ellistabletalk/2014/10/22/the-lies-told/
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 05:58:27 +0000
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