OPINION & ANALYSIS
Struggling to keep
light on hill burning
Phillip
O’Neill
“THE long-term future of the
Australian Labor Party is now at
stake. Continuance of present trends
will reduce the greatest political
party this country has known into a
sectional rump.”
This was not said last week. It was
said by Gough Whitlam before the
1966 federal election, where Labor
would suffer its seventh successive
defeat since 1949.
I stumbled across the quote last
week in Graham Freudenberg’s tale
of Gough Whitlam’s political career.
A Certain Grandeur was released in
1977, the year Gough Whitlam
retired as Labor’s leader.
Freudenberg was Whitlam’s speech
writer. The two shared a love of
language and knew its power.
Gough Whitlam became
opposition leader after the 1966 loss
and set about reforming his party
and its policies, and then he took
them to the people, unsuccessfully
in 1969, but then in victory in 1972.
However, Whitlam’s government
was forced to an early poll in 1974
when the Liberal-Country Party
Coalition threatened to block the
government’s budget in the Senate.
But Labor was again victorious with
51.7 per cent of the House of
Representatives vote on a two-party
basis. Yet the Coalition still refused
to recognise Labor’s right to form a
government. Famously, Coalition
leader Billy Snedden said: “We were
not defeated. We just didn’t win
enough seats to form a government.”
Snedden was asserting the bornto-rule mentality of many in
Australia’s conservative parties
throughout history.
Labor was pummelled by the
Coalition throughout 1975, led by
Snedden’s replacement, Malcolm
Fraser. The attack had the backing
of big business and the big
newspapers, especially those run by
Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch would
learn from this campaign that his
newspapers could give him massive
personal and political power.
Freudenberg describes how Fraser
hunted and hounded Labor that year
in search of the “extraordinary and
reprehensible circumstance”, the
excuse to bring down the Labor
IN 2010 some of the leading external
causes of death in Australia
included transport accidents (1503
deaths), accidental falls (1648
deaths), accidental poisoning (864
deaths) and assault (217 deaths).
Death by dog didn’t rate a
mention. However, in 2011 little
Ayen Chol was killed by a pit bull
terrier cross and suddenly pit bull
breeds were on Australia’s mostwanted list.
The recent attack on Natalie
Southam at Lake Macquarie has
again prompted calls to toughen
dangerous dog laws, but revelations
that Lake Macquarie City Council
failed to declare the dogs dangerous
before the attack in spite of
COMMENT
theherald.com.au
Thomson saga
THE government has accused
the Opposition Leader, Tony
Abbott, of breaching the Crimes
Act by suggesting Craig
Thomson’s well-being would be
best served if the MP resigned
from Parliament. The story, on
the Herald’s website yesterday,
attracted plenty of comment.
It is apparent that the Coalition has
only one policy to offer Australia:
play the man/woman.
Chookman
I call for all of them to be sacked.
Let’s start again. Clean slate.
judgedredd
For both sides: stop with this
stupid, grubby, dirty politics and
get on with your jobs. Remember
you bunch of clowns are our
employees.
N/Flyer
The quote ‘‘but wait there’s more"
seems to fit this federal
government.
Spike
GARGANTUANS: Gough Whitlam, second from left, with the late Frank Crean, Sir John Kerr and Jim Cairns in 1974.
government and restore the
conservatives as leaders of the nation.
Of course, Whitlam’s cabinet
colleagues gave his opponents good
reasons to attack the quality of his
government. And the loans affair, a
naive attempt to borrow a vast sum
of money via Tirath Khemlani, an
unlikely agent of the newly wealthy
Middle East oil states, gave Fraser
the extraordinary and
reprehensible circumstance.
Four decades on, the merits of the
Whitlam years are mythologised or
not, depending on your view. But no
longer are the passionate debates of
those years re-joined.
Yet nostalgia kicked in as I read
the roll call of the Whitlam ministers
in Freudenberg’s book, enough to
make me check Wikipedia to see who
was still alive. Gough is, of course, but
he is frail, as we saw recently at the
funeral of his wife, Margaret.
Malcolm Fraser lives on, too, and in
a fortnight will deliver the Gough
Whitlam Oration to the Whitlam
Institute in Sydney, an extraordinary
sign that wounds heal. Graham
Freudenberg will sit in the audience.
Rupert Murdoch also survives,
still head of the most powerful
global media corporation the world
has seen.
Among the surviving ministers are
Bill Hayden, Kep Enderby and Tom
Uren, who celebrates his 91st
birthday today. And Junie Morosi,
Jim Cairns’s principal private
secretary, and lover, lives on.
But the dead are many, including
Kim Beazley (snr), Fred Daly, Jim
McClelland, Newcastle’s Charlie
Jones, Lance Barnard, Jim Cairns,
Clyde Cameron, Rex Connor, Lionel
Murphy, Frank Crean and the boy
from Redfern, Jim Cope. It is a roll
call of men and their dreams, some
fulfilled – like an end to conscription
and the withdrawal from Vietnam; a
national health insurance scheme;
free university education; federal
schools funding; sewerage in
Australia’s growing suburbs; a
radical overhaul of family law; the
reform of the public service; and the
guarantee of one-vote one-value.
But the list of names also reminds
us of the bungles and mishaps when
inexperienced and fanciful men were
jolted into the real world of running
an increasingly complex Australia.
The list of the dead also includes
John Kerr and Garfield Barwick, and
Vince Gair and Joh Bjelke-Petersen,
and Albert Field, all key players in
the circumstances that stripped
Whitlam’s government of legitimacy.
Khemlani is also long dead.
A Certain Grandeur reminds us of
the two great struggles that
dominate the history of the
Australian Labor Party. One is the
struggle for internal unity and
purpose so Labor can win elections.
The other is the struggle for
legitimacy: the fight with the
conservative parties, the media and
powerful business interests over the
right to govern.
My memory was that Labor was
routed at the election that followed
Whitlam’s sacking. But Freudenberg
records that Labor’s national
primary vote in the 1975 election was
43 per cent . The latest Fairfax
Nielsen poll has the Labor
government of Julia Gillard at just
28 per cent .
Labor’s struggles continue.
Professor Phillip O’Neill is director
of the Urban Research Centre,
University of Western Sydney.
It’s the deed, not the pit bull breed, that kills
Laws targeting a dog
breed don’t work, writes
Mel Williamson.
ONLINE
receiving a number of complaints
about their behaviour cause
concern. The council said it did not
have enough evidence to declare the
dogs as dangerous.
Proponents of breed-specific
legislation argue that pit bull breeds
are genetically engineered to be
savage. They reason that any dog
with pit bull genes should be
declared dangerous; but the
Australian Veterinary Association
insists that we should judge the
deed, not the breed.
I believe a Queensland case
involving Tango, an American
Staffordshire Terrier, highlights
another major flaw of breed-specific
legislation, which is the difficulty in
proving beyond doubt that a dog is a
pit bull. Tango’s owners spent more
than six years and $500,000 fighting to
prove that Tango was not a pit bull.
They eventually won the case.
A research fellow at Monash
University, Linda Watson, has been
researching the effectiveness of
breed-specific legislation and
argues that similar legislation
around the world has been proven a
failure in several academic studies.
The Netherlands abolished their
breed-specific legislation in 2008.
Breed-specific legislation is also
being repealed in the US, Canada
and the UK. Ms Watson noted that
since 1979, a pit bull cross had been
responsible for only two of the 33
dog attacks in Australia which have
resulted in a human fatality.
Instead of toughening unworkable
legislation which kills innocent pets
and wastes taxpayer dollars, the
government should get serious
about preventing dog attacks.
The majority of vicious dogs are
intact males. A campaign to educate
about the benefits of desexing
should be launched in conjunction
with a free desexing program.
Australia should crack down on
backyard breeders and the pet stores
that profit from them.
Adoption from shelters and the
implementation of foster programs
should be encouraged.
Dogs may then be screened for
behavioural issues and desexed
prior to adoption.
Free basic courses provided by
councils in dog behaviour and
training would support Australian
dog owners in their responsibility as
dog handlers, helping them to
manage and correct behavioural
issues before they presented a
danger to the community.
Dog attacks don’t occur because of
genetics; they occur because a
human failed to prevent them.
I don’t feel any sympathy for him.
Show him the door and if the piper
played right all the rest could
follow. The Labor party, who I once
held in high regard, has done its
dash with me.
So over it
Our Prime Minister has shown an
amazing amount of resilience
leading a minority government
against every dirty trick in the book
by a negative alternative with no
policies and no ideas. The
Thomson saga is overblown as
he’ll have his day in court.
Stevo106
Is this just the tip of the iceberg of
titanic proportions?
Kurt
Innocent until proven guilty in a
court of law, or have I lost the plot?
Let the government have a go and
stop your bloody whining. Tony,
this is Australia not the American
Bible Belt and also the 21st
century in case you missed it.
Just a thought
You are dead right, Tony.
draco
ONLINE poll
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Opposition’s hand
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TOTAL VOTES 51
VOTE NOW
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Mel Williamson is no-kill advocate
and former animal rescue volunteer.
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Monday, May 28, 2012 NEWCASTLE HERALD 11