Australia: How and why the Gough Whitlam government's far-reaching reforms were won

Jim McIlroy opines about Australia: How and why the Gough Whitlam government's far-reaching reforms were won.

These reforms were the reactions to the radicalisation of the masses:

However, it is important to emphasise that the Whitlam victory occurred on the crest of a wave of popular mass struggles — most centrally the anti-Vietnam War moratoriums — and the rise of a new youth radicalisation that began on the university campuses and spread to broad layers of society from the 1960s to the early 1970s.

This upsurge also involved the new wave of women's liberation, the growing Aboriginal rights movement, the start of gay liberation and the modern environment movements. The youth revolt also challenged traditional authority roles in the family, education, morality, culture and politics.

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In Australia, the anti-war movement grew from a small minority to a mass movement expressed in the Moratoriums of 1970 and 1971. General anti-war sentiment gradually increased to become a large majority by the time of the 1972 election.

It was in this tumultuous social context that the Whitlam Labor government came to power, carried on a huge wave of popular demand for real change.

As Capitalism has shown time and time again, it can co-opt these movements into the mainstream where they can be safely defused. Radicals are turned into reformist then into bureaucrats. From the barricades to the warrens of the bureaucracy. This has happened with the environmental, feminist, and Aboriginal radicals. They now fill in forms to get funding to keep going on. Thus, the slow grinding down of youthful vigour into middle-age malaise begins.

McIlroy writes that there are three (3) important lessons from the Whitlam Era:

First, that progressive change is possible — if we could afford free education in 1974, for instance, we surely can now.

Second, that the corporate elite will not accept any challenge to its interests, however mild. It will violate democracy to protect its interests.

And third, that the Labor Party is not an appropriate vehicle to achieve social change. Faced with a challenge to its mild reformist agenda in the mid-70s, Labor capitulated.

The problem with the ALP since its very beginnings was that it was not a party of the working-man but of a would-be petite burgeoisie. Their dream was not of an international working class, but of owning their own little business.

McIlroy concludes that:

We should remember the progressive gains from Whitlam's government, but remember they were not handed down but won by the struggles of ordinary people. And we can win them again — and more — in the future.

We now need to accelerate the vital task of building an alternative political movement to eventually challenge the status quo of big business rule, and to struggle for a socialist society.