Excellent, thoughtful article from Bel Eltham In New Matilda. By his own admission, he's too young to remember Gough as an active politician, but he's researched carefully and summed up the time very well.
"When it came, he seized it with both hands, embarking on a whirlwind of legislative change that has never been matched, before or since. Appointing himself and deputy Lance Barnard to all the cabinet positions for the first fortnight of his government, Whitlam ended conscription, recognised communist China, applied sanctions against South Africa, and embarked on an ambitious program of support for the arts."
(snip)
"Since 1975, Whitlam’s achievements have never been under greater attack than today. The Abbott government is re-privatising higher education, and is attacking universal health care with a $7 co-payment. It has already had a go at rolling back the Racial Discrimination Act. It remains viscerally opposed to environmentalism, to feminism and to any meaningful advance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander equality.
"Indeed, Whitlam’s passing shows that the ideas that he stood for – of social democracy, of universal social provision, of progressive law reform and of a cradle-to-grave welfare state – are now in eclipse. Just as in the 1950s, a conservative government is making Australia a less equal society. The Labor opposition is helmed by a weak and ineffectual leader, and there is a 1950s split in the progressive vote between Labor and the Greens (although at least the ALP can still rely on Greens preferences)."
https://newmatilda.com/2014/10/21/obituary-gough-whitlams-ideas-must-live
I hope - how I hope - that somehow, Shorten will be rolled as Labor leader before the next election, because I fear that, however bad Abbott is, there is nothing appealing about Shorten to most voters; not in personality, eloquence, or passion. A second Abbott term will finish off the Australia Whitlam left us, and the damage may never be undone.
What a pathetic turnaround – from Gough Whitlam: big man, big intellect, big ideas, big personality, to Tony Abbott: an intellectually challenged little runt, with no original ideas or policies, on sale to the highest bidders; a stumbling, stuttering, bandy-legged second-rater, locked in the past of the mother country where he really belongs.
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