Thanks for the ride, Gough

Being involved in politics during the Whitlam era was exhilarating

I have met every Prime Minister since Gorton, save Rudd. Most of these encounters have been fleeting and now, as those who were the young Ottomans of the seventies approach the age where they put their 70-year-old feet on the ottomans, it is interesting to reflect on Gough Whitlam, whose memorial service echoes in my ears as I write.

Everybody has an anecdote about Gough. Mine is about a night in 1973 when I was leaving Parliament House with John Knight, who later became Senator for the Australian Capital Territory before tragically dying in 1981 at the age of only 37. On the steps of Parliament House, we encountered Graham Freudenberg, who was working for Gough at the time. Both John Knight and I were on opposition leader Bill Snedden's staff. However, staffers, irrespective of party affiliation, were generally on good terms, and Graham — Freudy, as he was known when we were all in a bibulous frame of mind — in the ecumenical spirit of the times, invited us both to a party.

We got lost going to the party in John Knight's Datsun, but, spying a phone box, Freudenberg suggested we call for reinforcements. Five minutes later, after a brief phone conversation, around the corner came nothing other than C1, the Prime Minister's car. I said to Freudenberg, “Not every day of the year that the principal private secretary of the leader of the opposition has the opportunity to ride in C1. You go with Knighty and follow us.” Freudenberg agreed; Gough's driver, whom I also knew, agreed — and for about 5 minutes of borrowed splendour, I did what no other opposition staffer had, to my knowledge, ever done — ride in solitude in the back seat of the Prime Minister's car, chatting with the PM's driver.

It was a bloody good party. I never knew why the car was there. Gough was not. After this escapade, there were apparently some murmurings, but nothing of any moment until, one day some weeks later, I met the Prime Minister coming up the stairs of Parliament House. He half turned and, with that Gough smile, boomed: “I hope you enjoyed the ride the other night, Jack.” And that was that. Generosity, wit, tolerance. That was 1973. Kerr and Fraser with their “genius” Barwick were yet to come.

Gough was one of those figures who, in a short time, oversaw long overdue social changes. Even working on the opposite side of the House, it was an exhilarating period in Canberra. Gough with all his expansionary vision for his Australia, however, was “easy meat” in the first Budget, when the worldwide recession hit with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, coupled with the oil crisis when petrol prices soared. His lack of economic savvy was at the heart of Gough's ultimate failure, and, although his oratory has not lasted down the ages, Bill Snedden made a very good speech in reply to this first Budget.

The pathway Whitlam strode along was littered with an array of beautiful bulbs, some of which germinated into delightful blooms. Others (such as Salvado in Western Australia, one of a number of projected growth centres) barely germinated.

I remember the battle over the introduction of Medibank, and the calm, logical manner with which Bill Hayden confronted his adversaries. He was well briefed by John Deeble and Dick Scotton, Medibank's architects, with the ubiquitous man in black, Paddy McGuinness, Hayden's then economic adviser, lurking in the background. That Medibank involved changes to the payment systems to both doctors and hospitals was perceived as a direct challenge to the private health funds and the Australian Medical Association (as if fee-for-service medicine was ever at risk and hospital funds would be run out of business).

Much of the political noise was about disturbing the sanctity of the doctor–patient relationship and subjecting doctors to compulsion. Abortion and the rights of the woman versus those of the unborn child were debated as a form of subplot, a surrogate for Whitlam wickedness. There was talk about socialised medicine and dark forebodings about the consequences if Medibank came to fruition. There was the Hospitals and Health Services Commission, which fitted more to the grand Whitlam design because it spread the federal umbrella of centralised control. That exercise ultimately failed, existing only from 1972 till 1978, but the Hayden Medicare plan did succeed after the double dissolution election of 1974 resulted in Whitlam being re-elected.

To Whitlam's credit, the legislation was passed by a joint sitting of the two houses of federal parliament, although he was never as sure-footed with this as he was with other of his proposals because it needed the detailed financial attention that Hayden could provide in ensuring it ultimately came into being in 1975.1 However, Whitlam was the chief steward, and if he had not supported it as he did, then even with Hayden and the myriad Labor doctors such as Moss Cass, they would never have seen it through.

At the heart of the Medibank system was community rating and a sense of equity in that everybody was entitled to both a government-paid hospital bed and treatment as a public patient. The government pricing system in what is now Medicare has been more or less successful. It is long overdue for review — but that is another tale.

It is interesting that the United States is experiencing similar hysteria about Obamacare, which, although untidy, is attempting to do what has long been accomplished in Australia — make reasonable health care available to the whole population.2 There are elements of compulsion in the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, just as there were in Australia's original Medibank proposal. A taxation levy was designed to pay for Medibank. This provision was resisted longest by the conservative forces.

The other provisions that send the reactionary teabag wavers into a political spin is the centralisation of power, whether this be in Washington or Canberra. Most of the debate then degenerates into power struggles. The US Republican states call the current White House the bastion of socialised medicine. So long as the matters of compulsion and federal–state imbroglio are allowed to fester, any national health scheme is at risk. In the US, the threat is to repeal — but to what?

I pondered as I listened to the Whitlam memorial service and the litany of achievements that Gough promoted. Had those eulogists not missed one very significant achievement — the 1974 passage at a joint session of the federal parliament, the enabling legislation? The health debate after 1974 was reduced to skirmishes which, at times, became personal and ugly, but the integrity of Medibank, transmuted into Medicare, has remained. Not a bad achievement and, for a period, I was there.

Thanks Gough. I enjoyed the ride.