‘Pandemonium’: how Whitlam’s sacking changed history

On November 11, 1975, radio journalist Leigh Hatcher was reading a story in her shoebox office on the second floor of Parliament House when her junior colleague burst through the door with startling news.

“Damn,” he remembers the stunned student yelling.

“Gough is fired!”

Hatcher, who was only 19 years old, had started his career as a political guard only three months earlier, on budget day.

The tumultuous period would catapult him into a rarer supporting role in Australian history as he witnessed up close one of the most extraordinary political epics since Federation.

The dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by Governor-General Sir John Kerr had been months in the making; It was the final chess move after a series of unpopular policies, political scandals and poor economic conditions.

The turning point was Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser’s refusal to pass Labour’s budget; This created the real possibility that Australia would run out of money, prompting Sir John to intervene in a way not seen before or since.

Fifty years later, AAP spoke to some of those who had a front row seat to the saga.

Hatcher, now 70, remembers the chaos of the day in parliament.

Following a startling warning from his young colleague, he made an urgent report for the Macquarie Radio Network’s news bulletins and raced towards King’s Hall, the gathering place at the center of what is now Old Parliament House.

“People were running and screaming” in the corridors, he recalls.

“It was complete mayhem.”

A few hours later, loud chants of “We want Gough” and boos were drowned out by the governor-general’s secretary, Sir David Smith, who read aloud the proclamation announcing Mr Whitlam’s dismissal, dissolving parliament and triggering an election.

The massive figure of Mr Whitlam loomed over Sir David’s shoulder as he spoke on the front steps of Parliament.

The secretary concluded the decree by uttering the phrase “God save the Queen.”

Mr Whitlam immediately seized the microphone and attacked the governor-general and opposition leader in a fiery speech that is now seared into Australia’s political conscience.

“We may say, God save the Queen,” he began, “for nothing can save the viceroy.”

The crowd roared.

It was Hatcher, sporting a checkered jacket, beard and messy hair, standing right in front of the newly ousted prime minister as he pleaded to the nation.

“As a radio journalist, you have to be where the voice is,” he says.

“I grew a beard because I was so young when I started in the press gallery,” he laughs.

Also on the steps of parliament that day was first-term Liberal MP Philip Ruddock, who has become one of the longest-serving politicians in Australian history.

“I think everyone was shocked and you saw it in their faces,” he told AAP.

But privately, lawmakers on his political side had a sense of what was coming.

“It was quite clear … some people were being called out and taken to (Mr Fraser’s) office to speak to him privately before the party room came to a final decision.”

Mr Ruddock recalls that the political environment leading to the dismissal was uncertain and that economic problems, including high inflation, took a toll on the Whitlam government.

“People were angry at the levels of inflation,” he says.

“There were a lot of issues with government spending that should not have been pursued.”

Although Mr Whitlam is widely remembered as the only prime minister to be sacked, he is revered among Labor faithful for his welfare reforms, defense of Indigenous Australians, overhauling education funding and pioneering Medicare.

But Mr Ruddock believes the Whitlam administration moved too quickly on the landmark changes.

“They were rushing to deliver the Labor agenda because they felt they had been left out of it for many years under Menzies (the long-serving Liberal prime minister, Sir Robert),” he says.

“There was a degree of impatience.”

Many of the Whitlam reforms were retained in one form or another by the subsequent Fraser government; but often their budgets were reduced as the new Liberal prime minister found himself in a more financially constrained mold than his predecessor.

The dismissal has divided politicians, historians and ordinary Australians since Sir John Kerr made his fateful decision 50 years ago.

Mr Ruddock describes the saga as the country’s political system working to break the impasse in parliament.

But Barrie Cassidy, a veteran political analyst and now chairman of the Old Houses of Parliament, says it is surprising that no effort has since been made to reform the governor general’s powers.

“After 50 years, a governor general can still dismiss the prime minister,” he notes.

“If you had asked me 49 years ago if this was possible, I would have said ‘no, of course not’.”

Cassidy, who took a break from a long career as a political reporter to work as press secretary for Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, says the lack of reform shows Australians are inherently conservative on constitutional change.

He had not yet started working in Canberra when the layoffs broke out. Instead he was pursuing a county court case in Melbourne.

By the time Mr Hawke started in office, just 10 years after his dismissal, many in the Labor Party had moved on from the saga and wanted to focus on other issues.

“I think it disappeared pretty quickly,” Cassidy says.

“I think the party looked forward and not looked back, it let the issue drift.”