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Gough Whitlam dies at 98; Australian prime minister was a reformist

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Gough Whitlam swept to political power in Australia in 1972 under a slogan, “it’s time,” that seemed to sum up everything that was stale and old-fashioned about an inward-looking, parochial nation. He was swept out less than three years later on Nov. 11, 1975, controversially dismissed by the Queen of England’s representative in Australia, Gov. Gen. Sir John Kerr, triggering the country’s bitterest constitutional crisis.

The former Australian prime minister died Tuesday at 98, his family announced.

Whitlam summed up his 1972 election campaign for the Labor Party with the words, “The decision we will make for our country ... is a choice between the past and the future, between the habits and fears of the past, and the demands and opportunities of the future. There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. For Australia, this is such a time.”

With his towering height and dark, hawkish eyebrows, Whitlam is remembered as a reformist who came to power with a long to-do list after his left-wing Labor Party had been in opposition for 23 years. A visionary with an acerbic sense of humor, he ushered in sweeping change, including free college education, increased government spending on state and independent schools, the introduction of universal healthcare, and the abolition of the death penalty and conscription. He pulled the last Australian troops out of Vietnam, freed conscientious objectors from jail and initiated the first return of indigenous land by a government to Australian aborigines.

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During his 1,071 days in office, Whitlam’s government passed swaths of transformative legislation that changed the way the country saw itself. He introduced laws banning race discrimination, introduced no-fault divorce, took steps to implement equal pay for women, introduced environmental protection legislation and banned oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef.

He established diplomatic relations with China and was the first Australian leader to visit the country. And he removed the last vestiges of the “white Australia policy,” when he eliminated a policy giving immigration preference to British people.

An iconic 1975 photograph of Whitlam shows him pouring a handful of sand into the hand of aboriginal leader Vincent Lingiari of the Gurindji people, who had been on strike for years as workers at an agricultural company named Vesteys, eventually demanding the return of their traditional lands.

“Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof in Australian law that these lands belong to the Gurindji people, and I put into your hands part of the earth as a sign that this land will be the possession of you and your children forever,” Whitlam said during the ceremony at Wattie Creek, in the Northern Territory, the first recognition of an aboriginal land claim by an Australian government. Lingiari famously replied, “We are all mates now.”

Whitlam set up a land fund to enable aboriginal communities to buy traditional lands and vowed to legislate for aboriginal land rights, a promise he said was important “not just because their case is beyond argument, but because all of us as Australians are diminished while the aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation.” He was ousted from office before he could introduce the law.

His political archenemy and successor, the conservative Malcolm Fraser, who engineered Whitlam’s dismissal from power, later embraced aboriginal land rights and carried on the reforms that Whitlam initiated.

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Whitlam turned the country outward toward its Asian neighbors, and shrugged off its history as a British colony. He announced a 25% reduction in tariffs, designed to force the country to compete globally.

Born July 11, 1916, Whitlam grew up in a well-to-do family, the son of the nation’s chief law officer, the solicitor general. He attended a private school and later studied at Sydney University, earning a law degree in 1946. In World War II, he served in the Royal Australian Air Force, becoming a flight lieutenant. After the war he became a barrister and joined the Labor Party. He was elected to parliament in 1952.

Australian political columnist Mungo MacCallum wrote that Whitlam would be remembered “for this breadth of vision, for the unquenchable optimism of his ambition.” To supporters on the left of politics Whitlam was “a flawed genius and a political martyr well on the way to beatification. The right regarded him as a monstrous aberration, a devil figure they used to warn budding politicians of the awful fate that awaits those who succumb to hubris.”

MacCallum called Whitlam, “the dominant figure of his times, a giant who bestrode the parliament in a way that few had done before him and none have approached since.”

Whitlam, who dramatically increased government spending to meet his ambitious social program, was seen as economically profligate. Australian inflation spiked on the back of the 1973 oil crisis.

When a government minister initiated talks on a $4-billion government loan from the Middle East, then misled parliament about it, the scandal led to Whitlam’s dismissal. Fraser, from the conservative Liberal Party, used a majority in the Senate to block the government’s supply bill, citing “reprehensible circumstances.”

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When Whitlam went to the governor general, Sir John Kerr, to call an election to resolve the crisis, Kerr sacked him, installing Fraser, pending an election, in one of the most divisive moves in Australian history. The constitutionality of the move is debated to this day, but forced from office, Whitlam could do nothing.

His government lost the ensuing election.

Whitlam’s wife, Margaret, died in 2012. His survivors include four children, Antony, Nicholas and Stephen Whitlam and Catherine Dovey.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

Twitter: @RobynDixon_LAT

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