Agronomist,

I guess the point I was trying unsuccessfully to make was that people now forget that most of these initiatives already had a history. Yes, Gough was able to bring them to legislative fruition, so he gets the guernsey. But without what had happened before he would have been unable to do most of them — he simply didn't have the time.

A nauseating orgy of fawning statolatry over the death of Whitlam.

Can't count the number of grown and even educated adults who have said the government provided "free" this or that. These people are operating at the mental level of an infant.

As for his so-called social reforms, all you have to do is ask whether it's justified to get these results by threatening to cage and rape people.

Well? Is it?

Whitlam was just another bumbling tyrant with a dream of unlimited power, and good riddance.

We should rejoice in the death of tyrants not lament them.

Don, I agree with you that the previous history made it practical to introduce some of the agenda. Not necessarily all of it, such as abolishing conscription.

Whitlam capitalised on that. McMahon had not and would not have. Fraser and Howard arguably would not have either.

Yes, there were things that only a new government could do, and ending conscription and our role in Vietnam were two good examples. One of the senior ministers in the McMahon government whom I met a few days after the 1972 elections was most up-beat about the result, despite the loss. He explained that there were so many things that the long-standing coalition government couldn't do that needed to be done — because they'd said No and couldn't now say Yes. Whitlam and Barnard have cleared the decks, he said...