"The Dismissal" fifty years ago

today is something the Labor party in this country still holds as wrong, as something which should never have happened. They still claim they had a mandate to govern and that the Governor-General did not have the power to dismiss a government about to knowingly do wrong.

I suppose it depends on which side of the political fence you are on whether you see the dismissal of Whitlam's government as right or wrong. The constitutional issues around it are still hotly debated. Even in law school the issue was one which caused considerable debate. Was it legal? Was it right? Did the Governor-General actually have the power? Was the Chief Justice right or wrong? 

For most people it was a simple matter of the Governor-General consulting the Chief Justice of the High Court and being told, "Yes, you can do that." If you were and are a Labor voter then this was wrong. If you voted or vote in any other way then it was right.

Of course it was much more complex than that. It was not a simple matter. Yes, the government of the day was proposing to break the law of the land and borrow money in order to keep the country running. It had run out of money because they were spending too much.

The programs the government was putting in place were popular. There was the precursor to Medicare. It is why we still have those cards the present PM likes to tell us are "all you need to visit the doctor". That is not correct but it sounds good. Indigenous land rights were coming into focus. That they have gone far beyond anything originally intended is perhaps something that nobody could have foreseen. That single mothers would get financial support was seen as a good thing but nobody could foresee the social consequences would not always be what the policy intended. 

Those of us who were school librarians welcomed the injection of funds into school libraries. That this had unintended consequences for the publishing industry is another issue. At least the university students were no longer paying to do their degrees.  Of course that had the unintended consequence of many more students applying and entering courses they were not really capable of doing. That resulted in lower standards - something which is still a problem. 

All I am saying here is that government policies which sound good do not always have the long term consequences they are intended to have. They can be put in place with the best of intentions and nobody can foresee the consequences. 

With respect to the Dismissal however there was more than just a little disquiet behind the scenes. The government was first being warned not to spend so much and then the public servants who advise the government were telling them they could not spend so much, that taxes would have to rise and money would have to be borrowed from other sources. Advice of this sort was coming thick and fast but the government was not listening. The programs were popular. They were in power. They could do as they liked. 

When the government was dismissed we had an election. The people could have chosen to vote them back in - and did not. Labor might like to claim unfair dismissal, even illegal dismissal, but there was an election. They lost. 

Perhaps it is time that Labor accepted that result rather than the continued anger at what happened prior to that. Fifty years in a long time to hold a grudge against democracy.