Synopsis
The Whitlam government propelled Australia out of the presumptions and certainties of twenty-three years of conservative government and changed it irrevocably. It passed a record number of bills into law and became the most successful reformist government in Australia’s history. This book brings to light aspects of Whitlam’s ambitious reform agenda that have been neglected for too long. The Australian Assistance Plan generated networks of regional and community cooperation that remain today. Plans for energy infrastructure and self-sufficiency that would ensure the use of the nation’s resources for the common good, appear more and more visionary. The ground-breaking Royal Commission into Human Relationships is clearly a forerunner of the current royal commissions into institutionalised child abuse and family violence. New research shows the extent to which this reforming agenda continued the post-war reconstruction plans of Curtin and Chifley. The personal dimension of this agenda – how Whitlam’s approach to policy design and implementation was influenced by his childhood in Canberra – is also detailed. Finally this book reassesses the place of the Whitlam government, and its dismissal, in history, in light of new material that continues to emerge from the personal papers of Sir John Kerr, and new analyses that challenge previous assessments.
About the Author
Jenny Hocking is Research Professor and Australian Research Council Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award (DORA) Professorial Fellow at Monash University and the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow with the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University. She is an award-winning biographer and author of the two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam, Gough Whitlam: His Time (2012) and Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History (2008), winner of the 2014 Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Barbara Ramsden Award and shortlisted for several literary awards including the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the National Biography Award. Her other books include Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography; Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life and Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-terrorism and the Threat to Democracy. Jenny’s latest book is The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975, updated edition, 2016. She is currently working on an ARC funded project, From Sarah Wills Howe to Thomas Wentworth Wills: An Australian Family Biography. This biographical study will span three generations of the Wills family, a significant yet overlooked colonial family. From the economic success of its matriarch Sarah Wills who arrived in Sydney in 1798 with her convict husband, to the decline and suicide of her grandson the renowned sportsman and founder of Australian rules football, Tom Wills, their story will bring a new perspective to the early decades of colonial expansion.
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