Australia
A meat pie election
Mungo MacCallum
Canberra The former Australian Prime Minister, Edward Gough Whitlam, has always been a man with an overdeveloped sense of his own historical importance, and within hours of being dismissed from his post by Australia's Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, he had found himself a new niche in the history books. He was, he said, the first Prime Minister to be dismissed by the Crown since George the Third got rid of Lord North; and George the Third, as Whitlam's colleagues were quick to point out, was mad.
No one has accused the Queen's representative in Australia of insanity — at least, not yet: but he has been accused publicly and privately of just about everything else. With some evidence, he has been accused of conspiring with the Conservative forces in Australia, and in particular with the present caretaker Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, to bring down the elected Labour government: he has been accused of ignoring proper advice and of acting in a dictatorial fashion: his wife has been accused of leaking his decision to her social acquaintances in advance.
But worst of all, from the Australian point of view, Sir John Kerr has been accused of acting outside the Constitution. It is difficult to explain the unquestioning awe in which this cumbersome and ill-drafted act of the British Parliament is held in Australia. Repeated attempts to change it by popular referendum into something more up-to-date and workable have been, almost without exception, rejected indignantly by the population. The team of suspicious colonists and overworked British civil servants who drew it up at the end of the last century are referred to reverently as "the Founding Fathers," and are assumed to have had such prescience and wisdom that no situation can ever arise which was not foreseen and allowed for in their deliberations.
Constitutional law is a thriving industry in Australia, and for some weeks, behind the political battles which have now spilled into the streets, an almost equally intense legal argument has been carried on. It would be fair to say that the lines have been fairly evenly divided. The present Chief Justice — an Attorney-General in a previous Conservative Government — believes that the Senate had the right to block the Supply Bills, and that the Governor-General was correct in dismissing the Prime Minister when he was unable to guarantee Supply. His cousin, a former Solicitor-General and a front-bencher in the present Conservative caretaker Government, agrees. The present Solicitor-General, whose politics are not known, disagrees, as do the majority of professors of law at Australian universities. Practising judges and lawyers are split along party lines. If nothing else, the present crisis will keep the academics busy for years to come.
There are three main sections of the Constitution in dispute. Section 53 denies the right of the Senate to originate or amend Money Bills; it does not specifically deny the Senate the power to defer or reject them. Section 57 lays down the procedure for resolving deadlocks between the Senate and the House of Representatives, it entails a three-month waiting period, and this was not followed. Section 64 deals with the powers of the Governor-General to appoint governments — which is conveniently known as "the reserve power". It was under this last section that Sir John Kerr acted. It is worth remarking that nowhere in the Constitution is it stated that a government must resign if it cannot• obtain Supply, or has lost the confidence of the House of Representatives. As in Britain, these are conventions only. Until last week it was also assumed as a convention that the Crown would never act to sack an elected government, except possibly in circumstances where some massive piece of misconduct or illegality had been proven.
The fury of' the supporters of the Labour government to find that this was not the case has been awe-inspiring, and the election campaign which is now getting under way in earnest promises to be perilously close to a class war. The left in Australia is muttering darkly about the CIA and the multinational corporations (which the left in Australia, as elsewhere, believes to be responsible for everything that happens); Labour Members are wowing the crowds with descriptions of faceless plutocrats sitting in penthouses sipping imported brandy and chuckling over their triumph as they recall their last great achievement — the Vietnam war. The leadership of the trade union movement has asked its members to refrain from violence, which they believe can only damage Labour's chances at the polls.
But such is the sense of desperation among the left (the extremists of which predictably see the whole thing as a heaven-sent opportunity to try and smash the System altogether) that their chances of success seem minimal. Fraser, in his few public appearances as Prime Minister, has been the target of roars of abuse, eggs, and that traditional Australian missile, the meat pie. Liberal supporters who have shown up at the Labour rallies, the biggest in the country's history, have been assaulted. Death threats to Fraser and Kerr (and, for that matter, to Whitlam) have been arriving by every post. Labour's quandary is how to keep supporters' enthusiasm for the "we wuz robbed" theme going (which they need to do if they are not to fight the election on Fraser's chosen ground, the state of the economy) while not allowing it to turn into the brawls which lost Labour so much support in the elections of 1966. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are worried that the fear of violence will keep their ,own supporters away from their meetings, thus adding to the impression that the country is overwhelmingly behind Whitlam.
At the time of writing, it is hard to judge the mood of this quite extraordinary election: the only thing that can be said with certainty is that Labour has a real chance of winning, which would not have been the case if the election were being held under normal circumstances. Its support in the major cities is very high, but in the country (which has far more than its fair share of seats, because a series of Conservative governments planned it that way) Whitlam is
only marginally more popular than a plague of locusts. It will be very close, and whichever side wins is going to inherit a legacy of bitterness which will take a very long time to fade. In particular, if Fraser wins, he is likely to find the country next to ungovernable: the trade unions have declared flatly that they will simply not co-operate with him, and there would undoubtedly be industrial chaos, probably culminating in a prolonged national strike. But the real worry fof both parties — and indeed for everyone who retains some respect for the Westminster system — is that the party which forms a government in the lower House may still not have a majority in the new Senate. If this is the case, and the threat of withholding Supply again hangs over the Government every six months, the present exaggerated slogans about the threat to Australian democracy may become terrifyingly real.
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