Gough Whitlam Passes Away

Farewell To The Titan

The man was 98. It's not like there was much more for the man to offer us beyond symbolic gestures, and his time in the limelight of history was long behind him. Perhaps his career embodies one archetype of the ALP leadership - invested with Charisma, invested in big ideas - much like his successors. Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd were all charismatic leaders, and even Julia Gillard would have to be some kind of poster-person for the gender-issuue-drive critique of ALP leadership. In a democracy, you don't get ahead without the galvanising power of charisma, and if anything the Gillard years highlights the problem of not having it.

Indeed, Bill Hayden, Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Mark Latham can all equally be dumped in with the Gillard years as examples of how the lack of a broad political charisma can sink the ALP's prospects. The wild electoral success of Whitlam in '72, Hawke in '83, Keating in '93 and Rudd in '07 actually line up in a very similar way. The connectedness of Hawke-Keating years is possibly the anomaly. Maybe ALP governments can't be long because their electoral successes contain a contradictory impulse which makes them vulnerable in the long term. If you exclude the Hawke-Keating years, you have roughly three years of Whitlam, Rudd and Gillard each. All of them had their terms ended by internal politics.

It also means Bill Shorten's leash probably ought to be (pardon the pun) shorter. If he can't get his electoral mojo going, he's not going to get the ALP back into government. He really only has one shot at dislodging Tony Abbott, and if so, he'll likely only get 1 term unless he can get his party reforms through.

Peter Carey And Conspiracy Theories

Coincidentally, and totally out of the blue, I saw this article today.

Has anyone has accused him of being a conspiracy theorist? "Not for years," says Carey, who is in Sydney to do a rapid round of interviews and speak at the Opera House on Monday night. "What comes with the term is the notion that conspiracies don't exist and the deeply troubling reactionary problem with the name is that if someone thinks there's a conspiracy they're wrong."

Amnesia is driven frenetically by two characters: Gaby Baillieux, a young computer hacker from Melbourne who releases a virus into the Australian detention system to release asylum seekers, and through the controlling US corporation opens doors to American prisons. And Felix Moore, "Australia's last serving left-wing journalist", who believes as Carey does that the CIA was instrumental in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 and is hired by his old "mate", property developer Woody Townes, to write Gaby's biography. 

Carey has no doubt the US government, under Republican President Gerald Ford, was suspicious of Australia's Labor government and reacted against Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's threat to reconsider the lease on the Pine Gap satellite tracking station. 

Although he had been active in the Vietnam War moratorium movement, Carey says, "I tended to be rather slow on things and rather naive". So it was only when Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, published secret US military and diplomatic documents that he started to speculate that his actions were revenge against that almost forgotten rupture in Australian politics.

It's an odd coincidence the interview comes out on the same day Whitlam's passing is reported.
I would point to the denunciation of the term 'Conspiracy theorist' - and a pretty strong one at that - that Carey probably has gone down the rabbit hole and seen and read and heard things to vex him.