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Whitlam Conf Speech 2 12 02 ‘Among Australian Fabians, I am Maximus’: Gough Whitlam and the Fabian Approach to Public Policy Development and Advocacy. Paper to be Presented by the Hon. Dr. Race Mathews at the ‘Thirty Years Later: The Whitlam Government as Modernist Politics’ Conference, Canberra, 2 December, 2002. Maximus One in particular of the many anecdotes about Gough Whitlam stands out for me. At a low point in his government’s fortunes in 1975, his then Senate colleague and president of the Queensland Rugby League, Ron McAuliffe invited him to officiate at the Rugby Grand Final. As he and McAuliffe walked to the centre of the ground, the crowd subjected them to a torrent of abuse and beer cans that continued throughout the ceremony and their return to the pavilion. Turning to McAuliffe in mid- stride, Whitlam remonstrated: ‘McAuliffe, don’t you ever again invite me to a place where you’re so unpopular’. In a similar flight of self-parody, Whitlam asserted to a New South Wales Lloyd Ross Forum audience in 1988: ‘Among Australian Fabians, I am Maximus’.1 For all that his intention was to entertain, the designation was correct. No other Australian political leader has so comprehensively championed the core Fabian values of liberty, community, democracy, equality and the elimination of poverty. None have been so consistently Fabian in their use of objective public policy research and advocacy in the securing of informed public consent for gradualist parliamentary reform. What follows is in part a comparative politics study and in part memoir. Fabianism Fabianism resulted from the widespread revulsion and agony of conscience over poverty in late-Victorian and early Edwardian Britain. What the selection by the newly formed society of the topic Why Are the Many Poor? for its inaugural pamphlet signalled was a sense of the moral untenability of insufficiency in the presence of excess. Was it not 1The Fabian Society was named for the Roman general, Fabius Maximus, whose preferred tactic of wearing down his enemies, as opposed to engaging them in pitched battles, saved Rome from defeat by an invading army under the Carthaginian general, Hannibal. 2 intolerable in moral terms for large sections of the population to be without access to the necessities of life? If not, how should the situation be remedied? The best known of all Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, wrote in the society’s first manifesto in 1884 ‘We would rather face a civil war than such another century of suffering as the present one has been’. 2 The subsequent development of the society is best understood as comprising a Mark I and a Mark II phase. Fabianism Mark I dated from the inception of the society in 1884 until 1939. Its distinctive characteristic was the adoption by the society of specific policies which it then sought to have implemented, initially by the so-called permeation of the major political parties of the day, the Liberal and Conservative parties, and subsequently through its role as a co-founder and on-going affiliate of the nascent Labour Party. Shaw endowed the society with the slogan ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’. The high point of the Mark I phase was the Labour Party’s adoption in 1918 of a new program, Labour and the New Social Order, that Margaret Cole – chairman of the society 1955-56, its president 1962-1980 and among its more notable historians - has described as being ‘as nearly as possible the purest milk of the Fabian word’.3 What followed was an enduring partnership between the society and the party, that survived the vicissitudes of economic slump, party schism and war, to emerge triumphantly as the pre-eminent intellectual influence within the post- war Attlee Labour government and thereby in the creation of the mixed economy and the welfare state. Fabianism Mark II stemmed from the adoption by the society in 1939 of its so-called ‘self-denying ordinance‘. The self-denying ordinance reads: No resolution of a political character, expressing an opinion or calling for action, other than in relation to the running of the Society itself, shall be put forward in the name of the Society. Delegates to conferences of the Labour Party, or to any other conference, shall be appointed by the Executive without any mandatory instructions … All publications sponsored by the Society should bear a clear indication that they do not commit the Society, but only those responsible for preparing them.4 2 Quoted in Mackenzie N. & J. 1977, The First Fabians, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p. 43. 3 Cole M. 1961, The Story of Fabian Socialism, London, Heinemann, p. 1. 4 Cole M. 1961, p339. 3 The change marked the culmination of a process whereby the society had ceased increasingly to be a body advocating specific policies as in its Mark I phase, and instead devoted itself to researching and publicising ideas within the broad framework of its value and principles. Fabianism was thereby re-invented as being primarily about the method and process for social reform, and the society re-affirmed its identity as the original political think-tank. What was common to both Mark I and Mark II Fabianism was twofold. In the first instance, both the Mark I and the Mark II phases were informed and driven by an identical on-going adherence to the society’s core values. Secondly, the two phases were alike also in their insistence on the primacy of painstaking research and reasoned argument. In the view of the UK historian Ben Pimlott, ‘Above all, the Fabians believed in the power of ideas’.5 The society’s pre-eminent early recruit, Beatrice Webb, saw clearly that social reform would not be brought about by ‘shouting’. She wrote, ‘What is needed is hard thinking’.6 A list of key Fabian achievements drawn up by Margaret Cole includes ‘having insisted on laying a foundation of facts for all assertions’.7 Fittingly, it was Beatrice Webb’s no less distinguished and influential husband, Sidney Webb, who most eloquently summed up what was finest about the Fabian outlook and approach. He wrote ‘I believed that research and new discoveries would prove some, at any rate, of my views of policy to be right, but that, if they proved the contrary, I should count it all the more the gain to have prevented error, and cheerfully abandon my own policy’.8 Sydney Webb further characterised Fabianism in succinct and memorable terms as embodying ‘the inevitability of gradualness’. None of this meant that gradualism in the face of endemic and grinding poverty was regarded by its authors at the time of its adoption as other than a regrettable expedient, or that is was uncontested by less patient minority elements within the society. Shaw’s contribution to the society’s best-selling Fabian Essays in Socialism in 1889 reads in part: ‘Let me, in conclusion, disavow all admiration for this inevitable but slow, 5 Pimlott B. (ed) 1984, Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, London, Heinemann, p. vii. 6 Webb S. & B., A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, London, Longmans, p. 174. 7 Cole M. 1961, p. 328. 8 Quoted in Mackenzie N. & J. 1977, pp. 281-82 4 reluctant, cowardly path to justice’.9 In time, overseas off-shoots of the society emerged, most notably in Australia.10 Sources of Advice A comparably quintessential Fabian approach and values can be seen to have characterised Gough Whitlam’s parliamentary career from its outset in 195311. Each new piece of work he undertook started from the principles of social justice and equality that have given his political life its whole motivation and purpose. Facts were gathered painstakingly and meticulously analysed, so that policy options emerged and could be tested. Once the final form of a policy had been settled, his formidable eloquence and advocacy were devoted unceasingly to the securing of informed public consent for it. He was elected to a life vice-presidency of the Australian Fabian Society in 1967 and as its president in 2000. He has spoken frequently for the society, and his Fabian publications have included Labor and the Constitution (1965), Beyond Vietnam – Australia’s Regional Responsibility (1968), Whitlam on Urban Growth (1970), Labor In Power (with Bruce Grant - 1973) and Re-shaping Australian Industry: Tariffs and Socialists (with Ralph Willis and Ken Gott - 1982). Whitlam recruited me as his chief of staff from my position as secretary of the Victorian Fabian Society – the then de facto national body – in 1967, following Labor’s cataclysmic defeat at the previous year’s federal elections. My brief was to further develop the network of policy advice established by my predecessor, John Menadue – a former secretary of the Fabian Society of South Australia - and thereby maintain and expand the flow of information and advice that was needed in order for Whitlam to refine the details of the policies whose broad nature in many instances was already clear in his mind.12 My contribution was in part the extensive contacts in academic and public policy research circles 9 Shaw G.B. 1889 ‘The Transition to Social Democracy’ in Shaw G.B. (ed.) 1889 Fabian Essays in Socialism, London, The Fabian Society, p. 200. 10 See Mathews R. 1993, Australia’s First Fabians: Middle-Class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour Movement, Cambridge University Press. For Fabian thought and the Curtin and Chifley governments, see Smyth P. 1994, Australian Social Policy: The Keynesian Chapter, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press. 11 He was elected to the House of Representatives on 29 November, 1952, and took his place there on 17 February, 1953. 12 John Menadue - a former Treasury economist - later became head of the departments of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Trade and Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Ambassador to Japan and CEO of QANTAS.
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