The Whitlam Whirlwind

Australia's first Labor Prime Minister in 23 years, Edward Gough Whitlam, 56, last week was off to the most amazing, assertive start of any leader in his country's history. True to a party promise of new initiatives that would rival those of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous 100 days, Whitlam bounded into action on an extraordinary range of issues from conscription to contraceptives--and left his countrymen, who had yawned through much of the election campaign, suddenly agape.

Moving as fast as a bush fire in the Outback, Whitlam had himself sworn into office along with Deputy Leader Lance Barnard several days sooner than is customary in an Australian change of government, and quickly demonstrated a faculty for imaginative agility. Unable to install a full Cabinet until after his party caucuses this week, the new Prime Minister assumed temporary custody of 13 portfolios (including foreign affairs, which he will keep) and gave Barnard the remaining 14. As perhaps the smallest Cabinet ever in a democracy, the two men promptly engineered a series of sudden shifts in Australian policies, both foreign and domestic.

Even before being sworn in, Whitlam had recalled the Australian Ambassador to Taipei and instructed Canberra's Ambassador to France to start talks with the Chinese in Paris aimed at establishing diplomatic relations with Peking. Now the Australian Ambassador to the United Nations was directed to back moves for a neutralized zone in the Indian Ocean. He was also told to reverse field and support Third World resolutions against white-supremacist Rhodesia. A Rhodesian information of fice in Sydney was ordered shut down. South Africa was told that sporting teams selected along racial lines would not be allowed into Australia, not even as transients en route to other countries. At a press conference, Whitlam said that he favored "a more independent Australian stance in international affairs, an Australia which will be less militarily oriented and not open to suggestions of racism."

Military conscription was stopped, and seven young men who had been imprisoned for resisting the draft were released. The 12,000 Aussie conscript troops were given the option of resigning or completing their 18-month terms with additional benefits; volunteer members of the armed forces were offered re-enlistment bonuses of $1,000. The 140 Australian servicemen still in Viet Nam, remnants of a force that had numbered almost 8,000 in 1968, were ordered home by Christmas.

Whitlam's major move on the home front was to pledge vastly increased federal aid to education, transportation and health facilities. He ordered a new appraisal of the impact of foreign investment in Australia and froze all leasing of land claimed by aborigines. On a somewhat smaller scale, he abolished a 25-c--per-gallon excise tax on wine and, in a flash attack on prim Australian censorship, lifted a ban on the movie Portnoy's Complaint. He also ended a 27 1/2% sales tax on contraceptive pills and made them available through the National Health Scheme at minimal cost. And he persuaded the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, which sets national wage standards, to approve the principle of equal pay for women. He stopped short of endorsing two views expressed by his wife Margaret: that abortions should be legalized and that there is nothing wrong in childless couples living together out of wedlock. Still, Women's Libber Germaine Greer, home from Britain for a holiday, was sufficiently moved to comment: "I might return to live in Australia now that it is under a Labor government."

In one of several actions taken or planned to reduce traditional British ties with Australia, Whitlam scrapped the practice of Aussies receiving knighthoods or other courtly titles in the so-called Queen's Honors lists. (In fact, the lists are prepared by the politicians in power and are generally handed out to faithful friends and followers.) Whitlam, already committed to replacing God Save the Queen with a distinctively Australian national anthem, also announced the cessation of official royal visits in favor of unofficial visits. Last week his newly appointed envoy to Britain, former Politician John Armstrong, predicted that Australia would eventually become a republic.

It may be that some Australians had simply not yet caught their breath sufficiently to voice protests against the Whitlam whirlwind of change. But generally, the nation last week seemed to be going along with Gough. Columnist Geoffrey Hutton observed in the conservative Melbourne Age that in the stream of decisions issuing from Canberra, "Australia's image has changed more swiftly than it has since the war." The minor swing of votes that put Whitlam in power, he wrote, had shaken Australians "out of the ingrained attitudes of a generation and turned us from spaniels into fox terriers."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.