At this, the defeated prime minister broke into tears. As he left the room, Sonia told Davis to stop. ‘That’s enough, Phil.’
‘I had to tell him,’ he said.
‘I know, but that’s enough.’3
More realistic colleagues soon delivered the same message. McMahon resisted, but his vestigial hopes were scattered once Nigel Bowen announced he would stand for the leadership. Knowing that the vote of New South Wales would split between him and Bowen, McMahon gave in. When he called upon Hasluck two days later, he was bitter and the defeat was still sinking in. The loss was not bad, but it was clear enough to overcome any thought of staying on as Liberal Party leader.
‘In the course of the conversation he expressed a mixture of disappointment and of relief at the results of the election,’ Hasluck recorded. ‘He was not sure what he would do about his own future but, later in the conversation, when we discussed the reconstruction of the Liberal Party, he said he “would not be there” at the 1975 election.’
McMahon might well have been disengaging, but anger and resentment were palpable. ‘He thought [the defeat] was due to the faults of others and the wickedness of the Labor Party,’ wrote Hasluck. McMahon let on that he believed Gorton was organising to retake the leadership. He dismissed the thought of Billy Snedden, Don Chipp, Malcolm Fraser, Phillip Lynch, Andrew Peacock, or Tony Street as successors, saying they were no good. Hasluck’s attempts to draw McMahon on the future of the party, and its need for rejuvenation, went nowhere:
He said that there had been too much disagreement and scheming inside the Liberal Party and mentioned the disappointment and ‘disgust’ of his wife Sonia at some of the things she had heard said by Liberals. Nigel Bowen was so disgusted with some of them that he talked of resigning from the party. The disloyalty was terrible.4
But there was no time for an extensive talk between the two men. Whitlam had not wished to wait until Thursday to meet Hasluck. The prime minister-elect was coming at 12.15pm.
Barely two hours later, Whitlam called McMahon and told him that he would be sworn in as prime minister that afternoon. McMahon was surprised. The counting of votes had not yet finished. Had Whitlam ‘consulted the appropriate people’? Whitlam assured McMahon of the legality of his plans, and said he wished to begin enacting his party’s agenda. Suddenly aware that his prime ministership would be ended within a few hours, McMahon was gracious. He wished Whitlam luck, and said that he hoped Whitlam would be given a fair go.5
At 3.30pm, it was done. Whitlam was prime minister.
THE Liberals moved on quickly. On 20 December, the party held its leadership contest. Staving off Malcolm Fraser, John Gorton, Jim Killen, and Nigel Bowen, Billy Snedden was elected leader; Phillip Lynch emerged as his deputy. The close-fought ballot, and the immediate wrangle over whether Lynch or Anthony should occupy the office space set aside for the deputy leader of the opposition, augured a turbulent time for the Coalition. ‘We have no present memory of what it is like to be in opposition,’ Snedden admitted.6
Blame for that new status was soon allocated. In an influential article published the following January, academic and future minister David Kemp blamed the election loss on a ‘failure of leadership’ that produced further problems. There were substantial criticisms of McMahon. His ‘dismal failure’ of a policy speech was ‘dull, poorly presented’ and so ‘crammed full of promises’ that it sounded ‘like a cynical effort to buy votes’. His ‘apparent criticism’ of his own ministers was misjudged, and the instability of the party’s leadership was an implicit dig at McMahon, who had played such a large part in the white-anting of colleagues.7
Over the next twelve months, there were suggestions from all and sundry about what could have been done to prevent the loss. Some offered policy suggestions: Billy Wentworth said that if the Coalition had actually abolished the means test, rather than just promising to, it would have won.8 Others said that lowering the voting age to eighteen could have done it. For a few, it was a matter of timing: Doug Anthony continued to believe that if they had gone to the election right after the budget, they could have done better.9 Most echoed Kemp’s criticisms, and blamed a failure of leadership. Howard Beale, a veteran of the Menzies government, wrote that McMahon’s administrative experience and skill ‘were not matched by the magnetic quality necessary to draw men to him and pull the party together’. David Fairbairn was silent for the moment, but had criticisms of McMahon’s television performances, public comments, and constant slip-ups. But he also blamed the press: ‘Eighty per cent of journalists tend to be Labor — Labor in outlook, anyway.’10
Peter Howson agreed with this, but reserved real fire for colleagues he believed were more intent on preserving personal power than staying in government: McMahon, he wrote in his diary, ‘fought the campaign without the teamwork that one would normally have expected from Ministers and this was particularly noticeable with the Victorian Ministers, particularly Snedden, Chipp, and Peacock.’11 But a pseudonymous Liberal favourably compared those MPs to the ‘doddering’ sixty year-olds re-endorsed in New South Wales, who couldn’t possibly appeal to a young electorate.12 Some blamed infighting with the Country Party; others blamed communication woes.
Most within the party thought that defeat was inevitable. The success of the Labor Party’s slogan pervaded this acknowledgement. The Coalition had been in office for twenty-three years, and it was simply time for a change. The government had run out of puff. It had little to offer, particularly in contrast to the energetic and wide-ranging programme of the Labor Party. Whitlam, too, thought it. ‘They would have been beaten under anybody,’ he had said, on election night. ‘It’s just too silly for them to blame — or us to thank — Mr McMahon.’13
However far-ranging or apt the criticisms, McMahon rarely admitted personal fault. The journalist Ray Aitchison once put it to McMahon that he was an example of the Peter Principle — that he was a successful person who had been promoted just one step further than his competence. McMahon flatly disagreed. ‘I instituted a programme of reform legislation and often pushed it through despite great difficulties in the path of it. I did not have much time available to me, but I am proud of what was achieved in that time.’14 When asked to explain why the government lost, he always returned to the same issues: the disloyalty of colleagues, the wickedness of the ALP, bias in the press. Of all the reasons that Labor had won, he said, ‘I believe the first one was disloyalty within our own party.’ He targeted the Country Party, too: ‘We weren’t completely at one.’ There were continual invocations of how he had carried the government on his own shoulders. ‘Time beat me,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t fit any more into twenty-four hours a day.’15 If there was a failing he would admit, it was of working too hard. He told Alan Reid that advice to ‘think’ through his problems, rather than work through them, was sound but unused. ‘I couldn’t take it because of the rush of events.’16 His focus on the defeat and evident hurt was such that one journalist was to write that year:
William McMahon is essentially a lost man, hoping that someone will help lead him out of the wilderness. He spends most of these days in a comfortable, and none too modest, office in the Commonwealth Bank Building in Martin Place, Sydney, and much of his conversation is morbidly concerned with the newspaper-Liberal Party-Labor Party conspiracy that dumped him from office.17
McMahon was happy to feed disinformation to journalists wherever it would make him look good, irrespective of what effect it would have on others. In February 1973, an account of the 1972 campaign by journalists Laurie Oakes and David Solomon, entitled The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, was published with the claim that a special political steering committee had been appointed by McMahon to look at election planning — but had never met.18 Nigel Bowen collared Solomon in the opposition lobbies at Parliament House soon afterward, and told him that he and Oakes had held Bowen up to ‘hatred, ridicule, and contempt’. Aware that this was the fo
rmula used to assert a claim of defamation, Solomon asked what was wrong. Bowen pointed out the claim. ‘That is false,’ he said. ‘You have my permission to ask Sir John Bunting for details of when we met.’ Then, Bowen added, ‘You should have known better than to believe anything that silly little bugger told you.’19 Later that year, McMahon told another journalist that the president of the Liberal Party had not agreed with his desire to have a unified, and co-ordinated advertising campaign for the election. Southey did not disagree that such a campaign would have been better, but he had no compunctions about writing to correct McMahon: Southey had attempted to have a unified campaign.20
Whatever his colleagues thought of the loss, whatever they thought of McMahon’s responsibility, was to no effect. Most of them simply thought that his time was past. ‘He didn’t make much impact and wasn’t liked,’ Anthony recalled. ‘I didn’t blame him publicly [for the election loss] but I felt that way.’21 And now, though he sat at the top table alongside Snedden, Anthony, and Lynch during joint party meetings, McMahon was not a senior figure. Like Gorton, McMahon was on Snedden’s frontbench, but unlike Gorton he had no specific portfolio. He had asked for one and one alone; when Snedden refused that choice, McMahon preferred to take nothing. ‘I’m not prepared to push it,’ McMahon would say later. ‘I’m not prepared to try to stake a claim. If I’m not asked, then I’m not interested.’22 In the face of McMahon’s unhappiness, Snedden had to be diplomatic: ‘Mr McMahon feels that he would like to be able to be a fatherly figure.’23
This was hardly ever going to be the case. McMahon was jaded, unwilling to work for people he blamed and so distrusted. Snedden found him impossible to deal with. ‘McMahon did not do his homework sufficiently,’ he said later, ‘was very impetuous and would state a point of view, be totally committed to it, and then literally within minutes he would change his mind.’24 The past dominated the party. In meetings of the shadow cabinet, the dislike between McMahon, Snedden, Gorton, and Fraser would always be palpable. Gorton would wait for McMahon to say something and then pick him off.25 ‘There was a three-way artillery match going on, on any issue that cropped up,’ said Bowen later. ‘It was a waste of time. If McMahon put something forward, first Gorton would snipe at him and then Fraser would snipe at Gorton.’26 They could all be petty. In October 1973, upon hearing a suggestion that he and McMahon be invested as Companions of Honour together, Gorton reacted sharply. He would not share a ceremony with ‘that little lying bastard’.27
McMahon was also unwilling to allow any suggestion that his career was over. Throughout 1973, he denied widely circulating rumours that he had canvassed leaving politics after the election defeat. ‘Whoever conveyed that information to you,’ he said to one journalist, ‘could have no knowledge of me at all, none, because I have never expressed that opinion to anyone and I haven’t talked about it to anyone else in an in-depth fashion other than to my wife.’28 Nor would he agree with suggestions that he was finished. He still had a contribution to make, he insisted. He still had skills and talent to use.
But he did have to admit that it was harder now. McMahon made no bones about how tough he found opposition. On his sixty-fifth birthday in February 1973, McMahon had to cancel lunch and dinner to work. For most of his career, he said, he had public servants to help him. ‘Now I have to do the work myself, and the effort to do it has been both difficult and enormous.’29 It stung that he could not simply reach for the telephone as he once had. ‘If you get in touch with former friends in the department,’ he said, ‘they have to say: “Please don’t get in touch with me. The repercussions will be too serious.” I just keep away from them. You’ve got to do it all yourself.’30
Taking on the Whitlam government was going to be a significant challenge. Its pace of work was immense. Within days of taking office, the so-called ‘duumvirate’ of Whitlam and Barnard had announced the end of conscription, the release of draft-dodgers, and the dropping of all charges against those who had violated the National Service Act. Whitlam and Barnard had decided to give a passport to Wilfred Burchett, to close Australia’s embassy in Taipei and establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, to reverse McMahon government instructions and support imposition of sanctions on the Rhodesian government, most notably in the UN, to re-open the equal-pay case that the McMahon government had opposed, to remove the excise on wine, to end British honours, and to ban racially selected sporting teams from touring Australia. There were additional measures to have the contraceptive pill placed on the National Health Scheme, to offer new grants in the arts and new spending for schools and education, to sign UN covenants on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, and there were plans to institute a royal commission on land rights in the Northern Territory.
The Whitlam government also acted to withdraw the final 128 members of the Australian Army Training Team from Vietnam. This decision led to the popular belief that Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam was wound down and completed by Whitlam alone. Whitlam had been the one to achieve the final cessation of Australia’s involvement, but it had been the McMahon government that had significantly wound down Australia’s military presence and terminated a combat role.
It was an example of the way that the legacies of McMahon’s time in office would be overshadowed, and even built over. Memory of the establishment of the National Urban and Regional Development Authority would be all but wiped away when Whitlam rebadged it the Cities Commission, and created the Department of Urban and Regional Development; the huge increases in education spending would be overshadowed by even larger increases from the Whitlam government, especially in secondary education; the legislation for Commonwealth involvement in childcare would be superseded by the Whitlam government’s expansion of that involvement; the controls against foreign takeovers that McMahon had legislated would allow Whitlam to halt a proposed takeover of manufacturing firm MB John & Hattersley, and to claim credit for protecting Australian companies. Even the poverty enquiry that McMahon had announced in August 1972 would be reshaped and expanded by Whitlam. As Donald Horne was to write, the years before Whitlam might seem to have been an ‘interregnum period, rather shapeless, a little silly, not leading anywhere’. But this was false. These were the years of critical change. In terms of objective results, Horne claimed, McMahon had modernised the political agenda, and given voice to the changes underway in Australian society — even if those efforts had been borne of expediency and the need to win an election.
McMahon’s efforts to defend his government and his time in office, rather than attacking Labor, could leave him exposed to ridicule and derision, to charges of hypocrisy or bitterness. After Whitlam ended conscription, McMahon publicly said that he regretted not having done the same. When Whitlam transformed the working of ministerial offices by introducing political staffers who could provide advice and challenge that of the public service, McMahon lauded the idea and criticised the efforts of those who had worked for him.31 In May, while attacking the Whitlam government’s Conciliation and Arbitration Bill, McMahon recalled a confrontation with Jim Healy, of the Waterside Workers Federation, when McMahon was minister for labour and national service. McMahon said he had threatened sanctions would be imposed should Healy not ensure industrial peace on the waterfront. ‘He did in fact tremble in his shoes,’ McMahon said. But Labor pulled up this grandstanding immediately. Healy had been dead for four years at the time McMahon nominated, Labor noted.32 When the US withheld an invitation for Whitlam to visit the White House, following Whitlam’s condemnation of its so-called Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, McMahon mocked and provoked him in the House. Whitlam was scornful in response. ‘We all remember the “McMann” visit,’ he said.33
At other times, McMahon’s efforts could simply produce incongruous headlines. When, by 1974, Labor’s problems with the Treasury department began to make headlines, McMahon was only too happy to offer support — for Labor. Spurred by his ex
periences dealing with a department that, in his view, was doctrinaire and responsible for the economic downturn that had helped lose him the 1972 election, McMahon went on television to warn Whitlam against accepting Treasury’s advice.34 This was an especially notable volte-face. McMahon could also, at times, offer sympathy. ‘When I looked at Gough Whitlam after he had become Prime Minister, I saw how fatigued he had become,’ McMahon said. ‘I knew exactly how he felt and I was sorry for the poor brute.’35
Labor could defend itself. It ran attacks on McMahon and his government. The effects of the 1972–73 budget and the government’s refusal to revalue the dollar throughout 1972 were, in Whitlam’s opinion, a ‘baleful legacy’. In Whitlam’s view, the decisions taken and not taken led to a gross undervaluation of the dollar, excessive liquidity in the economy, rising unemployment, and inflationary pressures that would come to affect his government profoundly.36 His task would not be made easier by decisions of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to embargo oil sales to much of the West, cut production and then raise the price. The developments sent economies around the world into shock.
Whitlam’s task of managing the government and economy was made no easier by the Liberal and Country parties. They were unfamiliar with opposition, unwilling to unify, and unwilling to respond to the fast-paced, progressive reforms of the Whitlam government with anything but outraged howls. ‘We were very rowdy in the opposition,’ Snedden later said.37
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