From here and most bolding, mine:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/...098967126?nk=e3388031682075d0b58b145845c1fffa
It’s time to face the truth about Gough Whitlam
GOUGH Whitlam was lucky his government was sacked in 1975. To our cultural elite, that turned him from a failure to a martyr.
That allowed the ruin he caused to gradually become obscured by the giant shadow of his myth.
More ominously, it also allowed Labor to gradually forget what it painfully learnt from Whitlam’s disasters.
So Labor today weeps for Whitlam and much of the media with it. But how must this torrent of tears strike most Australians?
Fact is, the elite’s verdict of Whitlam – the hero reformer, Great Leader and victim of a conservative conspiracy – has never been shared by most voters.
Aloof and arrogant, Whitlam was no man of the people and no prime minister was shunned by them so comprehensively – twice.
Whitlam ruled chaotically for only two years and 11 months until he was sacked by governor-general Sir John Kerr to end a damaging stalemate in the Senate, where the opposition had cut off the scandal-racked government’s money.
The Left raged at the dismissal. But at the election the public wholeheartedly backed Kerr’s verdict, destroying Labor in a 44 per cent to 56 wipeout.
The public two years later made clear to Whitlam he really wasn’t wanted, rejecting Labor again by another massive margin – 45 to 55.
There’s no sign that the public’s damning verdict ever changed. The reason is simple. Whitlam may have had big dreams, but voters prefer to live their own.
What they value most are not the kind of grand gestures which had mourners this week ringing talkback to say Whitlam made them “proud to be Australian” – recognising communist China, demanding joint control of US spy bases here, signing a flurry of international conventions, and replacing God Save the Queen with Advance Australia Fair.
What counts more is that a prime minister helps Australians to realise their own dreams – of a good job, a house, savings in the bank and proper schooling for children, with work at the end of it.
But
Whitlam gave them only as much – or as little – as a Big Government man can, quadrupling spending on health and education and letting wages explode by 28 per cent in a single year.
The disaster was inevitable. With the Budget blown and the international oil shock hitting a weakened economy, the
Whitlam government saw unemployment nearly triple, the tax take double, the deficit blow out and inflation soar to nearly 20 per cent.
Many Australians lost their jobs, their businesses, their savings, their dreams and hated Whitlam for what he’d done to them. A new generation of pragmatic Labor leaders – notably Bob Hawke – learnt from this debacle.
For these new leaders, the books had to balance and the workplaces had to tick over. It wasn’t romantic work, yet this made Hawke the great prime minister Whitlam never was.
But how far Labor has fallen. A new Whitlam emerged four decades later with Kevin Rudd, a leader with the same grandiose schemes, the same reckless spending, the same debt blowouts, the same incompetence, the same rising dole queues.
Then Julia Gillard simply made things worse.
If only that were all. But Labor has forgotten other lessons it once learnt from Whitlam’s fall – and many voters have forgotten, too.
Like many on the Left, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten this week praised Whitlam particularly for bringing in universal health care and giving people a bigger “shot at university”.
What Shorten didn’t spell out was that Whitlam had recklessly made both doctors’ visits and universities free.
These “free” goodies, actually paid for by taxpayers, helped kick off our welfare culture, and later governments of both sides, alarmed by their cost, have tried to wind back Whitlam’s signature schemes.
The Hawke government reintroduced university fees and for a while brought in a Medicare co-payment, until public fury forced it to back down. Even today, the Abbott Government is trying to free us from Whitlam’s welfarism. Battling another Labor debt, it is trying to make students pay more for degrees and plans its own Medicare co-payment.
Yes, Whitlam also made ambitious changes widely accepted as good, bringing in need-based funding for schools, transferring Crown lands to traditional owners, allowing no-fault divorce, legislating for equal pay for women, ending gerrymanders, decriminalising homosexuality and getting sewerage systems to many suburbs.
But other “reforms” came at a cost we haven’t yet counted. Whitlam outlawed racial discrimination, but those laws inevitably expanded to shut down debates on racial “identity” and preferments, and fed a grievance industry that has empowered a million activists, lawyers and other bullies.
He adopted multiculturalism, only to encourage a dangerous new tribalising of Australia.
Whitlam had grand dreams but too often the price was the smashing of the dreams of the people he was elected to serve.
No, more modest leaders suit Australia best, and hang around longest.
They are the leaders who know
Australians wish to live their own dreams and not those of their prime minister.
To those Australians, Whitlam to them was the big-spending menace on the hill and not at all their martyred Saviour."
regarDS