"Relevant and Electable": Gough Whitlam and the Remaking of the Australian Labor Party

On 2 December 1972, Gough Whitlam led the Labor Party into government for the first time in 23 years with the most expansive and electorally articulated agenda for change in modern Australian political history. Over two hundred policy promises had been presented at the 1972 election - from education to Indigenous rights, universal health care to electoral reform, equal pay and no fault divorce" and each of these in turn reflected years of policy development and internal party struggle through the 1960s in what had been a deeply divided Labor party. It marked a dramatic shift from the Menzian post-war political certainties, with all the attendant upheavals that disjuncture entailed. The twenty years from Whitlam's election as the member for Werriwa in late 1952, his election as deputy leader in 1960 and leader in 1967, his near expulsion in 1966 and shock resignation in 1968, are key to understanding both the policy breadth of his government and Whitlam's own political framework. This was a protracted process of reform that began with the Labor party itself, which had been torn apart by the 1955 Split. Its policies remained trapped in the ideological battles of the past, its structures ossified and impervious to change. This paper explores that trajectory through extensive policy renewal and party reform as the essential political antecedent to Labor's electoral revival. Whitlam's view, shared with the growing number of 'modernisers' in the party was encapsulated in his favoured term 'contemporary relevance'. These years are a story of an arduous, fractious and yet ultimately successful, drive effectively to remake the Labor party" to adopt new policies addressing contemporary electoral concerns with a broader membership base, to make it relevant and electable.