Overview

Gough Whitlam's government lasted less than three years. Its impact has lasted for decades. In Gough Whitlam: The Power and the Dismissal, Gordon J. Mackenzie traces the rise of a tall, impatient barrister who set out to drag Australia into the modern world - and the brutal way his experiment was cut short. From the ""It's Time"" victory of 1972 through the whirlwind of reforms in health, education, family law and Indigenous affairs, Whitlam treated the Commonwealth as an engine for rapid change. Medibank, free university tuition, no-fault divorce, the end of conscription and the last traces of White Australia - all were driven from the Lodge at breakneck speed. But ambition came with a cost. Economic shocks, overloaded administration and the Loans Affair eroded public trust just as a ruthless Opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, seized on the Senate's power to block supply. On 11 November 1975, Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam without warning and installed Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister, triggering the most explosive constitutional crisis in Australian history. This book follows Whitlam from his early battles to modernise the Labor Party, through the drama of government and dismissal, into his later life as ambassador, elder statesman and relentless defender of his legacy. It shows how much of his program survived - Medicare, mass higher education, racial equality in law, a more independent foreign policy - and how his crash reshaped every prime ministership that followed. Gough Whitlam: The Power and the Dismissal is Volume 4 in Burden of the Lodge, a series on Australian prime ministers who carried the weight of the office in very different ways. It is a story of scale, risk and consequence: how far one leader tried to push the Commonwealth, how hard the system pushed back, and how much of what he built the country quietly chose to keep.

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