Vale Gough Whitlam

[Redlight]

Gough bowled in, implemented a string of near revolutionary changes, all designed to make the life of average people significantly, irrevocably better. His goals were ambitious and aimed at improving the lot of all Australians, not the handful of influential lobbyists that seem to dominate these days.

He paid the price with a struggling economy and an establishment that panicked at their loss of control. However the economy recovered and the reforms remained, a legacy that is unsurpassed.

The Whitlam government were in the process of trying to buy back our mineral resources when it all went pear shaped. Imagine if they'd pulled that off in the seventies? This country would be rolling in cash like the Saudi's by now.

After Gough, instead of learning the lesson and seeing opportunity for further reforms, we've seen a string of politicians that are driven purely by the polls and their own-self interest. Maintaining power has become more important than actually doing anything.

The only great reform for normal working Australians I can think of since the mid-seventies is the introduction of compulsory super. Other than that the last 40 years has been about the stealthy dismantling of Gough's revolution, by both sides of politics.

We're going backwards

Where, for one glorious moment, we had visionaries and men of imagination and daring, now we have mere managers and their PR handlers.

They wonder why respect for politicians is at an all-time-low. It's because the art of politics is also at an all-time-low.

We need another revolution.

[35forever]

It sure is. Revolutionary reform is a sure recipe for electoral failure, modern politicians are simply unable to ignore the god of modern politics, the polls. Every time we look like getting another revolutionary, I.E.: Obama or Peter Garret, he turns out to be another dud unable to see past the lobbyists and the polls. We really do need another revolution before all of Gough's gains are taken back by the procession of mediocrity which followed him.

[jg22]

A giant of a man. Literally, figuratively and physically. Like Prometheus he taught us we were capable of better things. That we could steal fire. And to the intellectual pygmies Sheridan, Bolt and Jones et al, who have taken the opportunity to attempt to rewrite history yet again and spit on the great man's grave I say remember this. In 10 years we will still remember Gough as our most visionary leader. Those three will be nothing more but fading skid marks on the y-fronts of society.