Who were the last 10 prime ministers of australia
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Gough Whitlam: His Time: The Biography, Volume II by Jenny Hocking
Biography
by Neal Blewett•
November 2012, no. 346
Gough Whitlam: His Time: The Biography, Volume II by Jenny Hocking
Miegunyah Press, $49.99 hb, 596 pp, 9780522857931
Biography
by Neal Blewett•
November 2012, no. 346
Jenny Hocking concluded the first volume of her Whitlam biography (2008) on the eve of her subject’s electoral victory in December 1972. Gough Whitlam had been the most effective and creative opposition leader in Australian history: since 1967 he had dragged a protesting Labor party into the second half of the twentieth century; provided the party with a contemporary social democratic agenda; broadened the appeal of the party beyond its historic working-class base; and seen off one Liberal prime minister, with another to follow. The challenge for Hocking in this second volume is to explain how this promise turned to dust and ashes within three years, with Whitlam’s dismissal by the governor-general, followed by electoral repudiation. Meticulous and thorough research, a broa
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Gough Whitlam
Prime Minister of Australia from 1972 to 1975
"Whitlam" redirects here. For other uses, see Whitlam (disambiguation).
Edward Gough Whitlam[a] (11 July 1916 – 21 October 2014) was the 21st prime minister of Australia, serving from December 1972 to November 1975. To date the longest-serving federal leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), he was notable for being the head of a reformist and socially progressive government that ended with his controversial dismissal by the then-governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, at the climax of the 1975 constitutional crisis. Whitlam remains the only Australian prime minister to have been removed from office by a governor-general.
Whitlam was an air navigator in the Royal Australian Air Force for four years during World War II, and worked as a barrister following the war. He was first elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 1952, becoming a member of parliament (MP) for the division of Werriwa. Whitlam became deputy leader of the Labor Party in 1960, and in 1967, after
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Gough Whitlam
Constitutional crisis leading to Whitlam's dismissal
With a great interest in international affairs, Whitlam travelled more widely than any previous Prime Minister or opposition leader. Among his many overseas tours he visited most nations of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Pacific and North America.
Following a series of controversies involving Labor ministers and revelations of government attempts to obtain foreign loans through unconventional channels, the Liberal–National Country Party opposition refused to allow the government’s budgetary legislation to pass the Senate in 1975 in the hope of forcing the government to an election.
From October to November 1975, with the government’s monetary supply effectively cut off, a grave constitutional crisis resulted.
The crisis climaxed on 11 November 1975, when the Governor-General, John Kerr, withdrew Whitlam’s commission as Prime Minister, commissioned the Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser to form an interim government until a general election could be held, and dissolved the parliament.
Whitl
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