Whitlam

 

Today is the 50th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government. 

That event has enormous significance for the country, paralleled for me by nostalgic personal recollections.

On the day of the election, 2nd December 1972, I worked as a polling clerk at the then Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane, which was an interesting experience. I'll write more about that later on this blog.

At the end of the 1972 academic year, I had just completed twelve months on a Labour and National Service post-discharge Rehabilitation Scholarship, which had set the foundation for the following ten years part time study culminating in two degrees. The day's salary for the polling work with the AEC was timely. That scholarship, although requiring me to do factory work during the university vacation to pay the rent, was one of the few positive outcomes from my service in Vietnam.

In 1972 I was still technically a member of the army reserve, but nothing short of nuclear attack would have put me back in uniform. I'd had the army up to here. One of Whitlam's first actions in government was to abolish conscription. The existence of the scheme which targeted 12% of twenty year olds had been a moral blight on the nation since its introduction in 1965.

At the time I had commenced, mostly by accident, a career in special education, and there was a happy coincidence between this and the election of a government which reformed support for people with disabilities through its focus on human rights and social justice.

Subsequently, initiatives taken by the Labor government in the relatively short time it held power, transformed the quality of lives of children with disabilities, initially by securing support for mainstreaming, and by the time it lost office, setting up institutional structures such as AHRC which gave teeth to legislation supporting their right to full access.

In Queensland (and most other states) at the time of Whitlam's election, children with severe disabilities went to school in segregated institutions, mostly in capital cities, and run by charitable organisations, such as the (then) Spastic Welfare league, Crippled Children's' Association and the (then) Subnormal Children's' Association. The titles of these organisations reflect very accurately the social attitude to disability at the time. 

In 1971, immediately on return from Vietnam, I worked as a teacher at the State School for Spastic Children, New Farm. On the same campus was a separate training centre for students with cerebral palsy who were considered ineducable. Above a certain IQ, they went to school. Below it, they attended the training centre. This was anathema to the ALP reforms.

Some of my class at New farm 1971

The fact that the IQ tests used at the time weren't standardised on a population of children with cerebral palsy was not considered relevant. During the time I was at the school, the training centre was closed, and the school was staffed with teachers from the state system. Similar processes were on the way in regional centres up and down the coast in Queensland, and the institutionalised schools for the blind and deaf in Brisbane were losing enrolments as special education units for students with hearing and vision impairments were being established in local schools.

As part of the move of students with disabilities from special to regular school settings, I worked as an itinerant visiting teacher in the mid-seventies, preparing both schools and students for mainstreaming. This was enjoyable and fulfilling work, and post retirement as a principal in 2005, I returned for a time to this work. It remained enjoyable, but these days the pioneering aspect has gone. 

Mainstreaming was driven by Whitlam's reform agenda. 

Children with these very common disabilities were now able to stay with their families and attend school with their non-disabled peers. 

All of this was driven initially by the human rights reforms championed by the Labor reforms, and even though the Whitlam government was relatively short lived, these structural changes became firmly embedded in public education provision in Queensland and elsewhere. These reforms profoundly improved the quality of the lives of these children and their families.

Later, in the early eighties when the money driven by Whitlam's reforms began to cascade from the commonwealth to the states, I was again in the right place at the right time, and spent six months offline developing a design brief for a new special school in Townsville. When opened in 1987, this school moved about seventy children with physical impairments from a 1940s model boarding institution to a school to which they travelled every day. 

I founded this school, built with $2.8 million of Whitlam money, which was not small bikkies at the time. When the National Party state minister for education (Lin Powell) arrived for the official opening, I was sorely tempted to remind him that the money to build it was a result of Labor reforms, but thought better of it.

Lin (Lionel)  Powell - Qld Minister for Education 1987

So when I look back on the anniversary of the 1972 Whitlam victory, I feel deeply privileged to have been able to participate personally in the transformational reforms created for Australians with disabilities.

I wouldn't have missed it for quids.... 

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Media Bias

The Victorian state election has been and gone, and the ALP has been returned with Daniel Andrews as Premier.

As a Queenslander, this event is of peripheral interest to me, but there is one aspect of the campaign and the result that is more than remarkable.

Elements of the Victorian media ran a sustained and relentless campaign against his re-election. It was characterised by the introduction into the discussion of events that had absolutely nothing to do with Andrew's policies, but focused on two fairly recent events involving himself and his family.

The first was a motor accident that involved a collision between Andrew's Ford Territory and a cyclist on 7th January 2013. The cyclist was badly injured, but did recover, losing his spleen. The police took no action after an investigation and statements describing the incident as - 

Cyclist was travelling along the unpaved surface road and crossed Ridley Street into the vehicle as it turned right. Cyclist collided with the front drivers side of the vehicle, causing the cyclist to be ejected onto the windscreen, causing it to smash. 

Photographs of the vehicle published by the Sun Herald show damage to the area in front of, but to the side of the vehicle's mudguard, and the smashed windscreen. This is consistent with statements given to the police by Mrs Andrews.

The accident happened in 2013, nine years ago, and after the initial reports had largely been forgotten. It is then resurrected two weeks before the election together with lurid claims of a police cover-up.

The Sun-Herald produced front page coverage for a number of days, and the outrage was picked up by Melbourne shock jocks who dined out on it right up until the eve of the election.

Then there was the story of an accident on 9th March 2021 when Andrews fell on wet stairs whilst on holiday on the Mornington Peninsula. He was placed in intensive care after this incident which caused several broken ribs and a broken vertebra. Andrews took four months to recover from this incident, which generated all manner of conspiracy theories on social media, and generated front page coverage (again by the Sun Herald) on Sunday, November 6th, a few weeks before the election. 

Again, this accident happened over a year ago.

Herald Sun November 6th 2022

This accident had absolutely nothing to do with the election campaign, but was used in a clumsy attempt to smear Andrews.

Now these media organisations have to make money, but the issue of ethics of how this is done seem somehow to have vanished into the ether. There appears to be no real accountability, and the Press Council (as I learned many years ago) is a toothless tiger.

And of course, media can publish opinion, but when they actively campaign (rather than report) in the lead up to an election, they should at least be honest enough to inform their readers.

In the end, none of this seems to have influenced Victorian voters. A Royal Commission into media ownership and bias is beginning to look like a pretty good idea.