Friday 2 December 2022

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.... 


Comments closed.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Roberto, the least you could do is reply to the third and unpublished comment on your last post.

1735099 said...

There is no "third" comment on my feed. You're imagining things. Get help.

Anonymous said...

You are a liar.

1735099 said...

Bless you, my son.....

Anonymous said...

You display the standard lack of honesty to be expected of a Green voting Laborite with a background in the field of educating young minds in Marxism. You come out with bold untruths and when you get a comment that clearly makes your statement a lie you refuse to acknowledge receipt or attempt to deride the commenter. It is your stock in trade and probably why you get exceptionally few comments. You only accept comments from those prepared to go along with your BS.

1735099 said...

In all the years I've been blogging, I've never deleted a comment. Anybody coming across this site would be laughing at your statement that I accept only comments from those who agree with me. They need only to read for a while.
What is consistent from those who disagree is labelling and name calling. Green voting Laborite with a background in the field of educating young minds in Marxism is a textbook sample.
It's the recourse of those lacking a cogent argument.
You wouldn't know how I vote, and I doubt you could tell the difference, when it came to the Marx family, between Groucho, Chico, Zeppo and Karl.
As for educating young minds, my teaching career was almost exclusively working with children with multiple and severe disabilities. I was too busy teaching them independence skills so that they could enjoy the best possible quality of life. Politics was another country.
You have an issue with cliche, and substitute it for logic and truth. Best avoid reading the Rightwing blogosphere, especially that seeping across the Pacific.

Anonymous said...

Here is another version of "Whitlam", 1735099. Let's see if you give it air time.
http://www.kevgillett.net/?page_id=10403

1735099 said...

Apart from the fact that this piece it is completely ahistorical, criticising Whitlam for opening up to a China which no longer exists, it is also notable for leaving out any mention of Whitlam's domestic reforms.
Mind you, Sheridan knows less about domestic politics than he does about international affairs, so that omission is unsurprising.
He also neglects to mention that Whitlam abolished one of the greatest political evils imposed on young Australian men - conscription in peacetime of a small minority of 20 year-olds to fight in a civil war on foreign soil.
Whitlam has never been forgiven by the Coalition of the time making McMahon look an utter fool (which he was) for trenchant criticism of his China visit, which simply aligned Australian policy towards China with the US which was doing exactly the same at the time.
Whitlam had his faults, the worst of which was impatience. He was the last Australian PM (after Gorton) to have seen operational service (in the RAAF).
He will be honourably remembered for much longer than seat warmers such as Abbott, Morrison and Dutton. He was simply out of their league.

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