Australia: 50 Years Ago

[crunchysteve]

On November 11, 1975, I was in grade 8, my second year at high school and, at the end of this date's school day, I brought home 2 mates to hang out, listen to music on the radio, talk shit. You remember being a teen, right? Me, Stu and Pete were thick as thieves and hung out a lot.

We arrived at my place to find mum had 3 radios going, trying to listen to the 3 local radio stations' news bulletins and updates all at once - the kitchen radio, mine and my sister's. Worse, she'd dragged the old black and white telly out of my room, showing the ABC and had the lounge room telly running, showing TNT9, both local TV stations adding to the cacophony in the open plan kitchen/sunroom.

"Jeez, mum! What's going on?!"

Apoplectic with rage, all mum could manage was, "The bastards! It's a coup! The effing bastards!" Stu and Pete made their excuses, there'd be no music and teen BS this day, and bid a hasty retreat. We laughed about mum's fury for years after, but this day was not the day for the hang we'd hoped for. And I was getting caught up in the fury a bit, too.

This was actually a coup. On Remembrance Day, a day Australia used to celebrate as the end of "The Great War" (WWI) and the successful defence of democracy against the tyrany of the old, Imperial ways. I was young, then, just turned 14 only 2 months and 2 days before this day, but as the story unfolded, and dad came home, "You've seen what they've done, then?" we settled into a night of quiet horror, watching news footage of the vigil outside Parliament and Whitlam's historical speech, "...Well, may you say,'God save the Queen,' but nothing will save the Governor General!" This may have been Australia's first ever "rolling news coverage" event. Normal programming was disrupted for hours. My sister, 8 at the time, played with her dolls, had dinner with us and went to bed after dinner, disgusted that the rest of us seemed uninterested in the usual TV viewing. Mum's only break from bearing witness, to supervise Cathryn's going to bed. I think I took myself to bed around 9pm. That was the end of hope for Australia's left and poor. That was the end of my innocence.

"The dismissal," as it's now called, has never been officially recognised for the coup it actually was. We still ostensibly have a democracy, as good and as bad as any in the "global north," much like Canada's, maybe a little better than Britain's, nowhere near as "effed" as the USA's, presently. But Labor are gutless, the Liberals worship the US Republicans like fanbois'n'girls, the Greens are bourgeois as fuck ("Liberal Lite") and One Nation, oh FFS, more crackpot and racist than the Trump Cabinet. And nobody speaks of the coup, the day Australian democracy took a beating it has genuinely never recovered from.

We celebrate the end of a war 107 years ago this year, but we never question the constitution damage that blocking the entire Supply Bill as a means to bring down an elected government on the 11th day of the 11th month. The Senate was given the ability to block parts of supply bills (budgetary bills) in order to prevent a government bankrupting the country, or to check for potential corruption. It was never intended to bring down governments. The use of it to do this in 1975 was, I believe, utterly unconstitutional, but like Britain's system, if a thing happens in Parliament and there is no Crown or Parliamentary ruling against it, it becomes part of the weight of constitutional law. Now, in Australia, the ticking time bomb of the "constitutional legitimacy" of blocking the budget to overturn a democratically elected government sits there, waiting for the right "constitutional criminal" to come along and burn Australia's Reichstag for us.

Am I shrill? Perhaps. But it's a legitimate concern. It's a gaping loophole that weakens democracy in this great (as in enormous) southern land. And, Australia, we need to remember this. We should have been remembering this in the mainstream for the last 50 years. Not just old "trots" like me, all of us. There is no living memory left of The Somme or Gallipoli or The Western Front, and there's certainly been no commitment in the intervening time, to end all wars, quite the opposite, in fact.

I propose, beseech even, that we remember the coup, for what it was, a bona fide attack on democracy by an opposition willing to use any means necessary to wrestle power from the elected government.

So, on November 11, please, maintain the rage. Labor, Green, Liberal, Independent or "Cooker," this could be used again, by any evilly intended Party, against my affiliation, against yours. Lest we forget that, on this day in 1975, Australian democracy was damaged and still needs urgent repair.