Some journalists took to Twitter today to tell us Mungo MacCallum was dead, but he wasn’t and isn’t.
Still, any excuse to remember one of my favourite Mungo pieces. It appeared in Nation Review on December 27, 1974.
It was a month after Malcolm Fraser had failed to dislodge Bill Snedden from the Liberal leadership. It’s easy to see leadership changes as inevitable in retrospect, but foretelling the future is fraught at the best of times. [Read more…]
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Joint Sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate, held during the term of the Whitlam Labor government.
The Joint Sitting, the first and only ever held, took place over two days, August 6 and 7, 1974.
Gough Whitlam described the sitting as “a last resort to enable the democratic will of the Australian people to prevail over blind obstruction”.
The proceedings took place in what is now Old Parliament House. They were chaired by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Jim Cope. The Liberal Opposition Leader (and future Speaker) was Bill Snedden. The Governor-General was the just-appointed Sir John Kerr.
The only member of either house who attended the Joint Sitting and is still serving is Philip Ruddock. Now the member for Berowra, in 1974 he was the 31-year-old Liberal member for Parramatta and still in his first year as a member of the House.
Six bills were submitted to the Joint Sitting, all of which had been first passed by the House of Representatives in 1973, following the election of the Whitlam government. [Read more…]
Australia’s parliamentary elections are increasingly focused around perceptions and packaging of the leaders of the various parties.
The election of Senator Natasha Stott Despoja as the leader of the Australian Democrats in 2001 was an indication of the importance political parties place on leadership as a determinant of the voting patterns of electors.
Prime Minister John Howard’s attacks on Kim Beazley’s supposed lack of “ticker” in the 1998 election was another indication that Opposition leadership can be a factor in elections. [Read more…]
John Howard became leader of the Liberal Party for the first time at a bizarre meeting of the parliamentary party called to remove him as deputy leader.
The party meeting was called by leader Andrew Peacock in an attempt to remove Howard from the deputy leadership. Peacock had demanded an assurance from Howard that he would not challenge for the leadership but Howard refused to give one.
A contest between Howard and John Moore saw Howard re-elected deputy leader by 38 votes to 31. Peacock then resigned and Howard was elected leader, defeating Jim Carlton by 57 votes to 6. Neil Brown became deputy leader. [Read more…]
Eleven days after the 1974 Federal Election, the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Snedden, finally acknowledged that he had not won the election, but he claimed he hadn’t lost either.
Snedden said: “We were not defeated. We did not win enough seats to form a government.”
In years to come, Snedden would claim he said, “We didn’t win but we didn’t lose all”, although there is no evidence from the recording that he actually said that. [Read more…]
The audio clip below contains 90 minutes from the ABC television coverage of the 1974 Federal Election count.
It includes the speeches by Opposition Leader Bill Snedden and Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
The broadcast was hosted by Ken Begg. [Read more…]
