Australia’s forward-thinking and most-transformative leader Gough Whitlam is dead at age 98.  He brought in the most sweeping policy and social reforms from the beginning of his tenure as Prime Minister from 1972, until his controversial dismissal just three years later.

“He and his government brought Australia into the late-20th century,” said Mr. Whitlam’s biographer Jenny Hocking.  “They established the sorts of things we now take for granted.”

Indeed, Whitlam’s Labor government broke the doldrums of two decades of rule by a conservative governing class with groundbreaking initiatives such as: Universal health care; making racial vilification illegal; introducing the overhaul of education that made college free for all Australians; lowering the voting age to 18; relaxing divorce laws; abolishing military conscription. 

He also: Completed the drawdown of Australia’s 60,000 troops from the pointless Vietnam War; began the process of returning land rights to the First Nations peoples; ended the death penalty; brought in environmental regulations.

And the list goes way beyond that.  Why would anyone want to give up any of that?

The constitutional crisis and controversial dismissal of Whitlam’s government is still debated to this day.  On 11 November 1975, the Queen’s representative Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam, using powers that had been never been invoked by any previous governor general.  Although Whitlam was unable to come back from that blow, it was Kerr who suffered the most.  He was gone from his position within a couple of years, and his portrait reportedly had to be hidden in Parliament House to prevent vandalism.

Whitlam and his supporters hinted the American CIA might have been involved in influencing Kerr.  And although the US has denied it, the claim has never been proven nor proven false.