A Second Chance?

As the country entered the final week of its second election campaign in only 17 months, almost everybody--and everything--went to the hustings. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's Labor government triumphantly produced a glowing testimonial from the country's only Nobel-prizewinning author, Patrick White. The Wildlife Protection Council eagerly proclaimed that a Labor victory was the last hope for the kangaroo.

Opposition Leader Billy Snedden's Liberal-Country party coalition got an equally rousing endorsement from the country's top football coach, Ron Barassi, and tried to ignore the polls that showed Labor gradually inching ahead.

As the first votes were counted, however, it looked as if Whitlam and Labor had been narrowly returned to power by winning a majority in the 127-seat House of Representatives.

No campaign since the Depression had aroused such interest or such strong emotions. "I realized in 1972 that we needed a change to free ourselves from mentally constipated attitudes," Novelist White (The Eye of the Storm) told an overflow crowd in Sydney's stunning new Opera House. "Mr. Whitlam has helped Australians to heave themselves out of that terrible morass which caused so many talented Australians to leave the country for the wider world outside, where their ideas and ideals won recognition." Said the Prime Minister: "We have given Australia a new pride and standing in the world ... We have buried old animosities. We are held in new respect by old friends and allies. Never in her history has Australia been more secure."

Snedden, 47, a somewhat drab and uninspiring speaker, could scarcely hope to match Whitlam's charisma. In the campaign, he tried to capitalize on something more important to voters: inflation, which under Labor has jumped from an annual rate of 4% to 14%.

Though many economists found Snedden's patchwork anti-inflation package of wage-price controls an unconvincing program, his emphasis on money matters put Whitlam on the defensive. Only midway through the campaign did Labor regain the initiative by pointing to its own inflation suppressants: a combination of tariff cuts and an upward revaluation of the Australian dollar. "It's possible to freeze meat and vegetables but not their prices," snorted the Prime Minister, knocking down the ON SERVICE idea of a wage-price freeze.

Basically, the campaign was about an issue even more important than inflation: what direction the country should take for the next decade. Since becoming Prime Minister, Whitlam, 57, has radically changed the course of Australia's foreign policy, making it clear to both the U.S. and Britain, the traditional big brothers, that Canberra will no longer follow the lead of Washington and London. Many of his proposed domestic reforms were stymied, however, by the opposition of the Senate, which rarely initiates legislation but does have veto power. During the first four months of this year alone, the Senate, in which the Liberal and Country parties have a majority, blocked no fewer than 42 out of 43 Whitlam proposals. At week's end the final count of the Senate vote had barely begun. Yet even if the conservatives manage to hold their edge in the Senate, they will be unlikely to act quite so cavalierly in rejecting Whitlam's legislation.

Whitlam, whose first government-imposed restrictions on foreign capital discourage overseas investors, plans to exert even greater control over foreign investments. If he retains a workable majority, he will press for a universal health-insurance plan and an electoral reform that would reduce the number of seats in rural areas and increase those in urban areas--a change favoring Labor. He also wants to simplify divorce laws, give the country its first bill of rights, and put business under tighter reins with new laws to police the stock market. His foreign policy will remain the same--independent and Asia-minded--and he will polish his reputation as Australia's roving ambassador. Already he plans to travel next month to the Soviet Union, Britain, East and West Germany, Sweden, Italy and Yugoslavia.

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