THE passing on Tuesday of Gough – in my circle of friends and family no surname was needed, he was Gough – brought great personal sadness.
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Perhaps the ever-closer proximity of my own mortality had something to do with that, but Gough was a person I respected – more for his vision than what he actually achieved.
I met Hawke, Keating and Howard while they were in office, but never Gough, yet he had more impact and influence on my life than those other three prime ministers put together.
I voted for him three times, not because of any particular ideology, but because of particular circumstances at the time and a perception of a fair go.
The first time I voted, I voted for Gough, in 1972 when he and Labor swept to power and I did it for my mates.
My birthday hadn’t come up the year before in the conscription ballot, but one of my mates had been conscripted and was off in Vietnam, and several mates’ numbers came up in a subsequent ballot and they were waiting to go into the army.
They didn’t want to go. Their resistance, and mine, to conscription was about fairness and money.
My mates called up were part-way through apprenticeships.
After two years in the army they would have returned to civilian life and their apprenticeships – facing two more years of pittance wages, doing all the dirty jobs and the morning smoko and lunch runs, because they would still be bottom of the heap - while those who started apprenticeships with them, but had different birthdays, would have moved on, completed theirs and be earning four times the money as qualified tradesmen.
In our view it simply wasn’t fair and Gough promised to end it – and did!
The 1974 election was different.
It seemed a choice between travelling further down Gough’s often bumpy, but exciting, road towards his vision of a multicultural, more equal Australia with a free health system and free tertiary education, or not very much vision at all and the USA directing our foreign policy for us.
Not much of a choice really for young idealists!
The free university hook was a big one – it enabled two of my mates to ditch their apprenticeships and go back to study, changing the course of their lives forever, and it wouldn’t have happened had they to pay fees – either up front or later, as in HECS.
The 1975 election was back to being about a fair go.
The Queen’s man, who Gough had nominated in the first place, had suddenly stepped into Australian politics and, representing an unelected head of state, had sacked the PM that we, the Australian voters, had chosen.
That just wasn’t on, it wasn’t fair – but it became fact.
The governments he led were often a shambles, racked with scandal and dodgy deals, but a big part of that was the ALP machine failing to recognise what a gift it had in Gough.
Until last week he still stood tall as a man of vision.
Keating summed it up best when he said there was Australia pre-Gough and post-Gough, and they were very different!
