MOSCOW, October 21 (RIA Novosti) - Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam has died at the age of 98, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
CBC News quoted Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as saying that Whitlam was “a giant of his time,” a figure who “united the Australian Labour Party, won two elections and seemed, in so many ways, larger than life.”
Abbott ordered all flags to fly at half-mast on Tuesday, and on the day of Whitlam’s memorial service.
Following his party’s election in 1972 with the famous “It’s Time” campaign, Whitlam’s government introduced a flurry of progressive reforms to the country at a breakneck pace. Whitlam pulled Australia’s forces out of Vietnam, put an end to national conscription, reduced the voting age to 18, pushed for women’s rights, introduced free university education, established rural land development programs, established the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, abolished the discriminatory ‘White Australia’ immigration policy, created the Australia Arts Council, established Medicare, and introduced environmental protection legislation. Most of this legislation, considered radical at the time, has now become firmly entrenched in Australian society, even among conservatives who opposed it at the time.
In foreign affairs, Whitlam was a proponent of détente, recognizing China in 1972 and becoming the first Australian Prime Minister to visit the Soviet Union, meeting with the Chairman of the Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin in 1975.
Prime Minister Abbott noted that China’s present status as Australia’s largest trade partner is part of Whitlam’s “enduring legacy,” Chinese news agency Xinhua noted.
Whitlam was ousted by Governor-General Sir John Kerr in October 1975 in a political firestorm etched into Australian consciousness as ‘The Dismissal’. Kerr dismissed Whitlam on a technicality over the opposition-controlled Senate’s refusal to pass budget appropriations bills.
Labour Party leader Bill Shorten spoke of Whitlam as a man who “reimagined Australia as a modern nation where equality of opportunity belonged to all,” Xinhua quoted him as saying.
Once stopping to ponder on his own mortality at a speech before Australian parliament, Whitlam said that upon meeting his maker, “I shall treat him as an equal,” the Guardian recalled.
Whitlam is survived by his four children. Margaret, his wife of seventy years, passed away in 2012.
