Word: gough
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Friendship, tradition, history and language still unite Australia with the British Crown and Commonwealth. The big question for Australians these days is how long the old ties will last under the independence-minded Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Arriving in London last week. Lionel Murphy, the Attorney General of Australia ("You will notice we no longer say the Commonwealth of Australia," announced his press aide), demanded the removal of "all the residual legislative, executive and judicial authority over Australia." These ties, he said, were demeaning "relics of colonialism." Murphy was referring specifically to two archaic legal technicalities...
Australia's first Labor Prime Minister in 23 years, Edward Gough Whitlam, 56, last week was off to the most amazing, assertive start of any leader in his country's history. True to a party promise of new initiatives that would rival those of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous 100 days, Whitlam bounded into action on an extraordinary range of issues from conscription to contraceptives-and left his countrymen, who had yawned through much of the election campaign, suddenly agape...
...exactly a battle of titans. A pre-election poll for the Sydney Telegraph showed that neither Incumbent Prime Minister William McMahon nor Opposition Leader Edward Gough Whitlam was regarded as trustworthy by a majority of the Australian electorate. An editorial in the Melbourne Age said that voters faced a choice between "the flawed pragmatism of McMahon versus the flawed vision of Whitlam." But in a nation where failing to vote can bring a $10 fine, it was a choice that had to be made. Last week the Aussies made it. They rejected the Liberal Party-Country Party coalition government...
...Smooth. For hulking Gough (rhymes with cough) Whitlam, 56, the campaign was his second since taking over the Labor Party leadership in 1967. Smoother in garb and in gab than most of his country's politicians, Whitlam sometimes strikes down-to-earth Aussies as being too smooth by half. One of his own party members complains that he is a "distinctly middle-class intellectual with both a prickly personality and a captious turn of mind." He also has a renowned temper. In Parliament he once dumped a glass of water on a member of the Cabinet...
There are other noticeable stirrings in Australia these days. Last week the government responded, if a bit tardily, to the problem of easing tension with mainland China. A few hours after Labor's Gough Whitlam announced that he would go to Peking with a party delegation next month, the Prime Minister hastily announced that he too was trying to start a "dialogue" with Peking. In other steps toward establishing a new posture in a changing world, McMahon gave the Soviet Union permission to establish a trade office and a shipping agency in Sydney, and approved the sale...