Word: whitlam
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Prime Minister Gough Whitlam flew home from London, cutting short a European tour, to oversee the most massive rescue operation in Australia's history. Darwin is the continent's most isolated city: almost 2,000 miles from the nearest metropolis, with no rail link to the rest of Australia and only one paved road through the outback. Navy units were immediately dispatched from Sydney with emergency supplies, but it will take them a week to complete the 2,500-mile voyage. Meanwhile, air force planes, commercial airlines and private jets donated by several Australian companies were airlifting...
...cost of reconstruction has been estimated as high as $780 million. Most of the city may have to be bulldozed over and completely rebuilt. Prime Minister Whitlam has pledged to do whatever is necessary to resurrect Darwin, and proud Australians seemed to agree that the cost would be worth it. In an editorial the Melbourne Age wrote that it is already anticipating the "time when the city named after the great student of nature's primeval forces [will] rise up again and contend with the wind...
Their case has been bolstered by an independent commission appointed by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to study the land rights of Australia's indigenous population. The commission recommended this year that ownership of the land should be retained by the aborigines and that there should be no further exploration or mining without their permission. Confronted with the choice between poverty and the wrath of the green ants, the aborigines give every indication that, for the time being at least, they would rather remain poor...
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...