I too have ‘long and first-hand memories of the Whitlam government’, Tim Harrington (letters to Byron Shire Echo, 18 Aug).
I remember that it funded badly needed new hospitals across Australia, introduced community health centres, support for the homeless, women’s refuges, funded the building of over 13,000 homes for low income families, doubled support for home carers, introduced support for single mothers, increased pensions and other welfare benefits to liveable levels, introduced universal health care (which the Fraser government, like the current one tried to dismantle), increased funding to the neglected schools sector and abolished university fees, initiated reconciliation and self-determination for Aboriginal people, passed the Racial Discrimination Act, lowered the voting age, ended conscription, abolished capital punishment, enacted ‘one vote one value’ electoral reforms, established the Australian Legal Aid Office, introduced our own national anthem and honours system, extended the minimum adult wage to include female workers, instituted no-fault divorce and established the Family Court, cleaned up corporate behaviour with the Trade Practices Act, brought oversight to ownership with the Foreign Investment Review Committee, provided work to 32,000 otherwise unemployed Australians, enacted environmental protection legislation, protected the Great Barrier Reef (Bjelke Petersen wanted to drill for oil), ratified the World Heritage Convention (which later enabled the protection of the Franklin River), signed up to RAMSAR, CITES and JAMBA conventions to protect endangered species, created the Australia Council for the Arts and the Film Commission, brought sanitation to Australian cities through the National Sewerage Program, and prevented the destruction of Glebe and Woolloomooloo, among other things.
All this was done while the Western world was in recession due to the oil crisis, and having to fight and election every 18 months.
They may not have got everything right, but they transformed a backwater into a progressive member of the international community and laid the foundations for much of which Australia can be proud today.
Alan Watterson, Brunswick Heads
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
