Frank Kelly writes of Peter Dutton’s racism (Echo 8 February) stating that Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating were ‘famously’ anti-racist. Close examination of Whitlam’s race record, including [relations with] the peoples of Timor-Leste, and specifically, to those who identified as South Vietnamese in 1975, paints a different picture.
Whitlam government cabinet member and Minister for Labor and Immigration at the time of the fall of Saigon, Clyde Cameron, provides details in his book China, Communism and Coca-Cola (1980) of a Cabinet meeting confrontation in 1975 between Whitlam and his then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Don Willesee. In that, Willesee was requesting urgent action and the utilisation of the RAAF to evacuate civilian South Vietnamese refugees from war-torn Saigon.
Whitlam denied the request, responding that he ‘was not having hundreds of f…… Vietnamese Balts coming to this country with their political and religious hatreds against us’.
After publication of Cameron’s book in 1980, Whitlam never denied making this comment. Moreover, the late, and much admired (on these pages) Mungo MacCallum wrote in the Quarterly Essay (Issue 6, 2002) that Whitlam’s 1975 cabinet meeting statement was just ‘a few lines of rhetoric’.
When you consider Whitlam’s attitude towards the South Vietnamese population you get a better understanding as to the reasoning of the then Australian government’s shameful and regrettable inaction in responding to and facilitating the evacuation of the civilian populace. Save for a much publicised and photographed evacuation of 200 orphans and a couple of handfuls of adults.
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. 
