The Whitlam Dismissal: America's coup for the control of Australia

Written by: Alice M. on 11 November 2025

 

11th November marks the 50th anniversary of the bloodless semi-coup of the popularly elected Whitlam government in 1975.  As the tide for an anti-imperialist independent Australia is building up, what lessons can we learn from the Whitlam dismissal 50 years on?

This was a bloodless coup unlike the fascist coups in Indonesia (1965) and Chile (1973) where thousands were killed by the military.  The three coups all had one thing in common – they were engineered by the US to crush people’s progressive and revolutionary mass movements that were threatening the US and British imperialists control of their countries. The US/UK engineered bloodless semi-coup that overthrew the progressive Whitlam government used British colonial vestiges to create a constitutional crisis, was executed by the Queens representative, John Kerr, Australia’s governor general and head of state at that time. 

The Whitlam government was the most socially and politically progressive Labor capitalist government Australia ever had before, or since.

With a huge majority it was swept into government in 1972 on a wave of six preceding years of massive grass roots people’s movements and struggles pushing for progressive change: against the Vietnam War, conscription and US imperialism, against the anti-worker and anti-union penal powers and the Clarrie O’Shea-led militant working class struggle, against South African Apartheid, against Pine Gap and US bases, against the dominance of US and UK culture,  for land rights, women’s liberation, free public health and education, for Australia’s independence and many socially progressive reforms demanded by the people.  (See our booklet  50years whitlam booklet nov 2025.indd )

The Whitlam government brought in many socially progressive reforms that benefitted the people, and it also started to take small tentative steps towards Australia’s political, economic and cultural independence from the US and UK. Whitlam objected to the US controlled Pine Gap intelligence spy base and ASIO’s involvement with the CIA in covert operations in other countries, including orchestrating the 1973 bloody military coup in Chile.  He told the US he may close down Pine Gap, and his Attorney-General raided ASIO’s offices.  

Rex Connor, Minister for Minerals and Resources in the Whitlam government, tried to take Australia’s natural resources and agricultural land out of the hands of foreign corporations (mainly US and British eg Vestey Holdings) by “buying back the farm”, and placing them in public ownership.

But the Whitlam government was not threatening capitalism. It was a progressive national bourgeois government and didn’t pretend to be anything else. 

Reforms that the government started to introduce were within the confines of capitalism, but they did open up visions, and potentially could have led, to far more reaching demands by the people. Demands for reforms that the US monopoly capitalist class and British colonialism, the core of monopoly capitalist ruling class in Australia, could not tolerate or accept. 

The powerful US and UK interests started to worry that public enthusiasm for greater national independence and more reforms would threaten their expropriation of surplus value from Australia’s working class. 

In November 1975, after 3 years in government, the popular Whitlam government was dramatically overthrown in a bloodless constitutional coup secretly engineered by the US/CIA and UK.

Mass anger against the Dismissal

As word spread of the Dismissal, outrage broke out across the country. Tens of thousands of angry working people immediately walked off their jobs, schools, universities and homes across the country.  The numbers swelled ten times the following days. They gathered in public places, outside state and federal parliamentary offices demanding reinstatement of the Whitlam government and called for the sacking of the Governor-General.  Workers and students were threatening wild cat strikes until their elected, popular government was reinstated.

In stepped Bob Hawke, the then ACTU President, directing workers and students to go back to work, universities, schools and homes, to cool off and wait for the next election.  Hawke saved the day for imperialism and reactionary forces from the people’s wrath.  The ruling class didn’t need guns to suppress the working class.  They used Hawke and social democracy to do it. Hawke seized the struggle out of workers’ hands, diverting it into parliament and delivered the working class to the ruling class.  Hosing down working class struggles and delivering working people to capital was Hawke’s trade mark throughout his entire period as ACTU President and Prime Minister. (See “Bob Hawke: Labour Lieutenant of Capital” pp 10-13 here)

For a brief moment in history, the Whitlam Dismissal exposed and shone a spotlight on US imperialism at the centre of political and economic power in this country, backed by British colonialism. It also showed the role of social democracy in reining in and strangling people’s mass movements and struggles.

Since the 1975 US/UK coup, the economic, political and military stranglehold of US imperialism over this country has tightened and expanded.  Capitalism in Australia is imperialism, now mainly US imperialism. The most powerful and decisive sections of Australia’s ruling class are US multinational corporations and local comprador bourgeoisie dependent on US imperialism for their survival and expansion.  The most powerful sections have always been those tied to imperialist finance capital.

From Hawke to Albanese - the US grip tightens

Since the constitutional coup of the Whitlam government, US imperialist control of this country has been strengthened by every Labor government from Hawke to Albanese.  We see it economically, politically and militarily.  We see it in giving away our natural resources, rare and critical minerals, destruction of local industries, environmental destruction, our culture and foreign policies. We see it in the US-led AUKUS military pact which is stealing more than $400 billion from the needs of Australia’s working people only to support the US and UK languishing ship building industries and imperialist war.

The global “neo-liberal” policies implemented by Hawke and Keating in Australia in mid 1980s – early 1990s were driven by capital’s compulsion to constantly expand.  Hawke and Keating governments opened the door to foreign capital, private banks and wholesale privatisation of state instrumentalities, hospitals, child care, aged care, social and community services, public transport, energy and power.

 Many hard-won workers’ rights have been dismantled and new draconian anti-union laws brought in by Labor governments.  (See “Labor Since Whitlam” pp 16-20 here).  Hawke’s famous 1983 Accord froze workers’ wages whilst the bosses pocketed bigger profits. The Hawke government weakened workers’ struggles that led the way for the Dollar Sweets and Mudginberri attacks on workers. The Hawke government deregistered the militant Builders’ Labourers’ Federation and used Air Force as scabs in the 1989 Ansett Pilot’s strike.  

In 2007 the Rudd Labor government rode on the backs of another nationwide working class struggle against the Liberals’ anti-union and anti-workers’ Work Choices. Immediately after riding into power on the workers’ backs, the ALP and ACTU dismantled the powerful Your Rights at Work are Worth Fighting For mass movement. Despite promising to dismantle the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission if elected to government, the Rudd and Gillard governments both kept the ABCC, laws prohibiting secondary boycotts and restrictions on unions’ Rights of Entry.  

This is not because of individual leaders’ personal characters or politics, although it does matter. But it is mainly because Labor as a parliamentary Party of capitalism is compelled to protect and advance the needs of capitalism and its ruling class.  Parliament serves the needs of capitalism. The real and decisive power lies with the most powerful section of finance capital, not in parliament.  In times of capitalist economic downturns and social crises the main task of any parliamentary party in power is to rescue capitalism by attacking the people’s living and working conditions, removing democratic rights and crushing resistance to capitalist exploitation and imperialism.  

In 2010 the then Labor Prime Minister Rudd tried to introduce a 40% resources super profits tax on big miners and mineral corporations. The supe profits tax did not challenge capitalism.  But in a major campaign by the Mining Council, mining corporations, and the Murdoch media, Rudd was dumped as PM and replaced by Julia Gillard who immediately dropped the minerals super profits resources tax.  The resources super profits tax had enormous public support, including unions who started campaigning for it, but like Whitlam before him, Rudd did not mobilise the people and fight for it.

Under the Gillard and Albanese governments, the tighter US imperialist stranglehold is driven by the US, whose global dominance and spheres of influence are being challenged by capitalist China’s economic expansion. 

The 2011 US Pivot into Asia Pacific, announced in Australian parliament by Obama with fawning PM Gillard by his side, fully opened the doors to the US turning Australia into its major US military base in the region in its preparations for a war with China.  The 2014 Force Posture Agreement, gave the US unimpeded and secretive use of all of Australia’s military, defence and civil infrastructure and instillations.  The US controlled Pine Gap has doubled in its size since Whitlam, and is openly used by US to send intelligence to assist Israel’s genocide in Gaza and suppress Palestinian resistance to occupation, The US controlled AUKUS Pillars 1 & 2 and military interoperability lock Australia into a US-led war with China and allow nuclear weapons carrying B52 bombers and nuclear  armed submarines to be based in the Northern Territory and Australian Ports close to major cities.  

Lessons from the Whitlam Dismissal

Labor party is a parliamentary party of capitalism and when in government it is compelled to administer and implement interests and policies of the most powerful section of Australia’s capitalist ruling class, and imperialism.

The Whitlam Dismissal has shown that even small progressive steps towards independence and progressive social reforms that threaten capitalist class profit making, are quickly removed either by a “coup” or by immense bourgeois media propaganda, or both.

The Dismissal sent a warning to future governments “Don’t step out of line in your service to capitalism and imperialism”.  

The coup ensured that the interests of monopolies, the US alliance, bases, were protected and Australia continued as its servile vassal state economically, politically and militarily. It ensured that US imperialism continued as the dominant section of Australia’s capitalist ruling class.

This is in no way to diminish or reject rank and file members and supporters of the ALP, most of whom genuinely long for a Labor party and government that truly represent and fight for working people.  But the Whitlam Dismissal shows that the ruling class and its state machinery will only allow a parliamentary party to stay in power for as long as it doesn’t threaten imperialist domination and continued exploitation of workers and the environment. 

Organising for anti-imperialist independence

Whitlam’s progressive social reforms and a few steps towards Australia’s independence, and later Rudd’s mining super profits tax, won huge public support.  But neither Whitlam or Rudd, as Prime Ministers administering and protecting capitalism, could, or wanted to, mobilise that massive public support, fearing where it would lead.  

For the working class the only alternative is building independent and united people’s mass organisations armed with anti-imperialist class consciousness.
Lessons for working people is don’t let the ruling class divert, divide and manipulate working people’s struggles into parliamentary graveyards.  People’s struggles that are kept in the hands of the people have shown the real power of mobilised and organised working people - the Clarrie O’Shea penal powers, the Vietnam war and conscription, many workers’ struggles, anti-war struggles, uranium mining, land rights, Franklin River, the 1998 MUA waterfront struggle, Your Rights at Work, BLF, and many others.  

The people’s movements for an anti-imperialist, independent Australia are laying the ground for a truly socialist Australia, led by the mighty working class.
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Further reading:

Bevan Ramsden: The role of the United States in the dismissal of the Whitlam Government

John Menadue: The Dismissal, the role of the CIA, MI6 and Austral Americans

Peter Rees: ‘She heard an extraordinary plot against the government’: The call that would haunt Winsome Nash

AIM Network: The Anglo-American ambush of the Whitlam Government – 11.11.1975 (Part 3)

John Menadue interview:   What would Whitlam think of the Albanese Government?

 

 

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