This is Gough Whitlam’s speech to the annual conference of the Victorian ALP, in which he challenged the party to change and said that, “certainly, the impotent are pure”.
The speech was delivered just four months after Whitlam’s election as leader of the ALP, following its landslide defeat at the November 1966 election.
Whitlam signalled that he was willing to stand up to the ALP. The speech is an important milestone in his battle to reform the party internally and renovate its policy platform.
The PDF below is taken from the E-Collection of the Whitlam Institute.