Audio and Video files of parliamentary tributes to Margaret Whitlam on March 19: Gillard, Abbott, Plibersek, Bishop, Rudd, Turnbull, Faulkner, Payne, Brown, Frydenberg and Griggs. Also includes audio of eulogies from Tony Whitlam and Catherine Dovey at the memorial service held on March 23.
Posts tagged as “Margaret Whitlam”
ABC and Channel 10 television news report on the death of Margaret Whitlam.
Gough Whitlam, 90, and his wife, Margaret, 87, have been awarded the first-ever life memberships of the Australian Labor Party at the national level.
The awards were made at the ALP National Conference in Sydney.
Addressing the conference, the former Prime Minister reminded delegates of his famous admonition of the Victorian branch in 1967 when he derided the oppositionist mentality that equated defeat with ideological purity: “Certainly the impotent are pure”.
Forty years later, the nonagenarian Whitlam told the conference, “when I was 50 I could get away with saying things like that.”
Whitlam noted that under his leadership in the 1969 elections, the ALP secured “the greatest swing on record and won 17 seats”. It would not have been lost on conference delegates that in 2007 the ALP needs to win 16 seats to secure a bare majority in the House of Representatives.
In 1991, a month after Sir John Kerr’s death, Margaret Whitlam said she was “prepared to believe” that the CIA was involved in her husband’s downfall.
Mrs. Whitlam was asked by a reporter whether she thought the US Central Intelligence Agency was involved: “I do. He [Gough] doesn’t. As an old thriller reader I’m prepared to believe it.”
On whether they had broken out the champagne when Kerr died, Mrs. Whitlam said: “No. I didn’t bother. I regretted his descent into his miserable life because I’d known his first wife very well. Peg was the sort of woman who would have been fabulous for anybody. He shouldn’t have taken that job in the first place. He knew she was dying.”