Fred Whitlam - Influence On Son

Influence On Son

Early biographers of Gough Whitlam were quick to detect his father's influence:

"The key to Fred Whitlam's character was tolerance - he loathed any form of prejudice on grounds of class, religion or race - and his overwhelming preoccupation was human rights... Related to his concern for fair treatment of minorities and individuals was a deep interest in foreign affairs. Fred Whitlam was the driving force in the Canberra branch of the Institute of International Affairs in its early years... All this rubbed off on his son."

Whitlam was a pioneer of international human rights law in Australia, and this was the area in which he exercised his most powerful influence over his son Gough Whitlam's career. As a member of the Australian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, Whitlam argued Australia's case for a permanent international human-rights court, an idea whose time was yet to come. "Instructed by Evatt not to compromise, he reported to his wife that he had 'stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood', but to no avail.". He contributed to drafts of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Whitlam retired as Crown Solicitor in April 1949, but continued to be closely involved in United Nations matters as an adviser to the Department of External Affairs. He was an Australian representative at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1950 and 1954. He died in Canberra in 1961, by which time his son was Deputy Leader of the Federal Labor Party. Graham Freudenberg writes of Fred Whitlam's influence on Gough Whitlam:

"Whitlam's family background and his father's career had three crucial influences on his thinking: on the role and nature of the Federal Government, the role and nature of the public service, and the problems of urban life in a new suburb."

Paul Hasluck, a public servant before becoming a Liberal politician in 1949 (and no admirer of Gough Whitlam), wrote of Fred Whitlam:

"I came to know him as a public-spirited, meticulous and dutiful man with an inquiring but cautious mind, who was always very concerned to make sure that whatever was done was right, both in the sense of legally unexeptionable and soundly based on principle. He was a good churchman. He was certainly not intolerant or censorious, but his meticulous concern about what was right, though it would lead him often to differ from the accepted views, sometimes made it seem that he was rigidly orthodox. He was held in very high regard and respect. He was kindly and modest."