Leigh Hatcher on how radio was first with news of The Dismissal 50 years ago

I was in my pokey little broom cupboard of an office on the Senate side of Parliament house writing up a story for the 2 o’clock news that Gough Whitlam had gone to the Governor General and was seeking a half Senate election to break the deadlock that had happened in 1975 when Malcolm Fraser’s opposition blocked the budget in the Senate.

My cadet, Tony Ritchie, came bursting through the door and shouted out, expletive deleted, ‘Gough sacked!’

I was so shocked, the Governor General had sacked the Prime Minister.

So I sent a quick flash up the line to the Macquarie network, some of which believed it and some which didn’t would you believe. Then Tony and I took off through Parliament House down to Kings Hall.

That’s how Leigh Hatcher remembers the historic day 50 years ago when the Whitlam Labor government was sacked. An inability to pass a federal budget and guarantee supply is one of the few reasons an Australian government can be dismissed from government by the monarch’s representative, the Governor General.

Leigh was a reporter for the Macquarie Radio Network. Radio was the first medium to break the news to the public after months of coverage of the Liberal dominated Senate not passing the budget bills and precipitating the ‘supply’ constitutional crisis.

Leigh told Steve Ahern how it all unfolded on the day:

I ran back up and filed a news story for the 2 o’clock news that Gough Whitlam had been sacked.  That’s when people started hearing about it. It was one of those events where you remember where you were and what you were doing.

So many [people who remember it] still say ‘I was listening to the radio.’

In these days of multiple media commitments and the need to file information to social media before you may have all the facts, Hatcher says spending time immersed in a story to fully understand it is important.

At 2 o’clock in the other chamber, the Senate, the Opposition, to everybody’s astonishment, got up and said Mr. President we want to pass the budget, bring the vote on. The labour party was caught basically with its pants down… after this huge deadlock and this so-called constitutional crisis finally they caved in. But no, they hadn’t been told. Gough had come back from Government House after being sacked… but he never spoke to anyone in the Senate, so no one in the Senate knew.

Labor, of course, passes the budget and it was only then when it was passed about 2:25 that Fraser felt confident enough to get up in the Reps and say, ‘Mr Speaker, I’m now the caretaker Prime Minister.’

I’m sitting up there in my little perch in the House of Reps press gallery looking over the opposition and looking straight down at Gough, face on….  The House of Representatives just erupted into chaos and when they learnt that Gough had been sacked and Fraser was now the caretaker Prime Minister.

Hatcher says he has always been grateful to have been there for the story. He sent the flash up, then filed the bulletin for 2 o’clock, then he was free to go into the Reps to witness it in person.

This monumental political earthquake playing out in the House of Representatives and on the floor, with the two big men just dogging it out between them. It was happening there in front of me and there was no pressure, as there would be today, to be stuck in the office filing for this station, filing for that station, filing this and that program, for television…

Leigh Hatcher is in Canberra this week to mark the anniversary.

Main Picture: Leigh doing a tv live cross this morning from Old Parliament House about the Dismissal.