Whitlam’s policy program was compelling because he had a clear and principled conception of social democracy that was relevant for the times. It was a conception of social democracy that straddled two eras: (1) the development of the post-war welfare state that married the tasks of post-war reconstruction and the democratization of industrial capitalism; and (2) the development of international human rights conventions in the period 1965 to 2006. It was his ability to rethink Enlightenment humanism and the ‘rights of man’ in terms that fitted a non-discriminatory and postcolonial idea of human rights that made his version of social democracy relevant to the period in which he was a political actor, and, I would argue, also relevant to us today.

Whitlam is well recognised as someone who used speechmaking to good effect, who worked closely and creatively with his speech writers, who was tireless in sustaining the key pedagogical points of these speeches, designed as they were to communicate his program for change. He sought to educate people in what the program meant, and why it mattered. It is this Whitlam I want to discuss here, not to reiterate these well-understood points, but to take this understanding further.