The tears flowed in time for the seven o’clock news, a bizarre long march all the way from new parliament house to old was enacted by the motley crew who still carry his torch, and the national broadcaster was able to deliver into our living rooms its dream night of viewing: Jacinta on Gough, followed by Keating on Gough, followed by the fortuitously-timed Hawkie-making-lunch-with-Annabel-and-mentioning-Gough, then back to loads more Gough piled upon Gough ‘til we all toddled off to bed. No doubt, many of us carried on dreaming about Gough into the wee hours.

Which is appropriate. Mr Whitlam’s Camelot-style reign was always more dream than reality; more Harry Potter than Hansard. (As Neil Brown and Toby Miller explore in this issue.)

The legend of Gough remains critical to the credibility of modern Labor. Without it there is no plausible ‘light on the hill’; no ‘compassion’, no ‘vision’ and no ‘fairer’ Australia. The key components of this frequently mendacious narrative are that Whitlam slayed the sexist, racist and other dragons of ‘white bread’ Australia and created our modern, multicultural, egalitarian society. Yet as was pointed out by Nick Cater in our 13 September issue, many of the social and other reforms credited to Whitlam were either already well underway in the Menzies era, or had their genesis there. ‘Menzies – not Whitlam -’ wrote Cater ‘was the great post-war champion of higher education. The country he took over had just one university per state. By the time he stepped down in 1966, seven more had been created. Some, like Monash, La Trobe and Flinders, had been built from scratch. Students enrolments had trebled, and at least half of those attending were receiving Commonwealth grants.’ And ‘it was Menzies, not Whitlam, Hawke or Keating, who pioneered Australia’s relations with Asia’ with his ground-breaking trips to Japan (only five years after the war) and Indonesia. More importantly, as Cater points out, Whitlam was only able to pursue his follies courtesy of the healthy economy he inherited from conservative, responsible predecessors.

Sound familiar?

Indeed, similarities with the Rudd/ Gillard shambles are inevitable. (Scarily, Whitlam never even pretended he needed to finance his plans, just assuming endless growth magically occurs.)

Mr Whitlam’s vision was large, but the hangover from his party was larger: half our population is now on welfare. For the age of entitlements, we can largely thank Gough. And there is no glossing over the demonising of our war veterans, the selling out of the Taiwanese and the Baltic states, the sinister dealings with Tirath Khemlani and Saddam Hussein, and out-of-control unemployment, government spending, tax hikes, and inflation.

Whilst paying our respects at the passing of an important historical figure, the sad truth remains that Mr Whitlam was probably the worst Prime Minister Labor have foisted upon us. And that’s no small boast.

Fishing trip

As if Wassim Doureihi’s appearance on Lateline wasn’t reason enough to laugh at the twisted logic of radical Islam, along comes Abdullah Elmir and his ludicrous youtube clip. The seventeen year-old Sydneysider apparently headed off on a fishing trip some months ago, only to resurface in Syria clutching a Kalashnikov rather than a kingfish.

The turgid drivel that this teenage thug spewed out onto our screens, hyped up in language to sound almost biblical in its pronouncements (‘I say this… whether it’s fifty nations, or fifty thousand nations etc’) may well recruit other misguided souls to his cause. But which others? As Richard Ferguson pointed out in these pages two weeks ago, the target audience for ‘Sheikh Google’ is the still-not-fully-formed, hormone-driven, fantasising brain cells of teenage boys. In many ways, such videos merely exploit the lust for violence computer games have generated billions from, and we in the West must bear some blame for allowing our offspring to trawl this sewer. What’s more, the Left must also bear some of the blame for their lionising of David Hicks et al and the constant pandering to the false god of ‘Islamophobia’.

Elmir’s clip relies on fear, shock, and outrage. But like punk, ‘goth’, death-metal and all those other supposedly terrifying youth obsessions, the ‘cool’ factor of radical Islam will soon dissipate. Beheading is so yesterday. Yes, IS and terrorism pose very real threats to all our lives. But the more we mock such pathetic individuals, rather than fear them, the quicker their propaganda is rendered worthless.