A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “It’s time to roll out those high principles,” The Australian Financial Review, October 31, 1975, p. 3.

Politicians always seize every opportunity to take the high ground, to clamber up on some high point of principle so that they can hit their foes with their haloes and make sure that their assailants are not sneaking up unobserved behind them.

In the present crisis the good and great of both sides have been quick to appeal to points of high principle and this has tended to confuse everyone, including me.

Government supporters have been quick to invoke the plea of principle. But in other days they took quite different attitudes to the same question.

For instance, on August 25, 1970, the then Leader of the Opposition and the present Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, had this to say in Parliament:

Let me make it clear at the outset that our opposition to their Budget is no mere formality. We intend to press our opposition by all available means on all related measures in both Houses. If the motion is defeated we will vote against the bills here and in the Senate. Our purpose is to destroy this Budget and to destroy the Government which has sponsored it.

And John Gorton who is so critical of our action this year, said on September 30, 1973:

The only way an Opposition can properly bring on an election on the sort of grounds I have mentioned is not by muddling around and throwing out bits of bills, it is by forcing the Government to go to the country and the only way you can do that is by calling off its money supply.

And Senator Hall who has also been hitting us with his halo said on July 16 this year:

If I were in the Opposition’s position I would adjourn the Senate until January 1 next year and let the people decide in the meantime.

In other words, he was prepared to use the Senate to force the Government to an election.

So what about all this nonsense of points of principle? I have always been taught that if an action was wrong in principle one day, it should also be wrong next week and next year.

And if a chap is going to make his stand on principle, he should make certain it is not a principle that can be shifted around to suit changing circumstances. He may drown himself if he behaves that way.

And last year, when we threatened to deny Supply in the Senate the Prime Minister was then quick to pick up the challenge and to ask the Governor-General for a dissolution of both Houses.

The difference between this year and last is that last year the Prime Minister made the judgment which turned out to be correct, that he would win in the House of Representatives. This year, he knows he couldn’t. Principles do not seem to loom very large really.

Last year we were taunted with the fact that half the Senate had been elected approximately five years ago and they were said not to reflect the then will of the people. This may have been true then, but it is certainly not true now — all the members of the Senate were elected at least contemporaneously with the House of Representatives.

There is, of course, no constitutional barrier to the Opposition’s action in voting against the Budget in the Senate. The power was deliberately put there by those who drew up the Constitution and they meant the power to be used if the proper moment arrived.

The question is, has the proper moment arrived? We think it has, not only because of the economic mess the Government is making but because of the repeated demonstration of duplicity and shady dealing.

I suppose you could cynically excuse the Government’s sin in deceiving the Parliament if they were good at governing the country. But when they are making a mess of the country’s economy as well as its morality, then we think that the proper moment has arrived.

But it wasn’t an easy decision to make. We knew that it would make us unpopular in some quarters. We knew too that we only had to wait to let the Government’s term run its course till May 1977, and the right to govern would drop into our hands like a ripe apple. But we also knew that the apple would not only be ripe, it would be rotten also, rotten with deception, rotten with inflation, rotten with unemployment, rotten to the core.