Australia 1901 - 2001 by Andrew Tink

Author:Andrew Tink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2014-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

27

All the way with LBJ

A keen spear fisherman with an athlete’s body, Harold Holt seemed made for the ‘swinging sixties’. Photographed in a wet suit, posing with his bikini-clad daughters-in-law, the new prime minister reminded many of Sean Connery in his latest smash hit Bond movie, Thunderball. But the Australian Financial Review picked up another side. ‘The most outstanding characteristic of Holt’s politics is their elusiveness’, the paper said. ‘Unkindly one could say that he was a plasticine man – imprinted with the philosophy, beliefs and arguments of the last person with whom he came in contact’. Savage pen portraits like these were fodder for television’s high-rating, revue-style Mavis Bramston Show. Progressive in its satire, the show mercilessly sent up politicians. Its wide audience relished skits such as ‘VIP Pick-a-Box’ in which a make-believe Sir Robert Menzies had his own quiz show featuring Ron Frazer as Harold Holt and Johnny Lockwood as the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi-Minh.

It was a decision Treasurer Holt had announced back in April 1963 that dominated his first weeks as prime minister. To the tune of Click Go the Shears, television audiences nationwide listened over and over to a catchy jingle: ‘In come the dollars, in come the cents/To replace the pounds and the shilling and the pence/Be prepared folks when the coins begin to mix/On the 14th February 1966’. The only planning hiccup had been an attempt to call the key unit of currency a ‘royal’ rather than a dollar, an idea which had been dropped following five months of public ridicule. As the first buses and trains rolled out before dawn on that February morning, early-bird commuters became the first members of the public to handle the new currency. And for the next two years, banks continued to accept the old notes and coins in exchange for decimal ones.

Notwithstanding the Australian Financial Review’s savage pen sketch of a ‘plasticine’ prime minister, Holt was capable of initiating innovative policy. ‘While Menzies believed Asia was a landmass to be crossed over, preferably on the way to London’, one political columnist wrote, ‘Holt saw it as a place where millions of people live, representing half the world’s population’. Within a month of taking over as prime minister, Holt flagged a roll-back of the White Australia Policy. The centrepiece was a proposed reduction in the waiting time for non-European immigrants to be granted citizenship, from 15 years to five, putting them on a par with European applicants. ‘These reforms are a step in the right direction’, the Malaysian prime minister said, ‘and showed Australia had a genuine desire to become more friendly with Asian countries’. The following year, the word ‘British’ was deleted from the cover of Australian passports. Between 1966 and 1968, more than 3000 Asians became Australian citizens. Even so, a program begun by the Chifley government shortly after World War II, which encouraged the subsidised migration of healthy Britons under the age of 45, continued apace. While adult migrants were charged £10 for their trip to Australia, their children travelled free.

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