Do we like them?

Do we like Gough Whitlam?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A long list of fairness reforms and early support for gay law reform, held back by the contested East Timor record.

Gough Whitlam led Labor to government in 1972 and was prime minister until the Governor-General sacked him on 11 November 1975. In his speech marking Whitlam's death, Anthony Albanese listed a government that reshaped the country in three years. That list is the best place to start, because the reforms are the whole story of why people still care.

The list covers full diplomatic relations with China, the Racial Discrimination Act, Medibank, and a ban on racially selected sporting teams, including apartheid-era South African ones. It also covers reopening the equal pay case and the release of young men jailed for refusing Vietnam service. Albanese also counted the land handback to Vincent Lingiari among the first major steps toward reconciliation.

On the harm check, the record is strong. On gay law reform, a Star Observer report on an August 1972 letter to activist Dennis Altman shows Whitlam expecting a Labor government to rewrite the territories' criminal code. He wrote that it would make no reference to sexual conduct not involving violence, and predicted it would have a profoundly liberating effect on the community. That was months before he won, when it was a long way from popular.

The big stain is East Timor. A Lowy Institute piece by a former defence attaché to Jakarta says Whitlam privately preferred that Portuguese Timor be peacefully folded into Indonesia, and that he built a close rapport with Suharto. Critics accuse him of signalling that Australia would accept annexation by force. The author argues the written record doesn't support that, and that it's a retrospective judgement. Where you land depends on whether you read it as Cold War realism or a betrayal of a small people.

The evidence on his private treatment of staff and colleagues is thin in what we could open. We couldn't open several pages, so we're not claiming more than the sources we read support. Nothing nasty turned up, and the reform record speaks for itself.