His aim, as Pearson points out, was equality of opportunity. And that endures. University entrance is based on merit and if you get in, you can still go irrespective of parental wealth. You just have to pay the cost back when you can afford it, through the tax system.

Pre-Whitlam, I sat in a Year 12 class knowing full well that some of my classmates would be able to go to university on parental money whereas I might not – even if I got better marks than them.

“No Commonwealth Scholarship; no university,” my father intoned. And he meant it, as scholarship-endowed elder sister when to university and scholarship-unendowed elder brother was packed off to Duntroon.

So Menzies’ scholarship system saved me (probably only by half a mark or so, but enough). Nonetheless, the scheme was utterly elitist. The values underlying it were: “We’ll pluck out a few of the very brightest for tertiary education to help the nation along.”

The Menzies’ policy was not grounded is fariness or equality of opportunity.

Progress comes when the changes are grounded in solid values. Then the changes endure. They may get a set-back occasionally as with universal health care, but once the change has been experienced and the idea embedded it will return and endure.

John Howard’s Work Choices will never return. On the other had, his gun-control laws will never be reversed. If anything, they will be strengthened. The former was based on ideological obsession and doing the bidding of business. The latter was based on public safety and done with courage against entrenched interests.

What has the iPhone’s failure to charge have to do with all this? It is “progress” at its sarcastic best with rotten values under-pinning it. 

Let’s not disparage invention and product improvement. But so much of the churning out of new models of things is done to engender a “must-have mentality” to increase profits. Also, it forces people to buy a new lot of add-ons and attachments because the existing ones are incompatible with the old model. Further, older models become unsupported either with spare parts or timely repair.

Planned obsolescence, Vance Palmer called it as early as the 1960s.

Whitlam had many weaknesses. He increased public sector salaries and conditions, causing private-sector workers to demand the same. That resulted in a wages blow-out and inflation. He did not keep Ministers or the pet programs under control. 

But he was not the big-spending economic vandal that some have portrayed him. In 1973-74, the first full year in which Labor had full budgetary control, there was a cash surplus of  $1.06 billion or 3.1% of GDP. No Government since has equalled that. Unemployment since 1975 has never been as low as it was then.

The unpredictable oil shock was the major culprit in Australia’s economic downturn in 1973-75.

The values under-pinning Whitlam’s economic policy stand out. He reduced tariffs (against the entrenched interests of the unions) so that consumers could benefit and industry would be stirred out of torpor.

He toughened trade-practices law. He drove colour television and FM radio. He shook up the sleepy bureaucracy of the Postmaster-General’s department turning it into the more businesslike Telecom and Australia Post. He pushed for sewerage systems in unsewered parts of Australia’s major cities. These were all driven by a desire to empower consumers and improve people’s lives. 

The long-term lesson is obvious. For too long when any change is proposed we have asked: “Will anyone be worse off?”, “Who will be better off?” or “What’s in it for me?” Rather we should ask: “What are the values under-pinning this change?”

We have become like Oscar Wilde’s cynics. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.