The Whitlam Government and the Betrayal of the South Vietnamese

Australia and the Fall of Saigon

With the formal and much-publicised end of racial discrimination as Australian policy, the question of contingency planning for large numbers of Asian, and in particular Vietnamese, refugees was still given no consideration by the Whitlam government, which came to power in 1972. This was despite the long-standing probability, and then certainty, that the Saigon regime would be defeated by the communist North. Further, the fate of anti-communist South Vietnamese in the event of a communist victory had been raised many times in the long-running debate on Australia’s commitment to Vietnam.

One prophetic warning of massive refugee problems following a communist victory was made in The Saving of South Vietnam, published in 1972 by Kenneth Grenville, a pseudonym for Kenneth Grenville Gee QC, then a New South Wales District Court judge:

Occasionally an ingenious gloss is put upon the theory of stopping the war by starving the South of aid. Schemes are…