It’s easy to be cynical about politics in Australia when the last halfway decent prime minister — Gough Whitlam — was voted in fifty years ago. Today he is remembered for creating Medicare, acknowledging Aboriginal land rights, pulling Australian troops out of Vietnam, and a score of other era-defining reforms.

It’s now common knowledge that the Central Intelligence Agency played a central role in the constitutional coup that resulted in Whitlam’s downfall. It’s less well known — but nonetheless indisputable — that Bob Hawke, then leader of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, was himself in close contact with the CIA at the time of Whitlam’s dismissal. When Hawke came to power in 1983, the Americans knew they could trust their man in Canberra.

Kevin Rudd served as prime minister from 2007 to 2010, and again briefly in 2013. Few would compare his tenure to that of Whitlam. Rudd’s downfall and replacement by Julia Gillard in 2010 seemed simply to be the result of a clash between his robust ego and Labor’s factionalism.