In 1918 Whitlam transferred to the Sydney office of the Crown Solicitor's office, and in 1920 he was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the High Court of Australia. He became deputy Crown Solicitor in 1921, assistant Crown Solicitor in 1927, and Crown Solicitor in December 1936. In this position he was senior legal adviser to the government for 12 years, and his views were respected and influential. Cameron Hazlehurst writes: As a public servant, Whitlam had no formal involvement in politics, but he was active in civic and community affairs in Canberra, then a small and isolated town, and was also active in the local Presbyterian Church. In 1933 he led a campaign against Canberra residents being required to pay a hospital tax when they had no elected local government and no parliamentary representation. He was known to have pro-Labor views. In a 1973 interview, Gough Whitlam said that had his parents been British, they would have been Liberals. "In the Australian context they would vote Labor as the party of change and public responsibility – things being done by elected persons rather than by self-perpetuating directorates." Whitlam was also a friend of Evatt, who was Attorney-General in the 1941–49 Labor government and later Leader of the Opposition.
Influence on son
Early biographers of Gough Whitlam were quick to detect his father's influence: Whitlam was a pioneer of international human rights law in Australia, and this was the area in which he exercised his most powerful influence over his son Gough Whitlam's career. As a member of the Australian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, Whitlam argued Australia's case for a permanent international human-rights court, an idea whose time was yet to come. "Instructed by Evatt not to compromise, he reported to his wife that he had 'stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood', but to no avail.". He contributed to drafts of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Whitlam retired as Crown Solicitor in April 1949, but continued to be closely involved in United Nations matters as an adviser to the Department of External Affairs. He was an Australian representative at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1950 and 1954. He died in Canberra in 1961, by which time his son was Deputy Leader of the Federal Labor Party. Graham Freudenberg writes of Fred Whitlam's influence on Gough Whitlam: Paul Hasluck, a public servant before becoming a Liberal politician in 1949, wrote of Fred Whitlam:
