By Jenny Hocking
Continued from Part 2
Through that single act of dismissal, Kerr had breathed new life into the arcane reserve powers of the Crown once considered obsolete, superseded by the democratic fabric of Westminster parliamentary democracy. Mungo MacCallum described it as “a reassertion of the divine right of Kings”, the usurpation of both the electoral will and the will of the Parliament in the formation of government by the Governor-General’s own.
It also brought to light some unexpected and untested elements of our system of governance as a Constitutional monarchy. The dismissal of an elected government by the Governor-General, as the Queen’s representative, using the reserve powers of the Crown which had not been used in England for nearly two hundred years and widely considered redundant, as having been long overtaken by the democratic fabric of an established Westminster parliamentary system, highlighted the remnant quasi-colonial powers of the Queen’s representative and their lingering effects for Australia as a Constitutional monarchy.
It is in this sense that the dismissal resonates today beyond the immediate dismissal of an elected government half a century ago, to encompass the critical question of the nature of the reserve powers in a modern democracy. What was once considered obsolete, if not antithetical to the essence of modern parliamentary practice, has been given new life; and that poses significant issues for any government lacking a Senate majority – as many governments have, before and since. Few would now say that the “residual” reserve powers can any longer be considered defunct, an impotent legal relic of a colonial past, since Kerr’s reanimation of them.
The dismissal unleashed a bitter, divisive, and prolonged controversy – over the actions of Kerr, and over the roles of the leader of the opposition Liberal party, Malcolm Fraser and Barwick – and always with the lingering sense that there was more to be found. In the near fifty years since, the dismissal historiography has gone through significant points of fracture, each reflecting a narrative rupture resulting from major archival revelations and consequent historical reappraisal. The initial view of the dismissal as the Governor-General’s reluctant, isolated, ineluctable, decision was neat, simple, and wrong.
Since that time a more complex and far more confronting story has emerged of the knowledge and collusion of key individuals and the deception of the Prime Minister on a previously unimagined scale. That process of reluctant revelation began at once. On the afternoon of 11 November 1975, Kerr revealed that he had secretly met with the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Garfield Barwick, the previous day – unknown to and against the express advice of the Prime Minister.
The essentially autocratic nature of Kerr’s vice-regal intervention was not limited to the dismissal of the elected government, it continued throughout the afternoon in a series of decisions the full details of which only came to light years later. First, with Kerr’s unilateral appointment as Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal party, without the confidence of the House of Representatives and who then lost a confidence motion by ten votes two hours after his installation. Second, with Kerr’s refusal to see the Speaker of the House or receive the motion of no confidence against Fraser which also called on the Governor-General to recommission the Whitlam government. And finally, by Kerr’s dissolution of both Houses of parliament, with Fraser still in place as Prime Minister and the live motion of no confidence against him.
The dismissal ended the brief second term of the Whitlam labor government, widely considered the most reforming government in Australian history. In that short time the government had introduced a remarkable range of reforms from ending conscription, free tertiary education, racial discrimination laws, the end of the white Australia policy and universal health insurance, to equal pay and no fault divorce, to name just a few. They remain, in Whitlam’s words, “like all great Labor legislation – permanent landmarks in our history”.
In government, Whitlam had advocated strongly for the “right to know” and for accountability through public access to information, most notably with the twin initiatives of the establishment of the Australian Archives as a stand-alone organisation, and the first moves towards freedom of information laws. Both these initiatives enabling systematic public access to government records have been central to the ongoing discovery of further details about the dismissal of Whitlam and his government. These details, ranging from minor corroborations to significant recalibrations, emerged episodically and haphazardly as archives were opened for public access and for the consideration of history.
It is a rare historical event that continues to fascinate and polarise even fifty years later, and yet the dismissal clearly does. The reason for this is quite simple: secrecy. The secrecy and subterfuge which Kerr acknowledged were at the heart of the dismissal, and the continuation of that secrecy into much of the historical assessments that followed, ensured a renewed interest in it with every new discovery. The other side of secrecy is disclosure, the “dialectic of concealment and revelation” as Verdery describes it, and as archives and interviews were opened for public access, those dismissal secrets crumbled, and a different story took shape. Each of these incremental disclosures then brought with it a new round of public interest and further debate in a long process of historical correction that continues today.
As a result of the secrecy at the heart of the dismissal critical aspects of it remained unknown, propelling a version of events that was inevitably incomplete and at times untrue, and reliant to an unusual degree on the version of event provided by the protagonists themselves. Add to this the difficulty in analysing an event that had been planned and executed in secrecy, that had never happened before, which had been discussed only in the abstract, and for which there was no comparator on which to model a critique, and the disciplinary difficulties are immediately apparent.
Humphrey McQueen, recognising the factual imprecision and analytical confusion surrounding the dismissal, described this as the “bewildered scholarly response to Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam”. In a blistering critique the following year, McQueen wrote:
It is not surprising that, confronted by Kerr’s action, mainstream academics have produced nothing more than a jumble of anecdote, psephology, placital niceties and personal prejudice, since these are the stuff of political science.
As the dismissal passed into history, even its most fundamental elements remained unknown, or known only in part, and the history took shape around that distorting prism of incomplete knowledge and attendant speculation. Central to this was the view that the Palace was not involved in Kerr’s decision, that Kerr protected the Queen and the Monarchy by maintaining her ignorance of his thinking, his planning, and his decision. Although the unprecedented use of the reserve powers by the Queen’s representative in Australia inevitably raised questions about the possible involvement of the Queen, that was immediately and emphatically denied.
The Queen’s then deputy private secretary, Sir William Heseltine later described, “the Palace was in a state of total ignorance”. In light of the revelations from Kerr’s own records and more recently the Palace letters, of the Queen and Prince Charles’s discussions with Kerr from September 1975 about the possible use of the reserve powers to dismiss Whitlam, “in a state of complete ignorance” is precisely what the Palace was not.
Continued tomorrow: Part 4
Illustration: ‘Jeanie d’Archives’. Concept/Creative designer Tess Lawrence. Production Daniel Jaap. Built upon the beautiful work of Touraine’s Hennes Poulvoir. Medium: Paint on ceramic. Copyright: Tess Lawrence.
Jenny Hocking is emeritus professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University and award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam. Her latest book is The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. You can follow Jenny on X @palaceletters.
Dear reader, we need your support
Independent sites like The AIMN provide a platform for public interest journalists. From its humble beginning in January 2013, The AIMN has grown into one of the most trusted and popular independent media organisations.
One of the reasons we have succeeded has been due to the support we receive from our readers through their financial contributions.
With increasing costs to maintain The AIMN, we need this continued support.
Your donation – large or small – to help with the running costs of this site will be greatly appreciated.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
On November 11th 1975, I happened to be listening to the Parliamentary broadcast on what is now Radio National. I heard Fraser announce that he had been appointed Prime Minister, and that the passing supply was immediate as his first action. With the passing of a No confidence motion following this, I thought that the crisis was done, and Fraser had been outsmarted. I never quite understood what happened next but it seemed that the normal processes that should have been followed at this point were prevented by Kerr’s proroguing of Parliament.
Was Whitlam wrong to accept this and allow his government to then go to an election? What could he have done to prevent this outcome?
As with the Voice referendum, I was disappointed with the result of the Republic referendum, now 26 years ago.
But would being a republic at that time have changed the politics and the dismissal at the time?
There are those who believe they are ‘born to rule’, and the shortcoming in the referendum debate was the model proposed for appointment of the president… appointed by parliament…. and the role of executive government, still within the parliament, so the ‘numbers game’ would not have been different and the political allegiance the president would have had would have been factors.
Even though Kerr was appointed by Whitlam, his desire to wield the power he did and sack the government of the day, could be repeated without a complete rethink of how government would be formed should we reconsider the republic question.
It’s a ‘what if’ question, and the answer is unknowable…. however, the brutality of politics today with influencers such as Musk and others on social media plus the rabid rightwingness of the main stream media, any left leaning government would have problems.Just look at the pressure Musk is directing at the Labour Government in Britain.
Considering all the political deviousness and farnarkeling of politics in Oz, it’s no wonder that Oz remains firmly implanted in the fundaments of the brutal old British imperium, and the deviousness of its monarchy, and now also Uncle Sam’s brutal hegemony which took on the effective role.
Seems that they strive to ensure we will never grow out of that subservience.