A Remembrance Day compilation

Fifty years ago today, the Labor government of prime minister Gough Whitlam was dismissed and Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser was commissioned to head a caretaker government until an election could be held – an election that he duly won in a landslide. It is still easily the most exciting thing to have happened in Australia’s generally very bland constitutional landscape.

The dwindling band of those who remember 1975 are still engaged in a political controversy under the guise of history, but in a curiously one-sided way. Those who were on Fraser’s side (as I was) rarely have much emotional investment in it; they tend to approach it in a fairly detached way. But most of the Whitlam partisans are still very much, well, partisans. They see the dismissal as a continuing grievance, and that invariably frames their historical interpretation.

So, for example, Whitlam’s biographer Jenny Hocking, who has engaged in a tireless quest to bring additional evidence on the dismissal into the public domain, most notably with her ultimately successful legal case securing the release of the “palace letters”. But one can’t help wondering why she bothers, since none of the new evidence ever seems to change her view of the matter.

I’ve tried in my small way over the years to inject some common sense into the discussion. Rather than make a fresh attempt, for today I’ve simply made a collection of links to and extracts from some of my past writing on the subject, so you can see how it looked from the 30- and 40-year perspective.

November 2005, “How to remember 11 November”
Writing for Crikey, I offer a compromise historical interpretation of the dismissal.

[T]he dismissal is history, and we should be able to look at it with some historical detachment. We could start by recognising that the polemical positions taken on both sides are untenable, and that any reasonable verdict will award blame all around.

November 2015, “11 November, again: John Kerr and the British connection”
Also for Crikey, I mark the 40th anniversary with a look at the international dimension of the crisis.

We know (roughly) how the CIA helped General Augusto Pinochet: military logistics, intelligence, propaganda and so forth. But where’s the analogy to any of this on November 11, 1975?

No one disputes that the Americans wanted to see Whitlam gone, and it’s entirely plausible that the CIA would have somehow communicated that view to Kerr (although he could have worked it out himself from reading the newspapers, especially if, in [Guy] Rundle’s words, he “saw himself as part of a global power structure guarding against an insurgent global populace”).

It’s even conceivable that might have influenced his decision, although there’s no evidence for that. But the idea that this was somehow central to what he did is hard to understand.

November 2015, “Please to remember 11 November”
As a supplement to the previous piece, I discuss the role of the House of Representatives:

A government relies on the support of the House of Representatives to govern. If it loses that support, it must either resign and let someone else have a try, or else advise the governor-general to dissolve parliament for an election.

The latter, of course, is exactly what Malcolm Fraser did on 11 November – no surprise there, since that’s the basis on which he’d been appointed. John Kerr could, as a matter of strict constitutional law, have rejected that advice, said “No, I’ve changed my mind,” and sent for Gough Whitlam to (re-)form a government. Since supply had been passed in the meantime, Whitlam could then have carried on without an election.

But for Kerr to have done so would have been an extraordinary act of bad faith — much worse than anything he did to Whitlam. Having been appointed on the explicit basis that he would advise an election as soon as supply had been secured, of course Fraser was entitled to assume that that advice would be accepted: as indeed it was.

September 2018
In the course of a post on a different topic, I make a point about the governor-general’s powers:

So, for example, in the crisis of 1975 it was sometimes suggested that, if he thought an election was necessary, the governor-general should simply have issued the writs for it himself without dismis­sing the Whitlam government. But this was one thing he could not due: the dissolution of parlia­ment and the writs for an election had to be countersigned by a responsible minister.

Since Gough Whitlam was not prepared to give this advice, John Kerr (given his view of the situation) had to find a prime minister who would.

July 2020, “Writing to the Queen”
My review of the palace letters.

But the fundamental point remains. Kerr may have used his powers unwisely or dishonorably, but those powers or something like them are nonetheless necessary, and because of our unsatisfactory constitutional arrangements they risk being used in a secretive and precipitate fashion.

Instead of endlessly refighting the politics of 1975, we would do better to take the task of constitu­tional reform seriously so that when such a crisis recurs, as no doubt one day it will, we will be better prepared for it.

July 2020, “Still worrying about monarchy”
A supplement to the previous item.

The partisans of Gough Whitlam, the prime minister that Kerr dismissed, are emotionally energised. Demonisation of Kerr is for them an article of faith. But those who think Whitlam was a poor leader have, by and large, no corresponding stake in defending Kerr. It’s quite consistent to think that the country was better off without Whitlam in charge but to feel uncomfortable, or just indifferent, about the means by which he was removed.

Nor is there any particular reason for opponents of the Whitlam tradition to be monarchists, espec­ially if they have taken to heart the key lesson of the letters that I tried to impart last week: that the powers Kerr used, or something like them, are not specific to monarchy but are going to exist in any parliamentary system.

August 2022, “​On saving the governor-general”
A return to the issue in the context of Scott Morrison’s secret ministries.

But a governor-general isn’t really in quite the same position as a British monarch. The queen has security of tenure; in a case of potential conflict with her prime minister she can afford to let them know what she is thinking without having to worry about being sacked. On the other hand, a governor-general is expendable in a way that the monarch is not: a governor-general who screws up can resign or be dismissed, and the dynasty carries on.