Republic conspiracists maintain the rage over Whitlam dismissal
Despite recently released evidence to the contrary, Australian republican conspiracists still believe the Queen was party to the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, but their continuing attacks on the Palace will damage their own cause, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Like Japanese soldiers hiding on remote jungle islands refusing to believe the war was over, a band of deluded Australian republican conspiracists still believe the Queen was party to the dismissal of popular Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975.
Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, an Imperial Japanese Army officer who remained at his post on an island in the Philippines for 29 years, was only convinced the war had come to an end when his aged former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Showa in 1974.
Historian Jenny Hocking and Australian Republican Movement head Peter FitzSimons are leaders of the delusional holdouts.
Hocking, whose admirable perseverance in pursuit of the correspondence between Governor-General Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace led to the release of a trove of letters on Tuesday, literally cannot believe what the evidence that she was instrumental in exposing so clearly shows.
Sir John, a long-time Labor lawyer, acted with great care and prudently and correctly kept Buckingham Palace abreast of the unfolding disaster which was the Whitlam government.
His actions in keeping the Queen and her private secretary Sir Martin Charteris informed were not unusual.
One of the viceroy’s responsibilities is to keep the Queen informed and this, as Bill Hayden told guests to Yarralumla when he was the incumbent, was one of the greatest pleasures of the job.
This doesn’t fit the narrative of those who — at Whitlam’s urging — maintained the rage.
Yet, neither Whitlam, nor his successor Malcolm Fraser or indeed Sir John, ever supported the conspiracists in their lunatic assertions of Palace involvement in The Dismissal.
The Hockings and Fitzsimons of this world are emblematic of the cancel culture which we now see trying to erase from the historical record all facts which do not suit their fantasy of what the world should have been like in bygone eras as they try to manipulate current generations into supporting their model for what the world should be like under their domination.
Their continuing attacks on the Queen for dishonesty and complicity is plainly wrong and will probably damage the republican cause but, as the 1999 referendum so plainly proved, the Australian public isn’t gullible enough to buy a pig in a poke.
In denying the facts before them, those who still cling to the wreckage of the conspiracy theory put themselves in the same league as COVID-19 conspiracists and anti-vaxxers, as global warmists who hang onto discredited climate modelling and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement who ignore the reality that black Americans murder more black Americans each year than white police officers murder blacks.
Before the release of the exchange of letters, the woke Nine media, the Guardian and the ABC devoted hours of programming and acres of newsprint to the unproven, untested speculation and they treated the conspiracy as accepted fact — just as they treated the false allegations against Cardinal George Pell as gospel until the High Court unanimously rejected the findings of the Victorian Appeal Court.
Sir John Kerr committed no offence in writing to the Palace, but I believe he erred significantly in consulting High Court Justices Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir Anthony Mason about the reserve powers he used in dismissing Whitlam because there was a chance that his actions may have been challenged in that court. The justices were imprudent then — just as is the current Chief Justice Susan Kiefel is now, having placed the court in an embarrassing position in accepting untested allegations of sexual harassment made against her former colleague Dyson Heydon and saying the High Court was “ashamed”.
That’s why an understanding of history is vital.
Some people learn from the past. Others don’t and never will because they are more comfortable with ideologically fashionable fiction.