Keating reveals he told Whitlam to have Kerr sacked or arrested

The 50th anniversary of the most tumultuous day in Australian political history has been used by former prime minister John Howard to urge Liberal leader Sussan Ley to talk to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about introducing four-year parliamentary terms.

Just hours after Paul Keating revealed he had urged Gough Whitlam to arrest governor-general Sir John Kerr while ensuring the Army did not move to protect the vice-regal representative, Howard said he was open to constitutional change while describing three-year terms as ludicrous.

Paul Keating has revealed he told Gough Whitlam to sack John Kerr, and jail him if he refused to go.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Whitlam was sacked by Kerr on November 11, 1975, in a turn of events that has reverberated through the Australian political system since. The Museum of Australian Democracy, housed within the old parliament house, on Tuesday held a series of interviews and panels to discuss the Dismissal’s ramifications.

Howard said he had been approached by then prime minister Bob Hawke in the 1980s to find common ground on four-year terms. A referendum on the issue was defeated in 1988.

Howard said he approached then Labor leader Mark Latham for four-year terms, but Latham wanted a “grand day” of federal, state and local government elections. According to Howard, four-year terms made sense.

“I’ve always been in favour of it [four-year terms],” he said.

“I’d say to Sussan Ley and to the prime minister, get together on it now. And don’t attach conditions.

“It is ludicrous that you have four-year terms in all the states but not in the federal parliament. It’s just crazy.”

Howard rejected a suggestion from his former immigration minister, Philip Ruddock, that the Senate be stripped of its right to block supply. Whitlam’s failure to get his budget bills through the Senate was at the heart of his government’s dismissal by Kerr.

But he did support two constitutional changes – removing the requirement that the number of House of Representatives be as close as practicable to double the number of senators, and that a double dissolution election be held when a bill had been twice rejected by the upper house.

Keating, who had been appointed the minister for northern Australia just a fortnight before the events of November 11, 1975, was with Whitlam in the hours after Kerr sacked the prime minister and appointed Malcolm Fraser as the nation’s political leader.

According to Keating, who went on to become prime minister from 1991 to 1996, he told Whitlam that he should go directly to Queen Elizabeth II and sack Kerr.

If he refused to go, Kerr should be locked up by police.

“My proposition was that Gough should ask the Queen to accept his advice to appoint a new governor-general,” he said. “In the event that Kerr resisted, I said to Gough he should be put under police arrest.

Garry McDonald today, and as Norman Gunston on the day Whitlam was sacked.Credit: Archives, SMH

“That is certainly what I would have done if I was prime minister.”

Keating said there was a risk that Kerr could win support from the Army to protect him from arrest as he was the nation’s commander-in-chief.

This was an issue that Whitlam had to consider.

“In other words, you’d have to have the soldiers with you for this to happen,” he said in an interview with Niki Savva, the veteran political journalist and columnist for this masthead.

Keating said Whitlam dismissed the idea, arguing the then-prime minister was a constitutionalist.

But Keating said the events of that day were a coup against Australian democracy, led by one man: Kerr.

“It was, in every respect it was a coup. A coup by an individual, not a sort of violent gathering,” he said.

A key reason for Fraser’s ability to frustrate the Whitlam budget was a change in Labor’s representation in the Senate. NSW premier Tom Lewis and Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen breached constitutional convention by appointing non-Labor supporting senators to fill two Labor vacancies in the upper house.

A referendum in 1977 prevents such a move.

Anna Burke, the former Labor speaker of the House under Julia Gillard, revealed how close she believed Labor had gone to losing office during her term in office.

Burke was made speaker on October 9, 2012, the same day that Gillard delivered her famous misogyny speech. The speech was part of a vote of no confidence from then opposition leader Tony Abbott.

According to Burke, she didn’t go to the toilet or leave the House for five hours for fear the Gillard government would fall.

“I thought on that day the government is going to fall on the vote of the parliament,” she said.

Burke said it was unlikely a future governor-general acted like Kerr and considered themselves “above the will of the people”.

“In a legal sense, it can happen again. Will it ever happen again? No, it won’t,” she said.

Liberal speaker of the House Tony Smith said it was very unlikely the events of 1975 could be replicated, in part because of the growth in minor parties in the Senate.

The Coalition and Labor had all but one of the 60 members of the Senate before the actions of Lewis and Bjelke-Petersen. Today, the Senate crossbench includes 18 of the 75 members.

Governor-General Sam Mostyn used the event to argue it was difficult to imagine a prime minister could be “surprised” by a vice-regal representative in the way Whitlam accused Kerr of doing to him with the Dismissal.

“It is true that I could not imagine a situation in modern Australia where a prime minister would be surprised or blindsided by the governor-General in the circumstances that occurred in 1975,” she said.

“Importantly, nor am I taking a more expansive approach to my role or redefining any of the core principles of responsible and representative government. These are incontrovertible principles and sit at the core of our democracy.”

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