Fifty years on, the dismissal is a reminder of how not to run a country
Precedents and conventions regarding casual Senate appointments were smashed, which enabled the Senate numbers to be manipulated. The blocking of the budget to force a general election was unprecedented. The prime minister, who could not get his budget passed, sought to govern without supply.
As the resolution to the crisis neared, the High Court was implicated and compromised. What if the dismissal had come before the court that afternoon? The governor-general deceived his prime minister rather than canvass resolutions to the crisis. The opposition leader privately intimidated and threatened the governor-general.
While Kerr dismissed Whitlam in his study at lunchtime on Remembrance Day, the opposition leader waited in another room with the door closed. When Malcolm Fraser was sworn in, he was allowed to remain in office despite not having the confidence of the House of Representatives even though he had supply.
The engineer of the dismissal was Fraser. He benefited from the conservative premiers’ manipulation of Senate vacancies. He led the Coalition to block supply to a government that had a majority in the House. Utterly ruthless, he decided to plunge the nation into a political and constitutional crisis rather than wait until an election due in mid-1977 that he would likely have won.
Whitlam was driven and determined, certain he would prevail in an epic mission to save democracy. But he never had a viable solution to the crisis, nor understood its central cause: supply. He did not have it, could not promise it, and could not govern without it. A half-Senate election was no solution as he could not guarantee he would gain a Senate majority.
The time to trigger a half-Senate election was at the start of the crisis, as Labor Senate leader Ken Wriedt urged, not at the end. Whitlam may have secured supply via a Senate election called in mid-October, but not from one called in mid-November, because supply would expire by the end of that month, before polling day. Whitlam’s plan had been to “tough it out” and hope the Senate would buckle.
Fraser offered Whitlam supply in return for a general election in mid-1976. Whitlam could have claimed victory and gained at least another six months in office, but he rejected the compromise. Whitlam ignored advice from public servants on tactics and strategies that might have seen him avoid dismissal. He did not consult ministers and staff.
Whitlam fatally misread Kerr. He ignored warnings from friends and colleagues: Clarrie Harders, Clifton Pugh, Elizabeth Reid, Clive Evatt and Bill Hayden. He treated Kerr with condescension, said he “must” follow his advice and called him “my viceroy”. Whitlam’s approach was to “crash through or crash”, the leitmotiv of his career, and this time he crashed.
Kerr failed his vice-regal duty, ignoring Walter Bagehot’s dictum about the rights of the sovereign: to be consulted, and to encourage and warn ministers, and avoid confrontation. Instead, he invoked the queen, asleep in her bed at Buckingham Palace, to terminate Whitlam’s prime ministership.
It was the wrong response, something no subsequent governor-general would contemplate doing again. Indeed, Sam Mostyn told me she would not have done what Kerr did: deceive the prime minister with a surprise dismissal. Even Fraser, I have discovered, thought Kerr should have warned Whitlam and consulted him more “freely”. It is a damning judgment on Kerr.
Kerr was haunted by his actions, endlessly second-guessing what he did, and became a sad and lonely man. In newly discovered notes made in the years before his death in 1991, Kerr insisted it was his “duty” and “destiny” to dismiss the government, and came to despise both Whitlam and Fraser for making him their “scapegoat”. It was delusional.
There was no foreign conspiracy – neither the CIA, British diplomats and civil servants, nor the queen gave a “green light” to dismiss Whitlam. After five decades we need to accept that it was a homegrown plot, as Whitlam always said, explained by the personalities, ambitions and interactions of those who knew in advance: Kerr, Fraser and judges Garfield Barwick and Anthony Mason. In my opinion they were not honourable men.
The queen was not in the business of liquidating prime ministers in her realms, and nobody has established a motive for why she would want to. Whitlam and the queen got on well. And he was liked and respected by British Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. Wilson’s staff told me 10 Downing Street was “shocked” by the dismissal, thought it was wrong and that the queen was not involved.
No surviving Whitlam minister when the vice-regal correspondence between Kerr and the Palace was released by the National Archives in 2020 – Hayden, Doug McClelland, Moss Cass and Paul Keating – believed the royal conspiracy theory. Keating told me it was “rubbish” and McClelland said it was “malarkey”. Australia’s leading constitutional scholars, Anne Twomey, George Williams and Michael Sexton, don’t believe it either.
Indeed, a letter from the queen’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, to Kerr on November 4 – a week before the dismissal – gives multiple warnings that the crisis was “political” and not “constitutional”, and the reserve powers should only be used “in the last resort” and when there is “no other course” available. That is hardly encouragement.
Kerr acted secretly because he feared being recalled by the queen. Whitlam always denied he would do this but a newly discovered memo in Whitlam’s papers reveals he sought advice on how to remove Kerr before November 11. “Could PM have GG recalled?” he asked. Whitlam wrote to Wilson confirming he would have sacked Kerr if his “suspicions” were “aroused”.
The Dismissal has been a lifelong obsession for me – born just weeks after – and it still has lessons to teach us. It is unlikely to be repeated not only because the three principal figures – Whitlam, Fraser and Kerr – were so unique, but because there is now institutional and political acceptance that it was not the way to run a country.
Troy Bramston is the author of Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New (HarperCollins).
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The dismissal of Gough Whitlam by Sir John Kerr exercising the reserve powers of the Crown without warning on November 11, 1975 – 50 years ago on Tuesday – was a monumental train wreck for our political institutions and undermined Australia’s parliamentary democracy.