John Kerr should have warned Gough Whitlam before dismissal: Malcolm Fraser
In never-before-revealed papers, Malcolm Fraser came to the view that John Kerr was wrong to dismiss Gough Whitlam without warning and should have consulted him ‘more freely’ during 1975.
In the decades after Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in November 1975, Malcolm Fraser maintained he was justified in pushing the political system to the brink by blocking supply and encouraging governor-general John Kerr to dismiss the prime minister if he did not recommend a general election.
But in an astonishing archival discovery, Fraser came to agree with Whitlam on a central element of the constitutional crisis: that Kerr should have warned Whitlam and not dismissed him by surprise ambush.
In a never-before-revealed unpublished Whitlam obituary, Fraser wrote that he had sympathy for Kerr who feared his own dismissal, which could have involved the Queen in the crisis over the budget, but added that this was not the way to act as governor-general.
“I have come to the view that the governor-general should have consulted the prime minister more freely,” Fraser wrote in July 2008. “He thought he must protect the monarch to make sure the queen could not become involved in domestic political battles fiercely fought.
“It was the cautious approach but, on reflection, I think there was a higher duty to consult the Prime Minister of the day and to warn of the consequences that could follow.” Fraser added that this was “a deficiency” in the Constitution and exposed “a flaw in our constitutional process.”
The discovery of the obituary, drafted and edited but never published, located in Fraser’s papers at the University of Melbourne, recasts the historical judgment of the Dismissal in a remarkable new way. It shows that Fraser agreed with Whitlam that Kerr had deliberately and wrongly deceived his prime minister and provided no warning of being at risk of dismissal. This was one of Whitlam’s central critiques of Kerr: that he executed a dismissal by deceit and surprise.
The governor-general had many opportunities to speak to the prime minister during the crisis but chose not to confide in him concerns about the strategy to: first, “tough it out” hoping the Senate might “crack” and pass his budget; and, second, to recommend a half-Senate election.
A half-Senate election would not have secured supply, which had been blocked in the Senate since October and provided no guarantee that Labor would emerge with a Senate majority after a December election when supply would have run out.
In the documents, Fraser noted that while Kerr had the “power” to dismiss the government, “the circumstances” in which he did so had created “a problem”. He reflected that Kerr felt “constrained and unable to talk” to Whitlam as the queen, a hereditary monarch who could not be dismissed, would be able to talk to a British prime minister. “Whether it was right or wrong, this led our governor-general in those days not to discuss freely and openly with the prime minister of the day the options that faced Australia,” Fraser wrote. “Rightly or wrongly he feared that he would be dismissed if he did.”
Kerr was terrified of his own dismissal if he did warn Whitlam that he needed to compromise or find an alternative solution to the crisis, and decided therefore to act by “stealth” and cloaked his real thinking from the prime minister.
In notes that Kerr made, also revealed in a new biography of Whitlam, he came to despise both Fraser and Whitlam and saw the dismissal as his “duty” and “destiny”. He labelled Fraser and Whitlam as “bullies” who had “misjudged me as being weak and likely to run away before their threats”.
If he had allowed the government to remain in power until an election was due in 1977, Kerr worried that a victorious Fraser “could have had me dismissed because he would presumably not want a governor-general capable of such dereliction of duty as my failure to act in November 1975 would have been”.
Fraser told this writer that Kerr was weak, craved approval and needed reassurance, vulnerabilities he exploited. “His character was not strong,” he said in April 2013. “He was not helped by his wife, he really wasn’t. He was a lonely man.”
This is a view Fraser held in 1975. His senior adviser, David Kemp, recalled the Liberal leader saying 10 days before the dismissal that Kerr was “very weak” and “will not act until there is chaos all round”.
Troy Bramston is the author of Gough Whitlam: The Vista of the New (HarperCollins)
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