‘I saw journalists with their hands shaking’: Paul Kelly recalls the Dismissal
For the first time in 50 years, The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly gives his forensic account of the day the Governor-General sacked a Prime Minister.
It would be a day of remembrance ceremony and political execution, the most astonishing Remembrance Day since the Great War. Australia’s version of the Sun King, Gough Whitlam, was his ebullient self.
I arrived at the House at 8.30am on the 28th day of the constitutional crisis. I was on the lookout for Gough, given his ambition to break the deadlock this day. Anticipation and anxiety filled the morning air. The great conundrum haunted the building: how would the most ferocious parliamentary deadlock in our history be resolved?
The protagonists, Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, were believers in the great man theory of history. They had pushed the Constitution and the country to its edge. People looking at today’s leaders, Anthony Albanese and Sussan Ley, have no comprehension about this crisis and the will-to-power of its agents. They were political giants and egoists from another age, ready to smash conventions in their quest for power and principle.
Australia was being put through the wringer. Fraser had blocked the budget in an attempt to force an election and destroy Whitlam’s government. Whitlam was defying the Senate to break Fraser’s plan and destroy his leadership. There was one certainty: the termination of the deadlock would bring triumph and tragedy to its protagonists, but in what order nobody knew.
Yet, as we would soon discover, one person did know. That person knew everything, every secret about this coming day, the shock and drama about to unfold, because that person was keeper of the Crown’s powers: the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr.
I went quickly to the second floor of the building where the press gallery was located. There was a small two-person office for The Australian’s senior staff that I was sharing with Niki Savva. That morning I had reported on page one that Whitlam was planning a supposed breakthrough tactic: calling a snap half-Senate election in mid-December.
The gallery along its narrow corridors was abuzz with Gough’s plan. Here was hope amid desperation: it was seen as a Labor initiative to terminate the deadlock gripping the parliament. I didn’t like it. I felt it would never work. I had expressed my reservations to Whitlam’s staff over the past few days. I believed seeking a Senate election was a blunder, but Labor was set. Gough was going to crash through. That morning The Australian reported that the ACTU and ALP president, Bob Hawke, was leading the charge for the half-Senate poll. But Hawke was on the fringes.
At 9am there was a last-ditch meeting to see if a compromise was possible. Whitlam and his Labor ministers Frank Crean and Fred Daly met the key Coalition trio of Fraser, Doug Anthony and Phillip Lynch. I knew it would solve nothing – no great insight there. I had been speaking regularly and privately during the crisis with both leaders. Neither was going to compromise at this point.
This day would bring to its climax the mercurial and fatalistic method of Edward Gough Whitlam, who had once offered the famous summary of his technique: “When you are faced with an impasse you have got to crash through or you’ve got to crash.” For Whitlam, November 11 was going to end in either political death or glory.
The Whitlam government had broken too many rules and had misread the economy for too long. It would be thrown out at an election – that drove Fraser’s aggression and Whitlam’s defiance. But Fraser couldn’t wait for a normal election, he wanted Labor’s liquidation now, immediately – his flouting of convention by blocking the budget and money supply had unleashed a fusion of political and constitutional passions on a scale never seen before.
Speaking with Gough late the previous week outside the building, I had never seen him so impassioned, an inferno of intensity, conviction and fatalism. He repeated his well-worn mantra. “Comrade, I’m as certain about Kerr as anything in my life,” he said, striking his imperial pose, his face redder than normal. “Kerr will do the right thing. He knows what is required.” Gough was almost intimidating me in his insistence. Later I wondered, who was he trying to convince?
On the evening of Thursday, November 6,fivedays earlier, I had seen Fraser in his office. He had just returned after his final meeting with the Governor-General in Kerr’s role as a supposed mediator. Fraser was calm and stoic. It was an off-the-record discussion. Fraser said he was confident the crisis would be resolved by an election before Christmas. I said Whitlam had absolute confidence in Kerr and asked how an election would be secured. Fraser said, deadpan, that he believed “the Governor-General … will sack the Prime Minister”.
His confidence was striking, his prediction deadly accurate.
When I interviewed Fraser for my book at the 20th anniversary, in 1995, he told me about his conversation with Kerr that afternoon. Fraser, in effect, threatened Kerr. He told me: “I now told the Governor-General that if Australia did not get an election the Opposition would have no choice but to be highly critical of him. We would have to say that he had failed his duty as Governor-General to the nation.”
This warning would have been devastating for Kerr. Anyone aware of Kerr’s pride would have realised its impact. Fraser, as Opposition Leader, was effectively advising the Governor-General, the sole prerogative of the Prime Minister. Whitlam’s sheer folly in allowing Kerr to see Fraser – to let him anywhere near Fraser – was monumental.
Kerr has confirmed Fraser’s account. He said Fraser told him if he did not act “I would be imperilling the Reserve Powers of the Crown forever”. That’s a threat on steroids. In their talk Fraser told Kerr the Opposition would win any election. He was offering Kerr reassurance: public opinion would vindicate him in any dismissal of Whitlam.
November 6 was a big day. Treasurer Bill Hayden had seen Kerr at Yarralumla. And before Bill left, Labor’s Attorney-General, Kep Enderby, told him: “[Kerr’s] one of us. You can trust him.” But at Government House Hayden found Kerr speculating on politics, saying Whitlam had a “magnificent fighting ability” when facing enormous setbacks. Hayden looked Kerr in the face. As an old Queensland cop, he knew: this man wasn’t “one of us”.
Hayden didn’t go straight to the airport as planned. He returned to Parliament House, went to Whitlam’s office, got him out of a meeting and informed Gough that his copper instincts told him Kerr “is thinking of sacking us”. Gough was fiddling with his spectacles and looking down at Hayden. “No, comrade,” he told the Treasurer. “He wouldn’t have the guts for that.”
This was the backdrop to the morning of November 11 – a backdrop we didn’t know at the time. Fraser had brilliantly read Kerr ; Whitlam had disastrously misread him.
When the 9am meeting broke, Daly and Crean were edgy. They felt the Opposition was too confident. Whitlam said in the meeting he would seek a half-Senate election, the sort of election normally held with a general election. The Opposition leaders asked Whitlam if he would be seeking Supply – funds to provide for government services during the campaign period – and Whitlam said he would not.
Whitlam wanted to keep the pressure on the Opposition’s denial of Supply in the form of the appropriation bills. He planned an election campaign that would further discredit Fraser’s already unpopular deferral of Supply – a campaign he hoped would break the Opposition. The Labor caucus met just after 10am and Whitlam announced he would ask the Governor-General for a half-Senate election. There was spontaneous applause.
I was standing in King’s Hall when the caucus broke. Labor MPs streamed across the polished floor in a flood of euphoria, smiling and laughing. “We’ve got that bastard now,” was their message about Fraser. The logic was simple: Gough was taking the initiative, it would be an election on the crisis, and the pressure on Fraser would surely become intolerable. I didn’t share the euphoria.
A short time later, Liberal deputy Phil Lynch briefed the media on the Coalition joint party meeting just concluded. Lynch came into the room, standing just a few metres from me. He was smiling – far too much. Lynch revealed there had been no discussion of the crisis in the party room. Indeed, before the meeting Fraser and Lynch had decided that discipline was paramount, and they didn’t want a party room discussion about Whitlam’s plan for a half-Senate election. The journalists were agog.
“Fraser’s been too scared to tell them,” was the immediate media response. But Lynch was smug. I made a note of what he said. “We believe events will work themselves out. We believe the present course is sound for reasons which will become apparent to you later.”
What did that mean? Back upstairs in the gallery, optimism about an impending Whitlam victory was starting to take hold. Journalist and political commentator Mungo MacCallum was walking the length and breadth of the gallery with his infectious laughter, telling us all that Fraser was finished. I checked with Gough’s office – they weren’t euphoric, but not far from it.
I was puzzled. I knew enough from my previous job in the Government Branch, Prime Minister’s Department, that had serviced Government House and was deeply versed in the Governor-General’s responsibilities, that Kerr was most unlikely to accept Whitlam’s advice for a Senate election. How could he? Supply would expire before the vote and no Governor-General could tolerate that. The Senate election idea was always going to blow up.
I kept running through the options but didn’t get far. Had Whitlam got a favourable signal from Kerr? Would Kerr now finally counsel Whitlam to give him advice for a general election? Why was the Opposition so confident? Almost nobody in the gallery was speculating about Whitlam’s dismissal. It was the “nuclear” option, widely assumed to be too extreme to be practical. After the event, many people thought dismissal was always the obvious step, but that wasn’t the mood on the morning of November 11, a few key Coalition figures excluded.
Dismissal was never the obvious outcome. But it was Kerr’s calculated choice. He had risen early that morning at Yarralumla to finalise the dismissal documents. He walked into the bedroom where his wife, Anne, was sitting in bed drinking tea. He showed her a copy of his statement setting out the reasons for Whitlam’s dismissal, saying: “If I have to use it, I am going to be execrated by one half of Australia.” She was shocked by his comment.
Lady Kerr read the statement and had a suggestion – a simpler expression of the issue. Her suggestion was reflected in the sentence that read in the final statement: “It is for the people now to decide the issue which the two leaders have failed to settle.”
But Kerr was taking no chances. He had already secured a letter from the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick (after meeting him at Admiralty House the previous day, November 10), saying the Governor-General had the “constitutional authority and duty” to dismiss Whitlam. Kerr had the Chief Justice locked in. Barwick wrongly assumed he was putting the steel into Kerr, when Kerr was really manipulating Barwick to win legal protection for his dismissal strategy.
Kerr had also spoken to his close friend Anthony Mason, another High Court judge, on November 9 and secured Mason’s in-principle support for dismissal. Mason and his wife had dined with the Kerrs on the evening of November 9. Kerr was obsessed about getting the High Court on side.
Sadly, our High Court was disastrously compromised.
But Kerr’s ultimate “lock in” was triggered in his notorious 9.55am phone call to Fraser on the morning of November 11, just after the 9am meeting with Whitlam had terminated. This was perhaps the most secretive event in an ambush heavy with secrecy and deception.
Whitlam, his government and the press gallery knew nothing of this Kerr-Fraser phone call. Years later, in May 1995, Fraser confirmed this discussion in an interview with me in preparing my book on the 20th anniversary. It had been first revealed in the 1987 biography of Fraser by Philip Ayres.
It constituted, in my view, a “tip-off” from Kerr to Fraser about the coming Whitlam dismissal. To Fraser’s credit, he wanted the discussion revealed. It is pivotal to the history of November 11. It can be seen as the most important phone call of Fraser’s life. On June 2, 2006, Fraser, in an extraordinary step, swore and signed a statutory declaration about the contents of this phone call.
Fraser said Kerr asked him four questions about what he would do if commissioned as PM. Fraser, in response, answered Kerr’s questions in the affirmative and gave the Governor-General four undertakings: that if made PM, Fraser would secure Supply, recommend a double dissolution election, run a caretaker administration with no policy changes and take no action against Whitlam government ministers.
When I pressed Fraser in 1995 on his account of this discussion, he was adamant: his recollection was “absolute”, there was “no doubt” about the veracity of his account. When I asked Fraser how he felt after the phone call, he told me: “I felt then that unless Whitlam changed and recommended something sensible, Whitlam was going to get dismissed.”
That confirmed it was a tip-off. Fraser now knew what Kerr was planning. Kerr’s motive was also obvious. Dismissing Whitlam and commissioning Fraser as PM was the most potentially dangerous step ever taken by the Governor-General. Kerr couldn’t afford anything to go wrong. He had to be sure Fraser would act exactly as intended and advise the dissolution of the parliament that same day to start the election campaign.
The phone call became an issue of dispute between Fraser and Kerr. Kerr said he never put those questions at the time, only when he was commissioning Fraser at lunch time. But the evidence is overwhelming for Fraser’s version. During their discussion Fraser made notes on a pad of the points that Kerr raised, to which he responded, and a photocopy of the pad and his notes is now public.
When the House resumed at 11.45am Fraser moved a censure motion against the government. Yet people were distracted by bigger moves afoot. Whitlam arrived at Yarralumla about 1pm and went straight to the study with his letter advising a half-Senate election. Whitlam and Kerr have somewhat different versions of exactly what happened – but Kerr terminated Whitlam’s commission as PM. They agreed on the final exchange. “We shall all have to live with this,” Kerr said. Whitlam replied: “You certainly will.” They shook hands.
It’s pretty remarkable. It reveals Whitlam as a constitutionalist. He accepted his sacking. He didn’t tear up the letter, didn’t refuse to accept the Reserve Powers of the Crown and didn’t try to have the Governor-General arrested. He repaired to the Lodge and called his ministers and advisers. When Gough told his wife Margaret what had happened, she said: “How ridiculous. You should have torn it up.”
Fraser, waiting in another room, was escorted to see Kerr. Told that Whitlam was dismissed, his face showed no reaction. He was asked the same questions that Kerr had, according to Fraser, put to him in their phone call. A letter had been prepared for Fraser giving those undertakings to Kerr in writing. Fraser signed it. They shook hands. Fraser left Yarralumla just before 1.30pm.
About 1.50pm I was on patrol in King’s Hall when Queensland left-wing Labor Senator George Georges came up to me, asking if I knew anything, and said: “Paul, I’ve just heard that Kerr’s sacked Gough.” I took off, ran down the opposition corridor, past Fraser’s office, up the single flight of stairs to the Press Gallery boxes. Journalists were milling around, and rumours were flying about – including the dismissal rumour. But no one was sure. The House resumed at 2pm. All looked the same, but this was deceptive. Within a couple of minutes, the gallery bell rang and Kerr’s statement of reasons for Whitlam’s dismissal was distributed.
The gallery was a mixture of shock, anger and incredulity. Maybe a few felt satisfied. I saw some journalists with their hands shaking as they read Kerr’s statement. Below us in the chamber Gough still sat in the PM’s chair, with Labor in the government benches, Malcolm in the opposition leader’s chair and the Coalition in the opposition benches. There was no announcement about the change of government.
It took some time to read Kerr’s 18-paragraph statement, and the more we read, the more anger mounted in the gallery. I couldn’t stomach his claim that he’d acted only after he was “satisfied” that Whitlam could not obtain Supply and that “no other decision” was open to him. As we now know, Kerr abandoned the Crown’s responsibilities, he never counselled or warned Whitlam, never told Whitlam he needed fresh advice to solve the crisis, and never gave Whitlam any real opportunity to go to the election as PM. This was an ambush by the Crown’s representative, improper by every test.
The censure motion dragged on. Only at 2.34pm – with perfect timing – did Fraser rise to announce he had been commissioned to form a government, whereupon he was drowned out by jeering and angry cries from the government benches. Whitlam now struck back – his counter-attack had been prepared at the Lodge at lunchtime over his steak. (It led to one of his famous quips: this time the condemned man had his meal after the execution).
While no longer PM, Gough had the numbers on the floor. Whitlam moved “confidence” in the just-deposed Whitlam government, tantamount to “no confidence” in the just-commissioned Fraser government. Labor won the vote 64-54.
The gallery saw a ray of hope – just briefly. Whitlam told the House that the Governor-General was now obliged to re-commission him as PM. But Gough had no hope. Having used the dismissal power fully aware that Whitlam had the numbers in the House, Kerr was never going to betray Fraser and reverse his decision by re-appointing Whitlam.
Whitlam had missed his chance. His only hope to thwart Kerr and Fraser was in the Senate – by delaying the passage of Supply, the most vital of the conditions on which Fraser had his caretaker commission. Without getting Supply, Fraser was trapped with a commission from Kerr he could not honour. Yet Whitlam had ignored the Senate.
The most conspicuous minister he failed to summon to the Lodge post-dismissal was Labor’s Senate leader, Ken Wriedt. When the Senate sat at 2pm Wriedt had not been told of the dismissal. Unbelievable. Taken by surprise, Whitlam and Labor couldn’t think straight.
Before the Senate resumed, Fraser briefed his Senate leader Reg Withers on the urgency of now obtaining Supply for the Fraser government, having had Withers orchestrating the denial of Supply to the former Whitlam government for the past month. Withers was the man for the job.
Withers later told me: “I said to Wriedt, ‘Put the question, we’ll vote for it this time.’ He looked stunned.” Labor’s Senate leaders were informed of the dismissal about 2.10pm. Supply was passed just after 2.20pm. The Senate adjourned at 2.24pm. If only Labor had a contingency plan for its dismissal, it could have thwarted Fraser at least for some time. But the passage of Supply was the final death knell of the Whitlam government.
The Appropriation Bills were sent to Government House for Kerr’s signature. The House sitting was suspended at 3.15pm. In press conferences, Fraser pushed back against a hostile media while Whitlam said the Queen would never have done it – a correct point, but the Queen’s powers were exercisable by the Governor-General.
Fraser now prepared to visit Yarralumla to formally advise the Governor-General on a double dissolution. As he left Parliament House at 3.45pm Fraser was mobbed. An angry crowd was forming as word of the dismissal spread across Canberra and through the nearby departments. I went down to the front steps as Fraser left. The anger was palpable, but there was no violence (an important perspective from 2025). Fraser was not attacked; his car was not bashed. The crowd was hostile, but the situation never spilled into violence.
But Kerr had a problem. He was worried about the House resolution of confidence in Whitlam. Fraser insisted that the head of the Attorney-General’s Department, a shocked and unhappy Clarrie Harders, accompany him to see Kerr. The Governor-General wanted legal advice that his use of the Reserve Powers at lunchtime extended into the afternoon, and his granting a double dissolution election on advice from a minority PM. While Kerr and Harders later offered different accounts of this situation, Kerr felt satisfied that the law officers had upheld the legal foundation of his actions in the afternoon.
Events then moved quickly. By 4.45pm the Official Secretary, David Smith, stood on the steps of Parliament House, in black jacket, and read the proclamation dissolving both houses. The crowd was now bigger and unruly. “May God save the Queen,” Smith said in conclusion.
Gough, a born actor, was ready for his most famous performance. Standing to his full height at the top of the stairs, his head held in imperious defiance, he said: “Well may we say ‘God save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General. The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General’s Official Secretary was countersigned Malcolm Fraser, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s cur.” He called upon the people to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm”.
I was standing a few steps below Whitlam, close enough to sense that he was operating on adrenaline-charged emotion. Gough was magnificent in political martyrdom. Yet he was vanquished, outsmarted by Kerr and Fraser.
Whitlam had crashed. He’d been tactically inept in handling the crisis, fatally misreading Kerr, disastrously trying to publicly intimidate Kerr by suggesting he had no autonomy, grievously under-estimating Fraser, failing over an entire month to break the will of the Senate, succumbing to the phoney resolution of a half-Senate election, ignoring the need for a contingency plan in case things went wrong, and failing to mobilise the advantages of incumbency.
Gough bet his prime ministership, his government and his judgment on John Kerr. And he lost all three. Whitlam never recovered. If Kerr demanded an election, then it was in Whitlam’s interest to conduct that election as PM, not as Opposition Leader. Aware that Labor’s rage must be contained, Hawke called for calm and opposed a general strike.
At the heart of Kerr’s mistake was his misuse of the Reserve Powers. He became convinced that Whitlam would sack him if he indicated the slightest questioning of Whitlam’s tactics – the upshot being he declined to talk honestly with Whitlam and employ the advice and warning duties of the Crown. Kerr decided he was justified in deceiving Whitlam about his concerns and his ultimate intention. Yet there was no justification for compromising the impartiality of the office of Governor-General and of the Crown’s position. Kerr put self-preservation before his responsibilities. His predecessor, Sir Paul Hasluck, had nailed the issue, saying “consultation, advice and warning precede any use of the Reserve Powers”. Buckingham Palace was shocked and left with reservations about the dismissal.
Kerr spent the rest of his life seeking vindication for the dismissal, writing books and leaving an archive of notes, letters and diaries, but essentially failing in his quest. His immediate successors, Sir Zelman Cowen and Sir Ninian Stephen, knew their task was to rehabilitate the office. Every subsequent Governor-General made plain in public or in private their opposition to Kerr’s action. Kerr became a hate figure on the Labor side. Eventually he retired early, in 1977, with both Fraser and Buckingham Palace keen to see the back of him.
The 1975 election on December 13 became a vote on the deposed government with Whitlam still leader of the ALP. Fraser, with his 55-seat majority, won the biggest election mandate in Australian history.
Two great mythologies and conspiracy theories that arose from these events have been the subject of various investigations by the author over the past half-century – that Kerr acted under the influence or instruction of America’s CIA, and that the Queen or her Buckingham Palace officials encouraged Kerr to enact Whitlam’s dismissal. Despite periodic claims, there is no evidence whatsoever that either the CIA or the Palace had any such role. My view on these matters is that Australia must function as a mature nation, that it cannot indulge baseless conspiracy theories in order to shift the blame to others. The 1975 crisis and its resolution was a uniquely Australian event and the responsibility lies entirely with ourselves.
A couple of days later I travelled with Whitlamto Sydney at the start of his campaign. As the press bus neared Surry Hills I saw a long line of primary school kids en route to the Prince Alfred Pool. The nation was immersed in its usual rituals, the shops were trading, the traffic was busy, the kids were going swimming. The great Australian summer was under way, light years from Parliament House. Crisis, what crisis? Gough was talking about the threat to our democracy, but the normality of daily life was unshaken. He had no chance.
Over the years, many people have asked me: could it happen again? My answer is a definitive “No.” Never again will the nation see three such headstrong figures as Kerr, Whitlam and Fraser, in the same offices at the same time, pushing the system to the limit. That event is too fantastic to become anything but a unique historical monument. Australia recovered from the 1975 crisis and absorbed a profound message – that in a democratic polity, institutions and powers must not be pushed to breaking point.
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