It seemed inevitable that, after all the secrecy and all the court battles, the
publication of The Palace Letters would renew calls for a republic in
Australia. Our 29th Prime Minister, and former Chair of the Australian
Republican Movement (ARM), Malcolm Turnbull, described the letters as
amounting to ‘an act of interference in Australian democracy’. Whitlam
biographer, professor Jenny Hocking – the historian who tenaciously campaigned
for the release of The Palace Letters – called the Letters
a bombshell which damaged Queen Elizabeth’s reputation by proving she had
breached her apolitical status in 1975 as Australia’s constitutional head of
state. Turnbull’s successor at ARM, Peter Fitzsimmons, did not hold back
the adjectives as he sought to re-energize Australia’s push towards a republic
by describing himself as ‘gobsmacked’ by the letters.
However, the real bombshell of the Letters can be
found in what they reveal did not take place during Australia’s political
crisis of 1975. To be sure, many of the key actors who contested the political
stage that year acted in bad faith. But there was no broad conspiracy to topple
Australia’s most energetically reformist government. Buckingham Palace did not
interfere or intervene as events unfolded; the swirl of letters and telegrams
between the Queen’s Vice-Regal representative, Governor-General Sir John Kerr,
and her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, reveal the Palace’s main
concern alongside Kerr’s health was for Kerr to act according to dictates of
the Australian constitution. As a former Chief Justice of NSW, they expected
Kerr would have a thorough grasp of the Australian constitutional requirements
and conventions.
The most gobsmacking element about the dismissal is that
when the system was placed under extraordinary stress by the blocking of
supply, the system worked. The army remained in their barracks. Tanks did not
roll down neither George Street nor Swanson Street. The courts continued to
operate under the rule of law. Whatever we make of Kerr’s actions on November
11, the crisis was ultimately resolved with the ballot and not bullets. The
Australian political system is by no means perfect. Since Federation we have
seen the (re-)enfranchisement of people who were excluded by the political settlement
of 1900: women, indigenous Australians, migrants from backgrounds other than
Western Europe. Our greatest political achievements, such as the 1967
referendum or the rolling back of the White Australia Policy, also reveal our
deepest political shames. But, for all the rage that was unleashed in 1975, our
constitution weathered perhaps the greatest political storm it has faced,
whilst maintaining the political freedoms our Commonwealth was both founded
upon and aspires too.
That the constitution was put in this position in the first
place was another matter.
Much could be (and has been) written about the Whitlam era
of 1972-1975. Gough Whitlam is undoubtedly the most courageous reformer
Australia has had as a Prime Minister. He presided over incredible,
legacy-building, changes to the country: universal health care, free university
education, initiating land right reform and the return of land to its
traditional owners, the ending of military conscription, and the withdrawal of
Australian troops in Vietnam.
At the same time, Whitlam presided over a troubled and
ill-disciplined cabinet. Whitlam’s ministerial comrades plagued his government
in crisis after crisis, risking their reformist agenda with charges of
incompetency and corruption. Early in their time in office, Attorney-General
Lionel Murphy had caused a scandal by personally leading a raid on the
Melbourne ASIO office. To circumvent the issue of supply, and enable his vision
to nationalize Australia’s energy market, Rex Connor pursued an unconstitutional
loan of US$4 billion dollars from a foreign lender. The government was
distracted during this time by the scandal of an affair by Treasurer and Deputy
Prime Minister Jim Cairns, who exacerbated the crisis by misleading parliament
about the Loans Affair.
Whitlam, for all his success in leading Labor out of
opposition after 23 years, allowed the cabinet too much freedom to pursue their
own interests and programs, often at the cost of the government’s reputation.
But Whitlam’s most fatal blunder lay in his appointment of
the new Governor-General in 1974. For all of his legal and judicial background,
Sir John Kerr was wholly unsuited for this high office. Admittedly, it is easy
to both besmirch Kerr’s character and cast him as a tragic figure. As he
acknowledges in the Letters, he became a man of few friends. Within six
months of assuming office, Kerr was widowed when his first wife Alison died in
September 1974.
However, as The Palace Letters testify, Kerr was
destructively obsessed with his own position and reputation. He was paranoid that
he would be removed from office – though that paranoia was fed by Whitlam's
frequent jokes and remarks about 'a race to the palace' between the Governor-General
and the Prime Minister to advise the Queen to fire the other.
In Kerr's mind, his actions to resolve the supply crisis
were undertaken to avoid that very constitutional crisis where the Queen was
sandwiched between her first minister and her Vice-Regal representative. But
Kerr's action leading up to November 11 undermined that defence.
As Kerr drew a circle of advice on how to proceed with
Whitlam, from Charteris, and from High Court justices Sir Garfield Barwick and Sir
Anthony Mason, he began to negotiate with the Leader of the Opposition on how
he might act. This is where Kerr acted in bad faith to the procedures and
protocols his office is charged with preserving and protecting. Kerr essentially
conspired with the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser, to preserve not so
much the constitution or the government, but his own appointment as
Governor-General.
That action was typified by Kerr’s action on the afternoon
of November 11. After the Senate passed supply and Malcolm Fraser had revealed
himself in the House of Representatives as caretake Prime Minister, the House
voted a motion of no confidence in Fraser and voted a motion of confidence in
Whitlam. The House dispatched the Speaker, Gordon Scholes, to Government House
to advise the Governor-General to recall Whitlam as Prime Minister.
Instead, Kerr refused to see Scholes. He kept him waiting at
the gate for an hour. Instead, he had parliament prorogued by proclamation by
his official secretary David Smith, leading to the now famous scene on the
steps of Old Parliament House where Whitlam, responding to Smith’s proclamation
“God save the Queen”, emerged from behind Smith and 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. They won't silence the outskirts of
Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for a few weeks. ...
Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be
held and until polling day.”
It’s hard to imagine a more
miserable or despised figure in Australian public life. The mental image of
Kerr which is lodged in my mind is his appearance at the 1977 Melbourne Cup
where he was appeared inebriated, and was his speech was drowned under the boos
of the crowd. The son of a boilmaker, Kerr has risen to the highest offices in
his state and his country. And he knew it. When you read or listen to Kerr, he
was well aware of his own self-importance. And recent revelations about his behaviour would not only today make his position untenable, but point
towards his lack of qualification for the office he assumed in 1974.
Because of his faults, and the
ease with which he could be portrayed as a drunken toft, Kerr provided an easy
scapegoat for those who were enraged by Whitlam’s dismissal. Yet it is
important to distinguish between personal dislike of the man, the
constitutional action he took. Driven by improper motive, Kerr’s actions were
neither unprecedented or illegal. While the powers he exercised had long
remained dormant, they were not extinguished. And while me wish that a
different, wiser Governor-General had chosen a different path, or been more
careful in their use of reserve power, dismissing the Prime Minister remained a
valid and open option for Kerr.
While Kerr’s legacy is
seemingly irredeemable, Malcolm Fraser’s reputation underwent a renaissance
after leaving politics.
I grew up knowing Malcolm
Fraser as a reformer and advocate of human rights. He became known as the great
humanitarian, unafraid to critique his own party and former colleagues, and
even forming an unlikely partnership with Gough Whitlam.
The Malcolm Fraser of 1975 was
far more impetuous. We forget that Fraser had already ended the Prime
Ministership of WWII hero John Gorton in 1971. According to Fraser, Gorton was
"unfit to hold the great office of Prime Minister".
(At least in 1971 MPs had the
decency to resign from cabinet before assassinating their leader.)
Become coming to power, Fraser’s
tactic was an all-or-nothing, scorched earth approach. Arguably, he was an Opposition
Leader in the same vein as Tony Abbot – a wrecker.
And it worked.
After only seven months of
becoming Opposition Leader, Fraser found himself in The Lodge.
Fraser used the numbers of the
Liberal and Country parties in the Senate to block supply to Whitlam’s
government. Whitlam could not pass his budget, and the government was at risk
of running out of money. Hence some of the crazier schemes like the Loans
Scandal that Labor frontbenchers employed to keep their political agenda afloat.
However, it was Fraser’s temperament
which caused the 1975 constitutional crisis. Assuming the mantle of Opposition
Leader in March, by September Fraser had triggered the Supply Crisis. He did so
because he was impatient; Fraser wanted to dam the flow of money to the
government in an effort to force an early election in the hope of winning
power. While the Senate had the power under the constitution to do so, there
was an unwritten constitutional convention that an opposition would not try to
use the Senate to block supply.
Other conventions were breached
to bring about the Supply Crisis. Despite winning a double-dissolution election
in 1974 and therefore arguably having a mandate to pursue his policies, Labor
never held a working majority in the Senate. Whilst the government and
opposition were initially forced to work with the cross-bench to pass or block
legislation, things changed dramatically in 1975.
In February one of the two
independents joined the Liberal Party, living the Senate with a makeup of 30 Coalition
Senators, 29 Labor Senators, and 1 independent Senator. This changed again when
two-Labor held senate seats needed to be replaced by their respective state
parliaments, in this case NSW and QLD. Both states were governed at the time by
Coalition parties; both states broke long standing convention and did not appoint
replacements chosen by the party who had won the seats at the last election. NSW
selected an independent, whilst QLD selected a Labor member who opposed Whitlam
and was prepared to vote against supply. With these two appointments, the Coalition
was given control over the upper house.
(It is worth noting that under
Fraser’s premiership, the constitution was amended via the 1977 referendum which
required state parliaments to replace a senator with a member of the same
political party).
Able to take advantage of these
changes in the senate, Fraser pushed Australian federal politics to the brink. It
may have been expected that Whitlam, unable to secure supply, would call for an
election. But having won an election less than 24 months prior, refused to play
Fraser’s game. Parliament was deadlocked.
In breaching the longstanding
convention over supply, Fraser played a destructive form of politics which
created fault lines and rage in Australian politics that continue to run deep. The
Palace Papers reveal that seeing the deadlock coming, Kerr had been searching
for months for a way to end the deadlock without compromising the constitution.
Hr consulted widely – and this would give the Opposition the opportunity it
needed to end the deadlock in their favour.
Arguably the most insidious action
Fraser took during the crisis was, when Kerr turned to hi m for advice, Fraser
entered into consultation and negotiation with a Governor-General who was
frightened over their own position of power. In a breach of protocol, Fraser
was even ensconced inside Government House without Whitlam’s knowledge while Kerr
withdrew the commission of the government.
In offering Kerr his ongoing support
to remain in Yarralumla, Fraser conspired and exploited the tension between Whitlam
and Kerr to his own advantage. Where Whitlam lost office, and Kerr lost his
reputation and legacy, it was Fraser – the instigator behind the Supply Crisis
and its resolution – who became the chief beneficiary of the dismissal.
When tested in 1975, our
constitutional monarchy worked. It wasn't pretty. Many Australians then and
since have had visceral reactions to how it happened. We may rightly question
some of the judgments and tactics. But the strength of the Australian political
system was to rest the most incredible of powers in the hands, not of
politicians, but independent guardians entrusted to use them sparingly. And
when they were used, the means for breaking the deadlock was given back to the
Australian people in the 1975 election.
Of course, there is a
cautionary tale in all of this. The outcome may have been different with other
actors in the lead roles on November 12. Though it now appears from The
Palace Letters that Whitlam contacted Buckingham Palace to briefly encourage
their persuasion of Kerr to reinstate a Whitlam government, Whitlam was otherwise
the constitutionalist. He called for rage, but rage to be expressed at the
ballot box, and not the barricade.
So many of our traditions and
conventions rest on having people of character in office. What would have
happened if Whitlam had no such integrity? In an age where ministerial responsibility and political indiscretion carry less responsibility than they once did, have we forgone character, integrity, and virtue in our political representatives?
I claim no ownership of the photos on this page. Click on each image for the owner.
I claim no ownership of the photos on this page. Click on each image for the owner.
