Category Archives: Monarchy

‘Palace letters’ reveal the palace’s fingerprints on the dismissal of the Whitlam government

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Independent Australia

Chris Wallace, University of Canberra

The “palace letters” show the Australian Constitution’s susceptibility to self-interested behaviour by individual vice-regal representatives. They also reveal the vulnerability of Australian governments to secret destabilisation by proxy by the Crown.

They reveal a governor-general, fearing his own dismissal, succumbing to moral hazard, and the British monarch’s private secretary encouraging him in the idea that a double dissolution was legitimate in the event a government could not get its budget bills passed.

The letters confirm the worst fears of those who viewed Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s sacking of the Whitlam government as a constitutional coup. They reveal Kerr shortened by at most a mere three months the resolution of the crisis created by the conservative Malcolm Fraser-led opposition’s refusal to pass the government’s budget bills, compared to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s own timetable shared with Kerr.

The correspondence shows Kerr was privy to Whitlam’s plan to hold a double-dissolution election in February 1976 if all other avenues, including a half-Senate election, failed to secure passage of the budget beforehand. Whitlam candidly told Kerr he would be replaced as governor-general if he obstructed that plan. This introduced the element of moral hazard that saw Kerr take a reckless and self-interested route in ending the crisis rather than the steadier one privately put to him by Whitlam – one that Kerr could have, had he chosen, quite properly facilitated.

Crucially, the palace provided a specific nudge to Kerr in the direction of dismissing the government as a solution. It did so by highlighting one expert’s view that Kerr could secure an election while saving his own position as governor-general.

The palace provided a specific nudge to Kerr on dismissing the government. AAP/EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga

A September 24 1975 letter from the queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, to Kerr pointed him to Canadian constitutional law expert Eugene Forsey’s opinion that:

[…] if supply is refused this always makes it constitutionally proper to grant a dissolution.

In such correspondence, the queen’s private secretary is understood as speaking for the queen herself. As such, this could be interpreted as the monarch providing not just comfort but actual encouragement to the governor-general in his sacking of the government.

By adding his point about Forsey as a handwritten postscript to the letter, Charteris created a degree of ambiguity on this score, giving rise to a potential argument that it was Charteris’s personal view and not that of the queen.

Read more: ‘Palace letters’ show the queen did not advise, or encourage, Kerr to sack Whitlam government

But this should be read in the context of the overall correspondence in the year leading up to The Dismissal. In these letters, Kerr repeatedly canvasses the opposition’s potential blocking of supply, the likely resulting constitutional crisis and his difficulties in that context. There is, notably, no counterveiling call from the palace to let the legitimately elected prime minister see his plan through, even though Kerr had conveyed Whitlam’s plan to the palace.

 

In a crucial letter to Charteris on September 30, Kerr outlined Whitlam’s privately proposed electoral path to a resolution.

In the event the opposition continued to block the budget bills, Whitlam wanted to hold a half-Senate election. After that the government would again put the budget bills to the Senate. Should the opposition continue to block them, Whitlam planned a double-dissolution election. Kerr relayed to Charteris Whitlam’s view that it “could not take place until February 1976”.

Why didn’t Kerr co-operate with Whitlam to implement this relatively speedy path to resolution of the crisis? The answer likely lies in Whitlam’s candour in telling Kerr he would ask the queen to replace Kerr should he not accede to the plan.

Since the letters through Charteris also confirm the queen’s intention, unreservedly, to accept Whitlam’s advice to sack Kerr should she be asked to do so, Kerr knew this threat to be real and increasingly immediate.

The question is, since the queen made clear through Charteris she would uphold Australia’s constitutional convention that the monarch follow the prime minister’s advice, why would her representative, Kerr, not simply do the same with regard to Whitlam’s plans for the crisis’s resolution?

Read more: The big reveal: Jenny Hocking on what the ‘palace letters’ may tell us, finally, about The Dismissal

This is the note missing from the palace side of the correspondence – an absence against which Charteris’s handwritten postscript pointing Kerr to the Forsey opinion that “dissolution” was a legitimate option when governments fail to get their money bills passed is stark.

Forsey was later a strong public supporter of Kerr’s sacking of the Whitlam government. No wonder the palace fought to stop these letters being released.

Chris Wallace, Associate Professor, 50/50 By 2030 Foundation, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘Volcanic’: Evidence of Queen’s involvement in the 1975 dismissal uncovered

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Representatives of the British government flew to Australia in the lead-up to the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government to meet with the then governor-general, casting further doubt on the accepted narrative that London officials did not play an active role in Australia’s most significant constitutional crisis.

Historian Jenny Hocking discovered files in the British archives showing Sir Michael Palliser, the newly appointed permanent under-secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, arrived in Canberra a month before the dismissal and held a joint meeting with Sir John Kerr and the British High Commissioner, Sir Morrice James, just as the Senate was blocking supply.

Sir Michael later reported back to London that Sir John “could be relied upon”.

“What is in those files is, to my mind, volcanic,” Professor Hocking, a research professor with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, told Fairfax Media.

“These are extraordinary materials indicating that the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British High Commission are in discussion about the possibility of interfering in domestic Australian politics, specifically in the half Senate election, in the lead-up to November 1975.”

Although there is no detailed report on the meeting nor any correspondence relating to it, there is a draft itinerary to show this “planned contact between the head of the Foreign Commonwealth Office and the Queen’s representative in Australia on such a significant date in our political history,” Professor Hocking said.

Immediately after the meeting Sir John Kerr cancelled a planned international trip to remain in Australia.

Professor Hocking believes the Queen knew what might happen to the government well before it happened – unlike Whitlam, who was caught completely off-guard by the actions of November 11, 1975.

Although Sir John’s role in updating the Queen and the British government about the events is well known, what remains unclear is how active government and royal players in London were in trying to prevent the 1975 half Senate election from being called.

“Kerr met with the British High Commission within days of the dismissal and communicated to him had dismissed the government in order to protect the Queen’s position. That should have no place in the governor-general’s thinking,” Professor Hocking said ahead of Wednesday’s release of a new edition of her book, The Dismissal Dossier, which contains the revelation of the meeting pointing to Britain’s involvement in the dismissal.

“Prior to 1986 and the passage of the Australia Act there was a perception that the Australian states were in a quasi colonial relationship in which Britain could exercise its own interests. It acted to protect those interests in approaching the government-general. It’s an extraordinary development.”

Professor Hocking is also waiting for a Federal Court judgement on her application to have access to what are known as the ‘Palace letters’, the correspondence between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace which she believes will – finally – reveal just what the Palace knew of Sir John’s intentions in the lead-up to the dismissal.

The letters are held by the National Archives of Australia which has deemed them “personal” – rather than official – correspondence that will not be released until 2027. They may never be released if Buckingham Palace decides to exercise its power of veto over their release.

Professor Hocking says a joint Australian-British inquiry into the events leading up to the dismissal, which remains Australia’s greatest constitutional crisis, is needed.

“We need to know what happened at this key time in our history but we also need to look forward to the implications of this for the way we might construct the powers of a head of state when we become a republic,” Professor Hocking said.

Next month marks the 42nd anniversary of the dismissal.

Further evidence of Queen’s involvement in the 1975 dismissal uncovered.

Published by Sydney Morning Herald, O

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