Well after more than a day and a night luxuriating in the folds of the Kerr-palace letters the first thing one can say is: wow. Wow. Maybe you have to know what you’re looking for but this collection is dynamite.
It exposes how the power relations of the UK and Australia worked and still work, the many forces behind the Whitlam government dismissal, the clash of personalities that drove it to some degree and, most extraordinarily, the character of Sir John Kerr.
And with all that are its gaps and absences, all that is unsaid and unspoken but which guided the players and may be of greater significance.
Above all this cache reminds anyone on the left once again what a crime and a tragedy was not only the dismissal but the faltering of the Whitlam government, how its removal set the conditions for the place we live in now, much diminished, the runt of the settler-capitalist litter.
You want a simpler takeaway? Leaving aside many other factors which went into Kerr’s actions, my take is that Buckingham Palace wanted to strengthen the legitimacy of the Crown office of governor-general in relation to Australian elected offices.
With the 1975 struggle over supply becoming more entrenched, and Kerr in frequent communication with the palace, it recognised his weaknesses and played to them to get a clarifying result. Bizarrely, it turns out it’s all Canada’s fault. I shall explain.
And so the letters began …
First, what the documents are. Four years of correspondence between Kerr and the palace, the respondent being Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary. Within that are 1200 pages — about 200 letters, news clippings and articles sent by Kerr, and some forwarded letters that he comments on.
They begin with Kerr’s appointment after the 1974 election. He begins bombarding the palace with six-page, single-spaced typed missives on marbled blue notepaper about — everything. The political state of play. What’s happening inside the parties. The problem of inflation. His decision to wear morning suits to official events. Whether the curtsy should still be employed. And on and on.
“I regret to say I have two letters of yours which I am yet to answer … ,” Charteris replies in a crisp white note in December 1974. Much of early 1975 is taken up with Whitlam’s Australian honours list whose structure Kerr objects to and tries to undermine.
By autumn it has turned to the emerging political crisis, as the Liberal government of New South Wales and the National government of Queensland broke convention by appointing replacements for departing Labor senators not from Labor, thus giving the Coalition a Senate majority.
Opposition leader Billy Snedden, seen as ineffectual, is replaced by Malcolm Fraser who makes clear he will not be bound by the convention that the Senate does not block money bills.
Kerr is energised. He starts to include clippings in his letters, like your grandma sending you items from the paper. The question of constitutional powers begins to be discussed. Fraser publicly argues that extreme and reprehensible circumstances could justify a denial of supply, forcing an election.
He gets it when it’s revealed that Whitlam’s resources minister Rex Connor has misled parliament — and Whitlam — by continuing to use a shadowy agent Tirath Khemlani to find a $2-$4 billion loan (5-10% of GDP; $50-$100 billion today) from petro states to develop Australia’s resources sector. By mid-October Australia is in political crisis.
The crisis is multiple because in order to open up a new flank, Whitlam’s staff have outed a CIA agent, Richard Stallings, as operating in Australia, without Australian government knowledge. Stallings had built the US Pine Gap spy base in the 1960s.
The leases of that and other bases were up for renewal on December 9 and Whitlam was making noises about not renewing them. He was also planning to announce in parliament — on November 11 — that the US had lied about Stallings and other CIA operatives in Australia.
‘The crisis has broken’
However, that matter does not appear in the Palace Letters. Instead Kerr begins a process of reporting and thinking out loud to Charteris. And here’s where the story starts to diverge from the account Kerr later gave.
On October 17, 1975, Kerr tells the palace “the crisis has broken”, with the misleading of parliament now out in the open. However, on October 20 he notes that the Senate has “deferred” not “rejected” supply and that Whitlam has said that he, Whitlam, would never give way to the Senate.
He also mentions an AFR article by Andrew Clark which sets out various scenarios. These included the possibility that Kerr could move to use the governor-general’s “reserve powers” — i.e. to act without prime ministerial advice — and that Whitlam could gazump Kerr by advising the Queen to sack him.
By convention, the reserve powers had been supposed to no longer hold. A governor-general was meant to do exactly as a prime minister advised. But in that week the shadow attorney-general Bob Ellicott had issued a paper/press release (which Kerr includes) claiming that the reserve powers still exist in full force.
Whitlam meanwhile is battening down the hatches. In that week he asks the Queen to remove the “dormant commission” from Queensland’s governor Colin Hannah (the capacity for state governors to become an acting governor-general if the post is vacant). Hannah had made party political statements saying the Whitlam government should go.
Kerr is thus left in no doubt that Whitlam will use the direct route to the palace if he has to. Nevertheless, in letters on both October 27 and November 3, Kerr explicitly states that the money would not run out until the end of November. Kerr has sought advice on the reserve powers, in two directions: one, do they still exist, and two, do they compel him to sack a government as soon as its appropration bills are rejected by the Senate?
Over these last two weeks in October the shift in Kerr’s tone is unmistakable. For a year or more he has been rather pompous and long-winded, obsequious as regards titles etc. In October he understands he is at the centre of a national political crisis.
This is an era, remember, when there is still a left. Key trade union leaders — Laurie Carmichael, John Halfpenny, Norm Gallagher and others — are actual communists. In the UK a year earlier, miners’ strikes had brought down a government. The letters of October and early November to my reading don’t just sound worried that Kerr may lose his plum job — there is worry that things are about to get out of control.
Things get really complicated …
In this final week it gets really complicated. On November 3 Kerr writes that Fraser has offered a compromise — an immediate half-Senate election, an early Reps election by June 1976 — but that Whitlam refused. Whitlam is going to use the crisis to break the Senate’s power over supply once and for all. Still, Kerr asserts that the political back and forth will, and can, run to end of November.
But on November 5 and 6, two letters from Charteris — dated November 4 and 5 — “cross back” to Kerr, replying to his letter of October 27. In that he had mused about the reserve powers, and said:
I should welcome any observations on a private or personal basis which you would care to make.
In the November 4 letter, Charteris obliges:
… It is often argued that such [reserve] powers no longer exist. I do not believe this to be true. I think those powers do exist …
In the November 5 letter, he quotes a Canadian prime minister, Arthur Meighen, on the powers of the governor-general:
It is [the governor-general’s] duty to make sure that parliament is not stifled by government, but that every government is held responsible to parliament, and every parliament held responsible to the people.
These two letters, taken together, are a political intervention by the Crown in Australian politics. There is no other way to see them. Charteris had the option of saying to Kerr: “It is for your judgement alone, and Her Majesty has complete confidence in you etc.” But he doesn’t. He affirms, casually, the highly contentious idea that reserve powers are still active.
Crucial to this is the quote from Meighen, Canada’s prime minister in the 1920s at the time of the “King-Byng” crisis, in which governor-general Lord Byng refused Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King’s request for a new election and gave the Conservatives, led by Meighen, the chance to try to form a government.
Meighen’s argument about the powers of the governor-general reaffirmed the notion that the executive power of commonwealth “dominions” still resided absolutely in the Crown.
There’s a lot more that happens in the five or six days between Kerr reading that letter and sacking the Whitlam government (including simplistic, purely political advice from chief justice Garfield Barwick that “of course” the reserve powers still exist), but what’s clear is this: either Kerr changes his mind about the timeline of the crisis, when and how he must act, or his prior letters to the palace have been a carefully constructed dissembling.
A smoking gun …
I do not believe the latter scenario for a second. And here’s a smoking gun of sorts. In a letter of November 17, as the country is in uproar and Whitlam is asking the Queen to re-seat him as prime minister (since the Reps had voted confidence in him), Kerr says:
The Senate might, I suppose, have given in … but after three refusals of supply … I am sure I had to get the matter to the people …
So deferrals have become refusals post-hoc. The end of November timeline has gone and the language of the justification — “the people”– are the words of Meighen’s that Charteris had quoted to Kerr, played back to him.
Kerr hadn’t really taken this line — that the governor-general was a people’s representative against the government and parliament — before. Charteris — by profession a courtier — had flattered and influenced a man who, on the evidence of the letters, was more tremulous about events that we have previously credited.
But here’s the real kicker about why this matters. Meighen’s statements derived from a crisis that occurred in the period when these countries were dominions — when the governor-general was responsible to the British Crown via the British government which had veto powers over laws enacted by dominion parliaments.
It was the King-Byng crisis and the Scullin-Isaacs crisis of 1930 (when PM James Scullin threatened to go to an election on the issue of whether the Australian PM or the British chose Australia’s governor-general) that prompted the end of the dominion system in 1930-1931. That gave commonwealth parliaments sovereign power, and contributed to retrenching the reserve powers.
Playing back the King-Byng crisis, and later recommending a pro-reserve powers book to Kerr, was the Crown’s way of using the crisis to strengthen its executive power in Australia. It saw the opportunity and took it.
There was more, much more, to Kerr’s decision, as I’ve outlined before and will return to tomorrow. But anyone who can’t see the palace playing power politics in these letters is kidding themselves. Or trying to kid others.
So would a popularly elected president (Dick Smith/Gerry Harvey or any other Sydney populist) be obliged to break the supply deadlock in like manner ?
How else do you overcome the Senate’s rogue behaviour initiated by a prince of gerrymandering ?
You can’t actually rig the senate like that any more. It has to go to the representative offered by the party as the result of a referendum in 1977. Sydney populists have nothing to do with it, but we need to be wary of how a future president might be appointed. The appointment by NSW premier Lewis was for a vacancy resulting from the Attorney General being appointed to the high court. Many did not think this was appropriate and the vacancy was not casual. The actions of Joh Bjelke-Peterson had no such excuse and were indefensible.
There is the Republican smell in the air.
What would a ‘popularly elected’ president have done differently, under the same circumstances, in 1975 ?
Note: Republicans don’t get around to the (apparently) painful question of presidential appointment or popular election in order for an elimination of the HRH association .
Do we want a media tart as Australia’s first President, because how else do you gain a high profile these days ?
Apart from Trump, are there any other ‘media tarts’ in the world occupying the position of popularly elected presidents of serious countries? Seriously, I’d really like to know.
Ronald Reagan, Volodymyr Zelensky (Ukraine) immediately come to mind.
Boris Johnson is just one other populist of many these days.
It’s the age we are enduring.
Technocrats need not apply.
We are told by the Republicans that he/she would be purely a figurehead – not, in any way, to be compared with the dangerous, populist megalomaniacs of ever increasing number in power around the world.
An excellent summary, Guy.
One wonders how closely ER11 had been monitoring Charteris’s every phrase? Perhaps power had also gone to the Queen’s secretary’s head.
Great article from Guy Rundle.
All the comments here at one level or another are spot on as well. You can not take the Queen out of the equation. But she as a member of the “Crown” was only relaying instructions from the greater body of the “Crown” – those distinguished international financier gentlemen who sit opposite Fleet Street in that one square mile of the that “City of London” just next to the City of London.
I maintain my rage but this is far too much of a stretch. Anne Twomey’s dispassionate piece in the Conversation is more persuasive.
Twomey differs from Guy on the question of whether the reserve powers existed: she says that “Charteris rightly accepted the reserve powers existed…”. I’d back her over Guy in that simple contest of opinions. But, rather than being “dispassionate’ as Howard Bamsey suggests, her acceptance of Charteris’s 17 November letter as “laying to rest” the question of whether the Queen had advance notice of the dismissal or encouraged is credulous in the extreme. Certainly, as Guy suggests, the palace (via Charteris) knew what was in Kerr’s mind.
And any half-decent practising lawyer reading the words she quotes from that letter might spot a mile away the erection of a gilt drainpipe of plausible deniability, majesty for the use of, designed for the exclusive use of a pair of rats clad in morning dress.
I’d say anodyne, rather than dispassionate, and I think she’s jumped unreasonably hastily to what is probably going to be an unsupportable position re the Queen ‘not knowing’. I also think she’s making that aspect out to be more important than it is; it’s Kerr’s actions that are the key issue.
Guy, I don’t disagree with you at all about the “palace playing power politics” but there is zero in what we have seen so far to suggest that the Queen was behind it. Rather, it seems to be that Charteris was on a serious power trip of his own.
Where do I say the Queen dun it? Thats exactly why im saying ‘palace’…
‘dun’ is Gaelic for a hill-fort. If you want to appear to be a journalist, check your spelling and grammar and us the word ‘did’.
‘ … and us the word ‘did’.”
Check your own work before criticising others.
And maybe you should think about getting a life.
ha ha. My mistake was a typo. Your mistakes were just bad spelling and grammar. Maybe you should think about ‘getting’ a life (or obtaining one). My excuse is I’m not a pretend journalist. What’s yours? Pretty thin skinned, aren’t you? can’t take criticism?
You do get that it’s a reference to “whodunnit”, right?
Job – You have mixed up G.Rundle and Browser. Slow down and you will make fewer mistakes.
Hello Browser. You are correct. I thought the comment was from Rundle. I checked back and saw it was just you sticking your bit in. I will slow down to Aussie speed so that it doesn’t happen again.
It is also cockney slang. If you don’y know that already you should just stfu.
Sorry, browser, not for you.
Guy….I took your use of such phrases as “This was the Crown’s way to strengthen its executive power in Australia.”, and “These two letters, taken together, are a political intervention by the Crown in Australian politics.” to mean that you were asserting that the Queen was at least partly involved. After all, she’s the most prominent member of ‘The Crown’, and far more prominent that Charteris who was merely an employee of the crown, and the one writing all the letters that we’re discussing.
No, thats the whole point of a phrase like ‘the crown’, snd the way it is conventionally used. Its an arm of the state, not an individual person. I have no idea how active a role the queen played. Im saying exactly what you say i should be saying
But in the Crikey Insider email, Peter Fray says “Today, as Guy Rundle writes, we can all have a deeper look. In doing so, it’s hard not to conclude that, yes, the Queen did have a hand in the Dismissal. ”
So I was certainly left with the initial impression that you were going to argue that “the Queen dun it”. It least here you’ve confirmed you were not suggesting that.
But we all know that even if it was the queen wot dun it, and it probably was given the threat felt by the CIA and no doubt British security agencies, there’ll be nothing in writing from her.
On serious matters such as this Master, do you think the Queen would have so much trust and so little dialogue with her Private Secretary? I think the Queen has played a very clever game of using Charteris to keep her own hands scrupulously clean.
Guy is on the money, and Twomey has provided an analysis very favorable to the palace and the aristocratic powers of the day.
Why might Twomey lean that way?
To conclude Queen Lizzie was not involved, you need to believe her private secretary, Charteris, did not discuss Kerr’s correspondence and growing concerns, interpreted the exercise of reserve powers on his own, replied to Kerr without her knowledge and kept Lizzie totally in the dark.
If you believe that, I have a nice bridge in Sydney you might like to buy.
I remember the time well and I always thought it had to go to the people. What I did not know as the letters reveal was that Whitlam had decided to call a double dissolution in January if all else failed. That is what should have happened and Kerr most certainly had no business doing as he did. Whitlam may well have lost the election, some members of his government were demonstrating complete ineptitude.
He may well have lost the election. But by the time of the dismissal he had disposed of the weight in his saddlebags, the 4 Cs -Cairns, Crean, Cameron and Connor, all of whom had been foisted in him by the party who insisted on having a say in choosing ministers (as I recall it). He’d replaced them them with competent people such as Bill Hayden. Whether he would have had enough time to get the Government back on track before having to hold an election is another matter.
True, but Fraser seized power promising competence that he and his party proved not to have.
That is always the way, Fairmind. It’s one of the golden threads which run through Australian politics; the other is the LNP’s knowing that it can get away with anything.