It was Monday November 3, 1975, and on a practice track somewhere in Melbourne, champion horse Think Big was being taken for a light canter.
It was the day before the Melbourne Cup, and the 1974 winner was widely tipped to get the double. Think Big — she was a crowd favourite and the name was much in the air. Was it on the minds of the nation’s leaders that morning, as they descended on Melbourne for the race that stops a nation?
Sir John Kerr and Gough Whitlam would all be in town that momentous day, as Sir John would tell the palace in his letter about that day. With the Palace Letters now available, we can see clearly what a momentous day this was — measured not only by what John Kerr told the Palace, but by what he didn’t.
Monday November 3 was the start of the last full week that the supply crisis could play out, without a decision having to be made as to whether a pre-Christmas election could be called — either a half-Senate or a double dissolution. That would have to be done by Tuesday November 11, for a December 13 poll (December 20 was out of the question).
Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser had announced his intent to block supply on October 15. But his early confidence was already slipping. Whitlam had turned the crisis into what both Kerr and the Queen’s secretary Martin Charteris would call a 1909/1910 moment — referring to UK prime minister H. H. Asquith’s breaking of the power of the House of Lords.
Thus, Kerr notes that Fraser had come to see him with a compromise — if Whitlam agreed to a House of Representatives election by mid-1976 (a year early), then Fraser would accept a half-Senate election before Christmas. At a Melbourne Cup eve function, Kerr passed on the offer to Whitlam and Whitlam told him there would be no deal whatsoever
But it’s what Kerr didn’t mention that is of interest. For the day before, Sunday November 2, in a speech at Port Augusta, Whitlam had announced that National Country Party leader Doug Anthony was tied up with a CIA agent operating clandestinely in Australia, and accused the NCP of getting CIA funding.
Whitlam hadn’t named him, but on the morning of Monday November 3, in the AFR, Brian Toohey had. He was Richard Stallings, first director of the Pine Gap spy facility in the 1960s, who had returned to Australia in the ’70s as a covert operative.
That week, the revelation of Stallings (and others) would send the national security establishment into uproar. Why? Well, because the US government regularly gave the Australian government a list of CIA agents operating in Australia.
Stallings wasn’t on that list, but he was on a second list which included deep cover agents, and which was provided only to ASIO, ASIS and permanent defence head Arthur Tange. Whitlam’s intention to, as prime minister, name Stallings in parliament as an unlisted agent would throw the intelligence relationship into uproar.
For the national security establishment, Whitlam’s punchy attitude was a clear indication that he had gone rogue. By 1975, US-Australia relations were at a low ebb. The US national secretary establishment had been gunning for the Whitlam government since attorney-general Lionel Murphy’s raid on ASIO HQ in 1973.
ASIO had been letting violent, fascist Croatian Ustashe groups run wild in Australia, as a way of preventing a visit by the Yugoslavia president Josip Broz Tito, the key player in the Non-Aligned Movement group of nations.
This was seen as unforgivable, according to CIA counter-intelligence guru James Jesus Angleton; a government raid on the “crown jewels” of inter-agency shared intelligence.
Going for broke
Through 1975 things were heating up. In December 1974, Whitlam had endorsed Labor MP Rex Connor’s search for billions in petro-dollars loans, to bypass the priority hold British banks had on Australian capital raising; the ASIO head had been replaced by a non-spy; and the ASIS head had been sacked for running an off-the-books mission in newly independent East Timor.
The nat sec establishment had presumed Whitlam to be a pro-US centrist figure. It now looked like he had been captured by the party’s anti-US left.
By far the most alarming gesture was Whitlam’s raising of the leases on US bases, particularly Pine Gap. These were due for renewal on December 9, and it was hitherto thought to be a formality. But in early 1973, Whitlam had told US ambassador Walter Rice that the bases would become an issue if the US continued to heavy Australia on security or cut it out of export markets.
The revival of that threat so close to lease renewal was a nightmare. In his Port Augusta speech, Whitlam had asserted that the National Country Party was funded by the CIA. He was going for broke.
Now here’s what’s significant in the Kerr letter of November 3: he makes no mention of any of this at all. Having kept the palace updated on the political situation at a level of such detail that he asked whether it was perhaps too much for Her Majesty, he entirely leaves out matters pertaining to national security — and to the unity of the Commonwealth.
Why would that be? The plain fact is that Sir John Kerr was now the servant of two masters. He was a former CIA asset who had become a British high-Tory type. He was desperate to serve both, while keeping them apart.
The real John Kerr
History has bequeathed us the top-hatted drunk. But the real John Kerr was an entirely different man, about which I’ll say more next week.
The short take is that Kerr was a Marxist radical in the 1930s who got taken up by powerful forces in World War II and became, in the late 1940s, both an anti-communist and a client of CIA front groups, such as the Australian Association of Cultural Freedom, of which he made a failed tilt to be president.
The British bling and fawning came later, and very much as a consolation prize. Kerr saw himself as a man in history, part of the double movement — people called to the radical left by the squalor of the ’30s, and then called to US support by the squalor of Stalinism.
So I do not believe for a second that he was unaware of the back-and-forth over US bases and CIA sleeper agents. We know that he quizzed Whitlam at length over the sacking of the head of ASIS — yet that doesn’t appear in the letters either.
We know that Kerr had an official, calendared meeting with chief defence scientist John Farrands on October 28. A week earlier, Whitlam’s staff had asked Tange for the list of CIA agents in Australia — with Tange providing the “outer” list which had not included Stallings. Tange had not, at that stage, known that Whitlam’s office had Stallings name.
Farrands was one of the few Australians who knew how Pine Gap really worked and its huge importance to the US empire — that it not only gave the US an edge on the USSR in monitoring (in breach of treaties), but was a pioneer in mass surveillance of general communications, hoovering up phone calls and telexes.
Farrands’ meet with Kerr would appear to be part of a decision by Tange and others to do an “end run” around Whitlam. Did Kerr raise these matters with Whitlam at the November 3 Cup Day eve meeting? It would seem unlikely he did not, since there is no indication that Kerr observed any propriety boundaries in general discussion of politics.
Things were moving fast now, as Brian Toohey related. On Tuesday November 4 Whitlam’s defence minister Bill Morrison went to see NCP leader Anthony on Tange’s request (Tange, now Morrison’s servant, had been Morrison’s boss) to try and talk him out of challenging Whitlam on Stallings CIA membership (Anthony had not known Stallings was CIA). Anthony refused, and on Thursday November 6 tabled a question on notice for Tuesday 11 November regarding the matter.
Staying in line
On Saturday November 8 things kicked up a notch, with the arrival of a telex from Ted Shackley, head of the CIA’s East Asia desk, to his ASIO opposite number stating that intelligence sharing would cease if ASIO, basically, couldn’t keep its own government in line.
The telex went to Tange on Sunday November 9, and to Whitlam’s office on Monday November 10 (an indication of where the power lay).
Farrands would later tell Toohey that he had briefed Kerr by phone that weekend regarding the Shackley telex — the scientist’s involvement in this lobbying can only have been because of the importance of the bases.
Farrands would later deny he had said such (though Toohey had repeated Farrands assertion to Whitlam the same afternoon as he spoke to Farrands – the occasion was a Canberra garden party).
Tange would deny that Farrands had briefed Kerr at all, save for the calendared October 28 meeting which was listed as a “get to know the public servants” meet.
But Tange would later slip up.
In his posthumously-published memoirs, he records a “November meeting” between Kerr and Farrands. Was this the phone briefing of November 8-9? Or was it a November 3 meeting at the Watsonia, Melbourne army base, which Farrands somtimes worked out of because it was the base for the Defence Signals Directorate, the Australian liaison with the US operators of Pine Gap?
On Monday November 10, Tange and Farrands tried to persuade Whitlam, via a briefing note, to answer Anthony’s question the next day by using the official US line that Stallings was merely a US defence department ex-employee.
Whitlam refused to mislead parliament. He never got the chance; Kerr sacked him before Question Time was due to begin.
Thinking big
This sequence of events has been known for some time (though previously no one appears to have twigged that Tange inadvertently owned up a November Farrands-Kerr meeting), but the revelation of the Palace Letters fills it out absolutely.
Why? Because at the beginning of the week Sir John Kerr is still referring to the Senate votes on supply as “deferrals”, remarking that the government has funds until the end of November — and treating the matter, in conversation, as if it was still a party political stoush.
But through that week of November 3 to November 10, he is seeking more urgent advice on the use of “reserve powers”. Importantly, he asks not only whether they still exist in a usable form (which was a real question at the time) but, crucially, whether they would have had to be exercised the first time the Senate blocked supply.
In other words, Kerr is asking whether reserve powers are somehow tied to the events of parliament, or whether they retain an absolute and arbitrary character.
He gets the answer that they do from two quarters: from right-wing high court chief justice Garfield Barwick who reaffirms their independent character; and from the palace, which supplies the argument from Canada’s King-Byng affair of the 1920s.
But Barwick’s written advice, which arrived on November 10, is perfunctory — it simply asserted that the powers continue to exist. And the palace affirms the governor-general as the people’s representative in the older framework of dominion status.
That interpretation is anti-democratic and leads to absurdity — as it did on November 11, when the House immediately passed a no confidence vote in Malcolm Fraser and a confidence vote in the “member for Werriwa”.
How did Kerr deal with that? He told the Palace on November 20 that he presumed the reserve powers to carry over beyond the crisis, and to give him the authority to prorogue parliament until the election, refusing any communication from the House of Reps speaker, with Fraser’s commission as caretaker PM still in tact.
What was one of the duties that befell him as caretaker? The renewal of the Pine Gap lease falling due on December 9, four days before the election. Which of course Fraser duly did.
As Barwick said later, “Sir John did his duty”. So did Farrands. After denying he had said he had briefed Kerr, he ended his career being made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, a rare honour indeed.
After the Dismissal, Kerr would include a clipping of an article by Brian Toohey outlining the Stallings affair — which would seem to be very much arse-covering. The Palace Letters give strong weight to the evidence that Kerr was crucially influenced by the US-alliance crisis to make a decision for an arbitrary dismissal at a date and in a manner that, two weeks earlier, he does not appear to have been contemplating.
Quite a lot happened on Monday November 3, 1975. The next day Think Big thundered home to get the Melbourne Cup double. And Sir John Kerr began thinking big himself.
Superb, painstaking dot-joining. The logic is relentless, and much more will emerge from incidental and satellite archives in the months and years ahead, to flesh it out even more indisputably. It’s only possible to dismiss this coolly reconstructed narrative as ‘conspiracy theorising’ if you scrabble evermore ludicrously to keep stuffing bits of dead grass into the absurd, collapsing distraction of some Hollywood cloak-and-dagger strawman. (Looking at you, Paul Kelly, you silly old scarecrow stuffer.) Successful conspiracies don’t leave ‘smoking guns’, is the point. If you have to shoot someone, it’s a frigging heist, and the cops get called, and there’s usually a chase, and even an arrest, a trial, a guilty bastard.
This was an absolutely successful, wilfully-engineered anti-democratic soft coup, one that changed our country (and our national character) profoundly, and continues to do so, to this day. It was pulled off by a serendipitous confluence of ruthlessly clinical ‘born to rule’ cohorts who, in various guises through all human history, have taken it upon themselves to ‘protect the rest of us’ from our own organised civic agency. Those cohorts are the same ones who today protest virulently against a proper historical accounting and reckoning, like GR’s – in reality a pointing out of the blindingly f**king obvious. It’s a continuum, they’re still at it: the Murdochian types, who believe they must protect the ‘stupid masses’ with dumbed-down democratic storytelling, election-wrangling, private deal-trysts with would-be PM’s and Presidents; security-obsessed bullies and cynics and too-smart-by-half wannabe Kissingers, playing their odious Great Games; the vapid mediocrities of the privileged establishments, then royalty, now celebrity too, then old money, now all money, including the Twiggys and Elons and Jeffs who want to buy the world into fairness (rather than just pay their f**king taxes like the rest of us). The one thing these cohorts all have in common is a hatred – a fear – of real democracy. Because that’s a loss of their control of our village, and if you lose control of your village…you have to rely on just being a decent, fair and equal part of it. It matters now more than ever to haul The Dismissal into the interrogation light at last, because Australia’s enduring squishy constitutional status as only a ‘sort of’ democracy, and our now even deeper strategic enmeshment with the US in a far more potent geopolitical ‘hinge moment’ than even the Cold War, leaves us more vulnerable to something similar again, in different clothing: another unspoken coup, another ‘legal’, ‘constitutional’ (smoking gun-free, Paul) usurping of our democratic will and agency, in broad daylight, with our complicity.
Australian democracy needs to grow up, fast..
It is claimed that Parliament is made up of elected representatives of people – nice fiction but let’s just accept it for the moment.
There, when others have “…taken it upon themselves to ‘protect the rest of us’ from our own organised civic agency“, aka Parliament, it can only be to protect us from ourselves, unworthy creatures than we be.
This is the usual, proclaimed & approved(!FFS?), purpose of religious organisations – “listen to your betters now and tomorrow, after you’re dead, things will be better”.
“The one thing these cohorts all have in common is a hatred – a fear – of real democracy“
Worth repeating. It has ever been thus.
Debt and deficit is the latest tool of oppression. The orthodox economists are quite scared that the populace might wake up to the fact that govts print their own money, don’t really have any debts, and deficits can be racked up if the money is spent for the common good. Business doesn’t want you to know that tax cuts have no effect on employment or investment decisions. Rich people want you to think that family trusts and Cayman Islands accounts aren’t about tax dodging, and they don’t want you to know that highly progressive income tax rates are actually beneficial for the economy AND society.
There are many tools of oppression, but having a fake democracy is surely the King, the nuclear arsenal behind all the conventional myths.
To misquote Beaudelaire: “Democracy’s greatest trick is to convince us that it exists”.
Exactly.
Baudelaire’s Mal de Fleur (Flowers of Evil) are in full bloom.
Where is the Tall Flower syndrome when needed?
Aye, Indy….Religion, ’sacrifice and duty’, ‘constitutional stability’, ‘case law’, ‘the economy’, ‘market forces’….’Judeo-Christian civilisation’, even ‘the ideal of liberal debate and free speech’ (note the current Harper’s/Weiss eyedust-throwing)…there are so many glittering abstract mirages the (invisibly vicious, cunning, bare-teethed) privileged conjure up, to bewitch us into relinquishing our own collective agency. Shamanism, really – the hypnotic comfort of surrendering our own (ie universal) sentient and material world privileges/obligations to ‘ancient tribal mummy and daddy’. You really have to work hard in these tinselly, sophisticated, comfortable, narcissistic times to eschew becoming captive to some or other paralysing bauble. It’s why I swear, rant and abuse the powerful as directly as I can (get past the Mods) in comments here :-). The first part of not being screwed by the powerful is to make it impossible for them to even want to duchess you into knotting your own noose, much less do so!
Spot on, Dogs. The tools are many and varied but the aim is always the same: the prevent us from fully grasping the power of our collective agency. That’s why social meeja terrifies the powerful. We are so close now to a kind of global stepping-up in collective, material world agency. The centre won’t hold…except as the centre-if-gravity of seven billion tweeting agencies. You watch. The End of Childhood.
Quality rant there, Jack. I’d read that any day of the week.
Crikey, sign him up!
Damn! Hat’s off to Crikey, Guy Rundle . . and Jack R. Oh, if only journalism nation wide was as good. 10 out of 10.
Why, then did Rundle, a day or 2 ago, resort to asking Anne Twomey for advice, when she has followed Paul Kelly to the letter?
Those claiming they know the Constitution, and the Palace Letters’ importance have, like Kelly and Twomey more so, found a marvellous “independence” of Australia by selectively picking a few letters.
This is the worst revisionism that Australians do not need right now, when the latest representative of the Liberal Party, the illiberal party PM Scott Morrison and his claque, seem to behave as though they are above the law.
The Palace and the CIA connections in the constitutional coup were events long before most Australians were born. But they set a bad scene to the present day, just when the plotting of the 1930s also against duly elected Labor governments, had seemed to horrify many, back then.
My view is Crikey has not been as strong as Menadue’s web site. As well, Malcolm Fraser lived to regret his terrible deceptions, and made personal amends but that did not change this legacy of ASIO, ruling class domination, and craven actions to the USA now.
There are Journalists and scientists who ‘pen’ stories both factual, detailed and of real interest to cross-section of general public.
There also are Journalists and scientists who incorporate all of above but are blessed with instinct, rhetoric that adds to readership. They are the ones able to elevate interest? Do agree re Menadue’s web content.
What are you talking about? I didn’t ask Twomey for advice. Yr comment makes no sense
The Thin Review devoted acres of space to pumping up the Twomey legend, today.
As a kinda ‘black letter Constitutional law scholar’.
Meaning, she misses the point, completely – all coups are political acts, and the endlessly interpretable law is only ever an enabler of that political act
She has tenure to protect.
The ABC’s Connor Duffy did a reasonable report on the value of tenure, on the news tonight.
‘Takeway’? Tertiary education in Oz is now farked.
Why? Casualisation. Example: Melb Uni, with $4B in reserves, has a casualisation rate of 70+%.
They’re burying the redundancies in the ‘insecure employment’ numbers, and thousands, 10’s of thousands, are being ‘let go’ without even registering.
According to Duffy, Victoria is the only state to require tertiary instos to report their casual numbers.
Joint’s stuffed, and we still bleat about the Chinamen nicking our brain(s).
Fun fact. At last count, Huawei had 96,000 employees working in R & D.
And, tonight, on ABC News Telly, it was “Huawi” – even when they had “Huawei” on a building in the background shot, with “Huawi” in the banner headline rolling across the screen.
Not sure we have too much more dumbing down to go.
My Mandarin is terrible even after a decade in the PRC but “Huawi” is indicative of not considering the Pinyin. The company name is pronounced as a “fh” with a suppressed ‘a’ in “far’. As an aside, the (long) history of the
company is fascinating.
As for the ABC it was worth keeping to about 1995 but I’d be happy so see it dissolved. Even the news is expressed in (uncultivated) “ocker” (to say nothing of the presenters).
As to tenure (or fair-mindedness) even Bertie Russell did not do well in the USA university system. Russell never sought tenure but the example holds.
While there will be a need for English in Asia (from informed native speakers) STEM teaching is rapidly coming to an end for the ‘laowai’ (which translates a something between ‘foreigner’ and ‘barbarian’)
While assisting some students from Saudi Arabia in essay writing for a MEd, over a decade ago, I was surprised to discover that the content taught at Grad Dip Ed level had morphed into a Masters programme.
Your last statement : no, David. There may well be a boundary for the top but there is nothing for the base. The forecast of Lee Kuan Yew for Australia, 40 years ago, is actually quite real. One only has to look to Singapore’s education system.
Thank you Guy.
The omissions from Kerr’s accounts to the Palace carry heavy significance. So does the covert manipulation by the CIA via Tange.
A rhetorical question: How can Fraser possibly consider that the concealment of the real agenda from the Australian people is in the national interest? Only because it got Fraser into the Lodge?
The Dog that Didn’t Bark.
In many fields, omissions are highly significant.
Fascinating. Conservatives still argue to this day that all it was was getting rid of a “corrupt government due to the Khemlani Loans Affair.
The nature of power remains obscure – where does it reside, who has it and how is it wielded?
The House voted No Confidence in Kerr’s Cur ergo the G/G was obliged to seek another “who could Control the Floor of the House of Representatives”.
He refused to do so – was he backed up by hulks 10mts tall using telegraph poles as clubs? Unlikely.
As always, it’s the nasty little Jobsworths, several levels down who do whatever they are told without thought or compunction.
I think Hannah Arendt described that sort of person 40yrs ago and they are still with us.
Banality on steroids, Indunn.
Coincidentally, Hannah Arendt came to mind this morning, as I was reading about Mathias Cormann’s ‘much mooted career pivot to the IMF’.
Arendt on Eichmann;
“What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
Sounds like Adolf E. would have been another well suited to a career pivot to the IMF.
This also has a ring of likeness;
“Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it,” the great French philosopher and activist Simone Weil wrote in 1933 as she contemplated how to be a complete human being amid a world that seemed to be falling apart.”
Adolf E. was actually a competent administrator. He was kidnapped for just that reason. He followed his JDF and “turned the handle”. To him that was his job (or indeed any job that he had). I doubt if the perceptions of Weil ever occurred to
Eichmann.
Similarly for Dr Schacht who bought Germany’s inflation under control. His secretary, Fraulein Steffeck, when interviewed years later declared that he merely chain-smoked and made copious telephone calls.