"All because he didn't have any socks!"
Ha ha ha ha. Wait. You're not laughing.
That's probably because that's the punchline to a joke which was told so long ago that everyone has forgotten what the joke was and that there ever was a joke.
That demonstration of a punchline to a joke that nobody remembers is kind of what yesterday was like. Yesterday, the correspondence between the Governor-General John Kerr and the Palace were made available to the public for the first time. Or rather, the correspondence was given the impression that it was made public because if you'd actually managed to get through to the National Archives of Australia website, you would have been confronted with the rotating donut of doom and not actually got through to the letters themselves.
There are according to the index, some 400 plus pages of correspondence which had been under suppression orders for the last 44 years and some of them made their way out into the hands of the general public, thanks to the leaking from journalists. I haven't yet been able to get to the storehouse of documents itself but I have seen the punchline in one of the letters which reads:
“I should say that I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because under the Constitution the responsibility is mine and I was of the opinion that it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance, though it it, of course, my duty to tell her immediately.”
- Kerr, 11-11-1975
The short answer to the 44 year old mystery is that the Governor-General John Kerr acted on his own accord, using the powers assigned to him by the Constitution, to remove a Prime Minister and the Government; without the direction or interference from the Queen. Put simply, this was an entirely Australian coup, carried out without informing the Queen until after the act was finished.
No doubt that the republicans will question why we should continue with the institution of the Crown, despite the fact that the dissolution of a Premiership has only happened twice in Australia since 1855 (Lang in NSW in 1931, Whitlam Federally in 1975); which means to say twice in more than a thousand legislative years. Neither of those occasions were the result of interference with from the monarch, which means that functionally, Australia is independent.
These people are more concerned with symbols than the actual functioning of government and they generally have no idea whatsoever about how to put safeguards in the system; thus guaranteeing that it will happen again.
Monarchists will probably cringe and backpedal at the thought that the Queen stood idle in the process while her representatives assumed the power of Vice-Regal and smashed democracy in the process. The obvious question of what the point of the monarchy is for in the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, comes into sharp focus. If the monarch functionally is completely useless, then why should it persist?
I don't know exactly how many monarchists there are but if they are primarily concerned with the symbols rather than the actual functioning of government, then the chances are that they are in favour of the existing power structures precisely because they derive some selfish advantage from it.
Pragmatists like me, point to the vagueness of the powers assigned to the Governor-General and will assign praise to the fact that because nobody actually knows what the powers of the Governor-General are, they are loathe to use them.
I think that Australia ended up with a pretty good system of government through some design via the Constitutional Conventions of the 1880s and 1890s and through sheer dumb luck and historical accident, thanks to some utterly selfish designs after the First World War; which have backfired magnificently.
I don't particularly care whether or not we have a Monarch or a President other than to say that Australia has comprehensively proven that its legislative bodies are cruel. I really don't want to see the institutions change if it results in more cruelty and more corruption; which unfortunately given the knavery of the political parties in this country, I see as absolutely inevitable. Unless someone is able to comprehensively lay out a set of changes to the system which are demonstrably logically better, then I waggle my pointing finger of judgement and say that they haven't thought it through properly.
What the release of these letters proves is that the palace was so far removed from the process as to be completely irrelevant. The really scary thing isn't that Kerr used the powers which were available to him but rather, it appears as though he may have been egged on to use them. I still haven't been through the archive of letters yet but I bet that they will contain nothing of Kerr's meetings with either Malcolm Fraser or worse, Rupert Murdoch.
It is an established fact that Kerr stayed for the weekend on Murdoch's estate in the Southern Highlands in October of 1975, but I suspect that the details of what were discussed that weekend will never be known. Kerr is dead and so can not discuss the matter and everything that I have read about Rupert Murdoch on the issue, indicates that he feigns ignorance on the matter. As there are no stories told in a vacuum, then this part of the story remains untold.
Perhaps even more of a mystery is why the Palace put suppression orders on the store of documents. I can understand that in 1976 it probably would have unleashed seven different kinds of chaos but as the long game of time plays out deeper and deeper and memory fades more and more, the ability of the letters to cause any chaos now has been inoculated.
The real tragedy in all of this is that the Constitution worked absolutely perfectly. Kerr was well within his legal powers to both make and unmake a government and even if the Fraser Government had been installed and they say on Wednesday 12th of November 1975, there would have been a vote of no confidence on the floor of the House of Representatives and Whitlam would have been remade as PM. This is akin to what we find in contracts and the so-called "double shotgun" clauses.
The real overlooked thing is that there was zero crisis of the Constitution but rather, the actual crisis was inside the Coalition in 1972 when the Whitlam Gov was elected. Having been leaderless and suffering a series of implosions following the resignation of Menzies in 1966, the born to rule mob never accepted the legitimacy of the ALP victory in 1972 or again in 1974 and entirely manufactured the 1975 crisis.
There are no conspiracies here; just a smack down fight. Fraser blocked supply, Whitlam wouldn't call an election, Kerr was afraid Whitlam would sack him, Kerr got in first. Kerr met with Murdoch, Kerr met with Fraser, Kerr wrote to the palace like a child who was afraid to admit that he hadn't done his homework. Kerr did Fraser's dirty work. The stain here is on the Liberal Party.
Fraser turned out to be a mediocre Prime Minister rather than just a gutter rat seeking power at any cost. He was like the mule with a spinning wheel in that he didn't know what to do with the power when he got it; after he shouldn't have got it.
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