On 11 November 1975, Governor-General Sir John Kerr removed Gough Whitlam as Australia’s prime minister. He relied on what is known as a reserve power, an authority he argued the constitution implied rather than spelled out. Lawyers have argued about that power ever since, and before the dismissal many Australians had little idea the Queen’s representative held it.
The justification was money. Whitlam had failed to get parliament to approve spending, and he then declined to call an election. Kerr dismissed the Labor government to break the deadlock, and installed the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker prime minister. Voters returned Fraser’s Liberal Party by a wide margin at the election that followed.
What the palace told Kerr
For decades nobody outside the palace could read what Kerr and Buckingham Palace had said to each other. The letters were classed as “personal” and held under a royal embargo. The historian Jenny Hocking took the case to court in 2016. In May 2020 the High Court of Australia ruled they could be released in the national interest.
The National Archives of Australia published more than 1,200 pages on 14 July 2020, covering August 1974 to December 1977. Demand crashed the archives website on the day.
The most pointed letter came a week before the dismissal. On 4 November 1975, the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, wrote that some argued the reserve powers no longer existed. “I do not believe this to be true,” he told Kerr. He called them a “last resort”, to be used for constitutional reasons and never political ones.
Kerr had been raising the subject for months. On 3 July 1975 he sent Charteris a Canberra Times clipping that floated his dismissing Whitlam, while saying he had “no intention” of doing so. The letters also show he discussed dismissal with Prince Charles.
Did the Queen know?
No, by Kerr’s own account. On the day itself he wrote that it was “better for Her Majesty not to know in advance”. Buckingham Palace said the release confirmed that neither the Queen nor her household had any part in his decision.
Kerr also kept Whitlam in the dark. He told the palace on 20 November that he gave no warning in case Whitlam moved first to have him removed as governor-general. Kerr feared a “race to the Palace” that would put the Queen in an “impossible position”.
Then Whitlam himself rang. At 4.15am London time on 11 November, he called Charteris as a “private citizen” and asked to be recommissioned as prime minister so he could choose the election date. Anne Twomey, a constitutional law expert at Sydney University, read the letters as undermining the theory of a royal plot. “The only smoking gun is Whitlam himself trying to get reinstated,” she said.
Why it still matters
Hocking called the palace’s advice on the reserve powers “scandalous”. She argued that the head of a constitutional monarchy must stay politically neutral at all times. The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, said the episode reinforced the case for an Australian head of state. So did the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who noted that Kerr took advice from courtiers who could not sit in Australia’s parliament.
The letters settled who made the decision. They did not end the argument over the power he used to make it.
