Be the master of our own destiny
Palace Letters reveal the flaw in a monarch of a foreign country having a role in an independent nation, writes Greg Barns
LAST week something important happened. Not yet another COVID development. But the release, after four years of resistance by the National Archives, of the correspondence from the Queen’s representative in Australia, John Kerr and Buckingham Palace about the bloodless coup of November 11, 1975 that saw the elected prime minister Gough Whitlam sacked and replaced by Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser.
Thanks to historian Jenny Hocking who went to the High Court so we could read this correspondence, we now know that while the Queen was not informed by Kerr he was going to sack Whitlam, she and her private secretary Martin Charteris overstepped the mark in encouraging Kerr and implicitly approving Kerr’s actions.
Kerr as Governor-General watched events unfolding closely knowing that he might be asked to intervene to resolve the fast moving constitutional crisis. Kerr turned to the then chief justice, Garfield Barwick who had been a minister in the Menzies government and who was known to be hostile to the Whitlam government. Barwick’s role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government was an overt act of politics, clearly not what a supposedly independent head of the judiciary should have been doing.
And Buckingham Palace has continued to meddle in the issue in recent years. It opposed the release of the correspondence which consists of 211 letters covering 1200 pages. As Jenny Hocking describes it, “The queen’s private secretary argued strongly against their release when the case began in the Federal Court, as did the governor-general’s official secretary, even claiming in letters included in a submission from the official secretary, Mark Fraser, that their continued secrecy was essential ‘to preserve the constitutional position of the Monarch and the Monarchy’.”
As well she and they might have been so opposed. It is clear the Queen and her advisers were giving Kerr comfort and advice. Malcolm Turnbull, for whom this columnist ran the Republic Referendum campaign in 1999, and who was of course prime minister from 2015 to 2018, said the correspondence shows the “governor-general was reporting to her [the Queen] almost like a local manager reporting to head office and seeking advice as to his options. Of course he made the final decision himself but he was getting a lot of advice on the way through.”
The Palace Letters reveal Kerr reporting to the Queen and Charteris on the views of the Australian media about the crisis. Kerr’s conversations with Whitlam were also duly reported to London. And instead of Buckingham Palace asking Kerr to desist from seeking to involve the Queen in Australian political matters they encouraged his conduct. Charteris was notably obsequious to the insecure Kerr writing seven days before the dismissal, “I think you are playing the vice-regal hand with skill and wisdom ... The fact you have powers is recognised. But it’s also clear you will only use them in the last resort, and then only for constitutional — and not for political — reasons.”
It has been said Kerr sacked Whitlam because he feared the latter might sack him. Charteris wrote on October 2, 1975, “Prince Charles told me a good deal, and you’d spoken of the possibility of the Prime Minister advising the Queen to terminate your commission. At the end of the road, the Queen – as a constitutional sovereign – would have no option but to follow the advice of her Prime Minister.” In other words, Charteris was opining about an Australian domestic political matter and giving Kerr comfort.
The monarchists in Australia are busy today defending the Queen and Buckingham Palace because the Palace Letters reveal Kerr did not tell the Queen he was going to sack Whitlam. He didn’t, he said, to protect the monarchy. But as Andrew Clark noted in the Financial Review last Wednesday, Charteris in a November 4 letter “told Kerr that the work of constitutional scholar Eugene Forsey supported the idea of dissolving Parliament, which is effectively what he secured by sacking Whitlam. An eminent Canadian constitutional expert on relations between the Crown and Commonwealth parliaments, Forsey believed it was ‘proper’ to grant a dissolution if supply was refused.”
The Palace Letters are of real relevance today for the issue of Australian independence. They show the fundamental flaw in a monarch in a foreign country having, at the end of the day, a
role in the domestic political and democratic travails of a supposedly independent nation. Why is it that Kerr had to contact Buckingham Palace in the first place? Because
Australia is not fully independent while it has a representative of the head of state in the form of the governor-general. And for a foreign head of state to interfere in the democratic process, including in resisting the release of the Palace Letters, is surely intolerable to those who believe Australians are entitled to be the masters or their own destiny. Hobart barrister Greg Barns SC is a human rights lawyer and former adviser to state and federal Liberal governments.