Queen’s letters during Australian crisis made public
CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s highest court ruled Friday to make public letters between the Queen and her representative that would reveal what knowledge she had, if any, of the dismissal of an Australian government in 1975.
The High Court’s 6-1 majority decision in historian Jenny Hocking’s appeal overturned lower court rulings that more than 200 letters between the Queen and Governor-General Sir John Kerr before he dismissed prime minister Gough Whitlam’s government were personal and might never be made public.
The only dismissal of an elected Australian government on the authority of a British monarch triggered a political crisis that spurred many to call for Australia to sever its constitutional ties with Britain and create a republic with an Australian president. Suspicions of a CIA conspiracy persist.
Hocking, an academic and Whitlam biographer, said she expected to read the 211 letters at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra next week. She said it was absurd that communications between such key officials could be regarded as personal and confidential.
“That they could be seen as personal is quite frankly an insult to all our intelligence collectively — they’re not talking about the racing and the corgis,” Hocking said. “It was not only the fact that they were described quite bizarrely as personal, but also that they were under an embargo set at the whim of the Queen.”
Archives director David Fricker said staff were assessing whether there was any information in the letters that should still be withheld. The archives have 90 business days to do so.
Kerr dismissed Whitlam’s reforming government and replaced him with opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as prime minister to resolve a month-old deadlock in Parliament. Fraser’s conservative coalition won an election weeks later.
The archives has held the correspondence, known as the Palace Letters, since 1978. As state records, they should have been made public 31 years after they were created.