CAIRNS BULK MEATS
what you intended to do before doing it, you acted not only with perfect constitutional propriety but also with admirable consideration for her Majesty’s position.”
He had earlier made it clear that the Queen would not intervene.
“I think it is good that people should know that The Queen is being informed, but, of course, this does not mean that she has any wish to intervene, even if she had the constitutional power to do so,” Sir Martin wrote to Sir John on November 5.
“The crisis, as you say, has to be worked out in Australia. If you do, as you will, what the constitution dictates, you cannot possibly do the Monarchy any avoidable harm. The chances are you will do it good.”
In other insights , Sir John wrote that he did not tell Mr Whitlam in advance of his plans, because he didn’t want the PM to get in first and ask the Queen to dismiss him.
“The position would then have been that either I would be, in fact, trying to dismiss him while he was trying to dismiss me — an impossible position for the Queen,” Sir John wrote.
It was something Mr Whitlam had joked about a month earlier at a dinner held by the GG in honour of the Prime Minister of Malaysia. “Before our dinner last night … the Prime Minister, in what he would claim to have been a jocular fashion, said apropos of the crisis: ‘It could be a question of whether I get to The Queen first for your recall or you get in first with my dismissal’,” Sir John wrote to Sir Martin.
“We all laughed.”
It has also been revealed Sir John discussed his dilemma with Prince Charles in PNG in September.
On October 2, Sir Martin wrote: “Prince Charles told me 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.”
Just one week before the dismissal, a letter from Sir
Martin shows that he supported the key argument that the Governor-General could use his “reserve powers” to resolve the impasse.
They are the letters Sir John did not want released, as he stipulated when he gave them to the National Archives in 1978.
It took historian
Jenny Hocking, who wrote a Whitlam biography, and a
High Court fight to have them revealed.