Aussie court orders release of letters over PM sacking

Australia’s top court has ordered the release of Queen Elizabeth II’s correspondence about the 1975 sacking of democratically elected prime minister Gough Whitlam, which palace allies had battled to keep secret.

The country’s High Court said letters between the British monarch and her Australian representative, governorgeneral John Kerr, over the affair were public record.

Kerr sacked Whitlam, the popular leader of the centre-left Labor party, three years after his election – causing a deep constitutional crisis that still scars Australian politics.

The reasons for his dismissal are still fiercely argued, with allegations of British and even American efforts to smother Whitlam’s reformist agenda. The queen’s representatives had argued the correspondence – held in the Australian national archive – was private and had successfully kept them secret for decades.

But that argument was rejected by a majority of the court, which ruled yesterday the letters were the “property of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution” and so part of the public record.

It was not immediately clear when access to the letters might be granted.

But the letters could help show if the British government tried to influence events in its former colony and what role the queen, Prince Charles and top royal advisers may have played. Local historian and Whitlam biographer Jennifer Hocking took the case to court arguing that the texts were “extraordinarily significant historical documents” and needed to be accessed.

“They are contemporaneous real-time communications between the queen and her representative in Australia, written at a time of great political drama, and are a vital part of our national historical record,” she wrote at the start of the case.

“As an independent autonomous nation, Australia has a right to know its own history, including and in particular the records pointing to British involvement in that history.”