“What you in Australia must understand is that you are more to blame than the CIA. You want this to happen, you want a certain administration in control, and you don’t want another administration in control. Do the loyalties of your intelligence services lie with your country as a whole or with the establishment in your country? In most instances, the answer you find is with the establishment.” Victor Marchetti, former CIA officer and deputy director at Pine Gap.

When Sir John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government in 1975 it caused outrage among the more vocal elements in the community. The demonstrators outside Parliament House on 11 November didn’t just pack up and go home when Gough Whitlam left the stage. They took to heart his directive to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm” and did just that until the election on 13 December and long after. But while they might win the moral argument, they didn’t have the numbers to return Whitlam to office.

Malcolm Fraser led the battle to get rid of the Whitlam government on behalf of the establishment. Australia’s powerful, conservative elites never accepted the legitimacy of the Labor government from the first sitting of the new parliament, when Senator Reg Withers dismissed its electoral mandate as the result of “temporary insanity” on the part of the voters. It was not only that Whitlam was forced to the polls by the opposition breaking conventions that had never been challenged in the past, the Senate persisted for three years in its obstruction to the government’s program. When Withers made his call to arms, the Senate had rejected 68 government bills in the 71 years since Federation, fewer than one per year. In the three years of the Whitlam government, they rejected 93.

It’s not difficult to see why the establishment in Australia wanted to get rid of the Labor government. Australians had grown wealthy and felt secure living in what Clinton Fernandes characterises as a sub-imperial power. The two main concerns of the establishment under the Whitlam government were reflected in those of Australia’s two imperial masters, the United Kingdom and the United States. They centred on the economic risks to their investments in Australia and on national security.

Sir Martin Charteris soon understood that Sir John Kerr was willing to accept his guidance on almost everything. He interpreted Kerr’s repeated affirmation of loyalty and “humble duty” as being a token of homage to the British Queen, rather than the Australian people, and he was surely right to do so. As Jenny Hocking has revealed, in a later handwritten note to Charteris, Kerr said many of his decisions “were specifically made in order to protect the Crown and the Monarchy in the future". As de facto head of State, Kerr’s overriding duty was to the Australian people, yet this ran a distant second to his “humble duty” to the British monarch.

Charteris was a leading and influential figure in the British establishment. He understood the establishment had no time for Whitlam’s economic policies. In addition, his former colleague in Military Intelligence and now chief of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, was highly concerned by Whitlam’s assault on the Five Eyes, his dismissal of ASIS director Bill Robertson and his threat to ASIS itself. MI6 officers were technically servants of the Crown, not civil servants, and Oldfield regularly briefed the Queen and Charteris.

Charteris knew the Wilson government wouldn’t support any operations that would lead to their fraternal party’s downfall, and that the Queen had to be kept as far removed as possible from possible involvement in Australian politics. Yet perhaps, with no responsibility for the Australian Crown, he could indulge in the provision of what McLean and Peterson later characterised as “irresponsible advice” in support of what he regarded as the interests of the British establishment.

Charteris would have understood that while the Palace itself believed the reserve powers of the Crown still existed, the Queen was, in practice, bound by Bagehot’s dicta, under which she had: “under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn”. But he would probably disagree with Bagehot’s view that a monarch: “of great sense and sagacity would want no other [powers]”. Bagehot had dismissed the reserve powers as being obsolete over a century before, but the Palace, supported by Eugene Forsey, was of a different mind.

Charteris saw an opportunity in the form of a weak, colonial Vice Regal representative clearly lacking anything resembling ‘great sense and sagacity’ and possessed of a Walter Mitty-like desire to demonstrate his powers to a prime minister who belittled him. As a traditional aristocratic Englishmen who had made a career of serving the monarchy, Charteris may have seen benefit in a demonstration of the ongoing prerogative of the Crown. This would have to be asserted without the Queen’s direct involvement, however, and certainly not in Britain.

The recollections of Sir William Heseltine, a senior adviser to the Queen under Charteris, in an interview with Troy Bramston in 2020, probably provide the best basis to assess the British Crown’s view of the dismissal. Heseltine notes for the record that Charteris had counselled Kerr that “exercising reserve powers was a ‘heavy responsibility’ and should only be used ‘in the last resort’ when ‘there is demonstrably no other course’ available to end the crisis”. The Palace was clearly surprised that Kerr acted precipitately, when the political crisis had yet to become a constitutional crisis.

But while Heseltine was critical of Kerr’s timing, he would understand that the governor-general considered he was forced to go early because of Whitlam’s action in requesting a half Senate election which, if he had agreed, would likely have involved the Queen in Australian politics. In addition, Kerr was obsessed by the idea that Whitlam could have him recalled before he could dismiss the prime minister. He had told Charteris he felt he could not risk that outcome “for the sake of the Monarchy".

Despite Heseltine’s temporising on Kerr’s timing, however, he never questioned the governor-general’s fundamental decision to dismiss the Whitlam government. Indeed, he strongly reaffirmed Charteris’s “irresponsible” advice to Kerr on the existence of the reserve powers, notably using the present tense 45 years after the dismissal. Heseltine said that Kerr “took the opportunity to check up on his own views as to whether the reserve powers still existed and we certainly in London had a unanimous view that the reserve powers still exist and [so] he was told”.

When Kerr arrived at Sandringham six weeks after the dismissal he received a warm welcome. For the first time ever under the Westminster system, a prime minister with a majority in the lower house had been dismissed long before the end of his term and then gone on to lose the subsequent election. The Crown seemed to have got away with it.

At a lunch in London held in Kerr’s honour, former British prime minister Ted Heath, who had declined a knighthood and, like Kerr, had a modest family background, passed him a cynical note congratulating him on having become a member of the establishment. As Charteris wrote to Kerr subsequently “your visit to London was very valuable because the establishment here now has a much clearer idea of what happened in your constitutional crisis… most people think that what you did was right”. He also suggested that Eugene Forsey would have “liked to be a fly on the wall”.

There is no need to search for the smoking gun in the dismissal. It was fired by Sir John Kerr at the instigation of Malcolm Fraser. But others provided the ammunition. If McLean and Peterson detect “a wisp of smoke” emanating from the gun barrel as a result of the intervention of an “irresponsible adviser” in Buckingham Palace, another substantial wisp came courtesy of the White House.

There has always been discussion about whether the CIA was involved in the dismissal. It was, but neither it, nor Task Force 157, nor the US Ambassador in Canberra, Marshall Green, were operating individually and off piste. They were part of Team America. Its captain was Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and, until 5 November 1975, National Security Adviser with the CIA in his charge. Kissinger had sat at the head of the operation against the democratically elected Allende government in Chile. The operation in Australia followed a similar playbook. Following Whitlam’s dismissal in November 1975, Kissinger could have told President Ford with equal veracity the same story he told Nixon in September 1973: “We didn’t do it. I mean, we helped …”

The Palace and the White House operated at different levels. The Palace worked against the Whitlam government in collusion with the Australian head of state. The Americans worked to destabilise the Australian government by encouraging the opposition, in parliament, in the security services, in the media and in the wider Australian establishment. In a sub-imperial power like Australia, the two approaches complemented each other to perfection.

Marshall Green went to Canberra with two objectives, to secure the US defence facilities and to safeguard US investments. While he was happy to go public by beating up the economic issues and the threat to investment, however, the US could not entertain an open debate on the defence facilities. If Whitlam ever came to understand what Pine Gap and the other facilities really did, he could go for broke. He could say the US was making Australia a nuclear target. It was bringing the Cold War and great power confrontation to the southern hemisphere. Under international law, by hosting the joint facilities like Pine Gap, Australia would be classed as a co-belligerent in any war the United States elected to undertake. Australia had lost its sovereign agency to avoid being involved in wars like Vietnam. It would have amounted to a very powerful argument.

No wonder then that Green was out of the blocks early on American investment. In a meeting with Clyde Cameron, the minister baited Green by asking how the US would react in the event the government nationalised US companies. This baseless threat seemed to rattle the ambassador. “Oh, we’d move in,” Cameron claimed Green said. “You mean send in the marines?” “No, not the marines. There’s plenty of other things we can do.” In early 1974, Green made a speech to the Institute of Directors in which he reportedly made reference to US intervention in Chile. He told the business leaders that if they stood up to the Whitlam government over its industrial policies, they “could expect help from the United States” like that recently “given to South America”.

On these issues, Green was a bundle of energy. He could also talk at a high level about the importance of the security relationship and the threat to ANZUS. He was constantly in the ear of leading members of the establishment. He clearly spent time with the opposition and the media, singling out Rupert Murdoch and Malcolm Fraser. He would have connected with the governor-general on the Canberra diplomatic circuit on numerous occasions.

It appears the critical multi agency meeting chaired by Kissinger in August 1974 agreed to a ‘watch and wait’ policy unless and until Whitlam began to threaten the US installations. All was quiet for a few months. In a meeting with Defence Secretary Schlesinger in February 1975, Green said “we are presently muting the issues that divide us; we could just as easily heat up the crucible at any time, either accidentally or intentionally”.

A major opportunity to “heat up the crucible” came soon after Malcolm Fraser took over as opposition leader in March 1975. With no sensitive security issues involved, the prospect of getting rid of their bête noire, Jim Cairns, and exploit the almost risible incompetence demonstrated by the Whitlam government in the loans affair proved irresistible to the Americans. It was all in – CIA dirty tricks, Task Force 157 and stirring up the media. As Senator John Button later recalled, the media campaign against the government was relentless, creating an impression of chaos, when Button, at least, believed the government was beginning to get its act together. It was effective. Even today, Age journalist Tony Wright, a not unsympathetic observer, remembers Whitlam at that time as leading “what had become in its dying months a scandal-wracked, virtually paralysed government”.

As soon as he had announced the blocking of supply, Malcolm Fraser began to put pressure on Kerr to dismiss Whitlam. As Jenny Hocking has shown, the pressure was intense. Fraser knew Kerr and had little respect for him. His behaviour reached the stage where it amounted to bullying. Meanwhile, the public pressure from the Murdoch press was equally intense. Journalists on The Australian undertook industrial action because of its biased reporting. The newspaper terminated its highly regarded political correspondent, Paul Kelly, because of his opposition to the dismissal. The headline of 20 October 1975 was “Fraser says Kerr must sack Whitlam”. Then there was a three-part editorial series entitled “Stalemate and Sir John” focusing on Kerr and how he should act. The last in the series was headed ‘The decision rests with Kerr.”

On 7 November, Rupert Murdoch met his former general manager, John Menadue. Over lunch he told Menadue, then Secretary of the prime minister’s department, “that he was quite certain that there would be an election before Christmas, and an election specifically for the House of Representatives". He suggested Fraser would win the election and Menadue would become Australian ambassador to Japan. Menadue neglected to warn Whitlam because he felt the story was ridiculous. Yet there was an election before Christmas that Fraser won. And Menadue’s next appointment was as Ambassador to Japan.

The demarche from the CIA to ASIO a couple of days before the dismissal represented the final thrust in the US administration’s efforts. Having lit the fuse, Marshall Green had left Australia in September, before the bomb went off. When Brian Toohey interviewed him in Washington after the event and suggested to him that Whitlam would have renewed the lease on Pine Gap, Green demurred. “That’s not what I was hearing,” he said. The CIA’s Ted Shackley, who had signed the demarche, told Toohey it had been authorised by somebody way above his paygrade. When asked if this was Kissinger, he hesitated and then declined to respond. Whatever impact, if any, the demarche may have had on Kerr, the dismissal of Whitlam hours before he could answer the parliamentary question allayed many of the US concerns. When Fraser renewed the Palm Gap lease as one of his first actions as caretaker prime minister, the Americans could rest easy.

*****

The fundamental cause of the dismissal was that Whitlam’s desire for economic nationalism and an independent foreign policy challenged the establishment’s endorsement of Australia’s status as a sub-imperial power. The old colonial master, appropriately led by the British Crown, provided the governor-general with the keys to dismissing Whitlam by advising him of the ongoing existence of the archaic reserve powers. The establishment, in the form of the Sydney Bar, provided confirmatory advice.

The new imperial power, the United States, operated to destabilise the Whitlam government and provide support to Malcolm Fraser, acting on behalf of the establishment. Fraser’s role was to convince the governor-general that the Whitlam government was a danger to Australia’s economic stability and national security and therefore its exposure to the judgement of the electorate would be in the public interest.

What are the implications of the dismissal for Australia today?

The first lesson is that a system of governance that allows an unelected official acting as de facto head of state to dismiss a prime minister with a majority in the lower house is absurd. Our de jure head of State is a foreigner, meaning Australia is one of the few independent countries with no head of state who can legitimately represent it overseas. The scandal around Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is currently undermining the monarchy in the UK. This provides an opportunity for the republican movement in Australia.

The role of the Crown, however, is only one of the constitutional issues that require review. The role and composition of the Senate is another. Do we need a bicameral parliament at all? The three-year term for the Commonwealth government is too short. The federal system is not working as it should. Australia is over-governed and over-regulated. Younger people in particular have a reduced commitment to democracy. It is time for a review, perhaps even a Royal Commission with bipartisan agreement on its terms of reference. Its recommendations would then be considered by a constitutional convention.

Finally, we need a public debate to discuss Australia’s role as a sub-imperial power to the United States. Under the AUKUS agreement we have entered a security partnership with our two imperial masters, although arguably the UK now plays a sub-imperial role to the US in Europe complemented by Australia’s similar role in the Indo-Pacific. Instead of seeking our security in Asia, which was Gough Whitlam’s objective, we are in the process of converting our island continent into a massive forward operations base for American forces. While Pine Gap and North West Cape cut lonely figures on an adversary’s list of nuclear targets in Whitlam’s time, they have now been joined by Darwin, Katherine and Henderson near Perth.

As James Curran noted in his recent Boyer lecture, our “visceral craving for the US alliance has led to a dumbing down of our foreign policy with a concomitant lack of ambition and imagination.” In addition, true to our traditional colonial deference, we have imposed no conditions on how Australian-based US forces may be employed. Other nations that play host to US forces, such as Japan, South Korea and the Philippines have a security guarantee, along the lines of NATO’s Article V, in their treaties with the US. ANZUS contains no such guarantee. Those three countries have also mandated that military operations launched from bases on their territory require prior approval from the host government. That surely reflects a basic assertion of national sovereignty. As far as is known, Australia has imposed no such conditions.

Finally, American covert operations to undermine the Australian government in 1974-75 were disgraceful. The ongoing refusal by US authorities to release the whole of NSSM 204, which uniquely among the over two hundred NSSMs produced under Nixon remains substantially classified, together with associated documents after 50 years speaks for itself. President Trump has demonstrated a willingness to declassify important documents relating to past events such as the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps he could be prevailed upon to release all classified material on the relationship between the US administration and the Whitlam government in Australia.

Read more of this series from   Jon Stanford and from  the Dismissal at 50 series.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.