Friday 29th of March 2024

the face of treason ....

the face of treason ....

John Kerr decided to remove Gough Whitlam in the week before the Dismissal and was in secret discussion about this with Malcolm Fraser.

This is the most explosive revelation of a new book that throws in doubt the 40-year-old claim that the Governor-General acted alone.

Monash University political scientist Jenny Hocking said new research showed Kerr acted with the foreknowledge and implied consent of the Queen, and with the knowledge of the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia Sir Garfield Barwick​, High Court justice Sir Anthony Mason and the Leader of the Opposition to oust a democratically elected government.

She said the West Australian Liberal senator Reg Withers had left a posthumous record of communications between Kerr and Fraser in a previously unpublished interview conducted two decades after the dismissal and embargoed until after his death.

"Withers reveals that not only had Kerr decided to act against Whitlam in the week before 11 November 1975, but that both he and Fraser knew this," Professor Hocking said.

"Withers confirms that the Governor-General and the Leader of the Opposition were in secret telephone contact, using their secure private numbers.

"Withers recounts that he was in Fraser's office in early November when Kerr contacted Fraser, using the private number for the Leader of the Opposition's parliamentary office.

"'Nobody knew what his private number was except Tamie'," Withers said.

"Fraser told the caller that he could be contacted on that number at any time ... Fraser then asked the caller for their number, repeating as he wrote it down, 'I can also ring you on his number?.... As Fraser hung up he said to Withers. 'You never heard this conversation'."

Professor Hocking said the secret communication was the most serious possible breach of the central constitutional and political relationship in a parliamentary democracy that the Governor-General acts on the advice of the Prime Minister, not the Opposition Leader.

Whitlam died a year ago last Wednesday, Fraser last March, and Professor Hocking's book, The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant To Know About November 1975 comes out on the eve of the 40th anniversary of what many people still believe to be the biggest political crisis in Australian history.

In another revelation from a long-embargoed interview, Fraser challenges our fundamental understanding of the dismissal of the Whitlam government in relation to the question of Supply.

"It now appears that the very basis of Whitlam's dismissal, and Fraser's appointment, as Prime Minister – the need to secure Supply – was a constitutional and political charade," Professor Hocking said.

"In this previously unpublished interview Fraser makes the extraordinary claim that the provision of Supply was not in fact a condition of his appointment as Prime Minister at all." Fraser makes this devastating admission in his interview conducted in 1987 with former Labor Minister Clyde Cameron for the National Library of Australia that has only recently been made available. "Asked specifically whether the provision of Supply was a condition of his appointment as Prime Minister, Fraser replied without any hesitation, 'No, it wasn't'.

"In a further dramatic historical unravelling Fraser then revealed that, even had he not secured Supply through the Senate on the afternoon of 11 November 1975, Kerr would not have dismissed him as Prime Minister and that he would have gone to the 1975 election as Prime Minister, without Supply. A shocked Clyde Cameron drew out the implications of this startling exchange in his immediate response to Fraser: 'You would have gone to an election without Supply, and you would have been in breach of one of the conditions that Kerr had laid down.' Fraser did not disagree with this, suggesting that the Coalition might even have won a few more seats had he done so.

"Despite Kerr's insistence that securing Supply was at the heart of the dismissal, Fraser maintained that his own failure to secure Supply would not have led to his dismissal and that Kerr would not have dismissed him for a denial of Supply as he had dismissed Whitlam: 'I don't think the Governor-General would have had much other course … I think it would have been a little difficult sacking a second (laughing) Prime Minister and re-appointing the first one sacked'."

Professor Hocking said that Kerr's private papers clearly show that the Palace knew that Kerr was considering the dismissal months before it happened. The Palace did not counsel Kerr against the dismissal scenario, did not advise him to warn Whitlam of the possibility of dismissal and, most significantly, did not themselves alert Whitlam to the fact that the matter had been raised by the Governor-General.

She said the Queen's private secretary Martin Charteris had also written to Kerr establishing a "secret arrangement" between the Palace and Yarralumla to delay acting on the advice of the Prime Minister to recall the Governor-General, should Whitlam have decided to remove Kerr.

"This extraordinary vice-regal manoeuvring presents Whitlam as a political ingenue, utterly unaware that among those he considered nothing more than post-colonial monarchal relics, his future was being determined with all the calculated anti-democratic sentiment of monarchs through the ages," she said.

In her 2012 book, Gough Whitlam: His Time, Professor Hocking revealed the critical document in Kerr's private papers describing the pivotal role that High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason had played in advising Kerr over several months prior to the dismissal, although he remained a shadowy presence in the political crisis for four decades.

In response, Sir Anthony has said he told Kerr he should warn Whitlam before terminating his commission and the first he knew that Whitlam had not been warned was when he read the news reports on November 11.

New revelations about the Dismissal continue to emerge after 40 years

 

does advice (demands, pressure) from the CIA count?

Latin Americans will recognise the audacity and danger of this “breaking free” in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power. Australians had served every British imperial adventure since the Boxer rebellion was crushed in China. In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of Vietnam, then provided “black teams” to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years.

Whitlam knew the risk he was taking. The day after his election, he ordered that his staff should not be “vetted or harassed” by the Australian security organisation, Asio – then, as now, tied to Anglo-American intelligence. When his ministers publicly condemned the US bombing of Vietnam as “corrupt and barbaric”, a CIA station officer in Saigon said: “We were told the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators.”

Whitlam demanded to know if and why the CIA was running a spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, a giant vacuum cleaner which, as Edward Snowden revealed recently, allows the US to spy on everyone. “Try to screw us or bounce us,” the prime minister warned the US ambassador, “[and Pine Gap] will become a matter of contention”.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence