00:00Well, firstly, I think it's quite extraordinary that 50 years after an event we see so much
00:07interest in it, so much discussion about it, and I do think that what's happened in the
00:12last couple of decades in particular is that the narrative around the dismissal has started
00:18to shift and I think now, given the new material we've seen, we recognise that the dismissal
00:24is a much more complex and protracted and carefully planned episode than what we originally understood
00:34it to be, where it was really presented to us as a sort of contingent event, you know,
00:40the supplies had been blocked for four weeks and the Governor-General was forced to make
00:44a decision.
00:45It's far more complex than that, there are other people involved and that's one of the
00:49things we did not know at the time.
00:52And so it's a much more, in some ways, intriguing and also I suppose more interesting story,
00:59a much more disturbing one in many ways, 50 years later, but it's one we need to have
01:04told and it's one we need to have all of the archives open, which they're not at the moment,
01:09but we do need to have full archival access to fully understand it.
01:13So Jenny, can you take us through why you decided to take that legal action to force the National
01:18Archives to release the letters from the Palace about events around the dismissal?
01:22And at the time, did you realise the enormity of what you were doing?
01:26I did know that they were very significant letters.
01:29I'd spent a lot of time in Sir John Kerr's papers, looking at his many, many notes and
01:37discussions about the dismissal.
01:39He was quite obsessed with it.
01:41And he made many long notes about his correspondence with the Palace.
01:45There were even some extracts from his letters to the Queen.
01:49And when I saw these, I realised just how dramatic they were.
01:52It was very clear that they were discussing matters that went to the heart of the dismissal,
01:57that they were discussing the use of the reserve powers.
02:00They were discussing the capacity of a Governor-General to force a dissolution.
02:05These are things that had not been used in England for nearly 200 years.
02:09And that in fact, our own Solicitor-General gave Kerr an opinion that very strongly said,
02:14in no uncertain terms, that there was no basis for the Governor-General to intervene.
02:19Nevertheless, Kerr was taking advice from elsewhere and including the Palace.
02:23When I read all of that, I knew that these were quite explosive.
02:26I knew that they were critical to history.
02:29And I had a wonderful legal team, a pro bono legal team, that also shared the view that
02:34there was a very strong legal argument as to why the National Archives should open them
02:38for us, which I'm very grateful they did.
02:41And Jenny, we talked about unknown players in the introduction.
02:44You described them as other people.
02:46Who did you discover had a hand in proceedings?
02:50The most important person, of course, which we did not know at the time and didn't know
02:55for nearly 40 years, was Sir Anthony Mason.
02:58Mason was a sitting High Court Justice at the time.
03:00He went on to be appointed a Chief Justice of the High Court by the Hawke Labor Government.
03:09And one of the Hawke Ministers said to me that they would never have appointed him Chief Justice,
03:13had they known of his role in the dismissal.
03:15And it's one of the very disturbing aspects that Mason did not want his name revealed.
03:22He pleaded with Kerr not to reveal it.
03:24Kerr had left a really detailed, typed note, setting out all of his conversations with Mason
03:31about the pending dismissal, which go back to early 1975.
03:37And through all of those months, he had been taking what he calls guidance and support from
03:42Sir Anthony Mason.
03:43It's a complete breach of the separation of powers, not to mention personally deceptive
03:48of the Prime Minister by both of them.
03:51And extraordinarily, Mason actually drafted a letter of dismissal for Kerr.
03:55I mean, it's hard to think of something that is more destructive of the proper relationship
04:01between the arms of governance than this.
04:03And so Mason's role was critical.
04:05And I had found that in 2012.
04:08It was revealed with my second volume of my biography of Gough Whitlam, his time.
04:13And that did create an absolute, I think, transformation of the way we looked at the dismissal.
04:20We understood it from that point on as something far more controversial and something that did
04:26involve other people.
04:27As you say, you were Gough Whitlam's biographer, Jenny, what was his reaction to what you found
04:32out?
04:33Look, his reaction was one of really deep distress.
04:36I think one of the really sad things about the dismissal, apart from the fact that it destroyed
04:41Gough Whitlam's professional life, something he had worked for the previous 20 years in
04:46the Parliament to achieve, was the extent of the deception of people that he worked with
04:53and that he thought would have behaved properly in their senior positions of governance, heads
04:58of department or in Barwick and Mason's case, members of the High Court.
05:03And this shocked and distressed him greatly.
05:07He had often pointed to Sir Anthony Mason as an honourable High Court judge, as he used
05:14to say, in contrast to the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, who we know had also been
05:19secretly giving advice to Kerr, but had only done so in the last day before the dismissal.
05:26Mason's secret advice and discussions with Kerr went right back to the very first weeks of
05:311975.
05:32They were persistent, they were pushing Kerr all the way along to the eventual dismissal
05:38of Whitlam and they were ensuring that he accepted that he had the power through the
05:44reserve powers, which, as I say, hadn't been used for nearly 200 years, to dismiss the government
05:49and appoint the opposition into government.
05:52Finally, Jenny, as you said, there are still unreleased documents relating to the dismissal.
05:57What might they reveal?
05:59Well, of course, it's impossible to say what they reveal until we have them.
06:04But the point is that we can't access them.
06:07And I think this is one of the remaining issues with our National Archives of Australia.
06:12The dismissal is now 50 years old.
06:16The records of the National Archives are meant to be in the open access period after just 20 years.
06:22I've applied for many, many records that are still in Kerr's papers that I'm waiting to
06:27have opened.
06:28But to go through the process of the archives, where you can only ask for 15 documents at
06:32a time, I estimate would take at least a decade even to put your applications in, let alone
06:37to wait for the archives to open them.
06:39It's time for the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to ask the archives to now open all of the
06:46remaining records in Sir John Kerr's papers so that all Australians can have the full story
06:51of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.
06:52We know how very important archival access is to history and it's time we had a complete
06:57history of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.
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