40th anniversary of the ‘Dismissal’
For his multiple crimes against humanity in general, and against this nation in particular, Charles should be run out of Australia, not feted hither and yon. One among these crimes is his documented role in the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975. He knows what he did, and knows that many other people do as well, especially in light of the explosive revelations in Jenny Hocking’s latest book, The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know About November 1975. It is typical of Charles’s arrogant, sadistic nature that he chose to be touring Australia precisely now, on the 40th anniversary of that action which profoundly changed our nation for the worse.
‘Supply’ was not the issue
Most Australians childishly believe that since “the Crown is above politics” and the Queen is a benign, powerless figurehead, Governor-General and former MI6 agent Sir John Kerr must of course have dismissed Whitlam on his own initiative, without the Queen’s knowledge, and that he did so over “Supply” (bills to fund the government). The fact that the Opposition of the day had for weeks blocked the passage of the Government’s Supply bills, the legend goes, forced him to act. Thus in his “Statement of Reasons” for the dismissal, Kerr wrote that “Because of the principles of responsible government a Prime Minister who cannot obtain supply, including money for carrying on the ordinary services of government, must either advise a general election or resign. If he refuses to do this I have the authority and indeed the duty under the Constitution to withdraw his Commission as Prime Minister.”
Already 15 years ago, we in the CEC published evidence such that only someone wilfully self-blinded could believe that the issue had anything to do with “Supply”, or that such a notorious Crown toady and insecure sycophant as Kerr had acted without the Queen’s knowledge and approval. In 2012 Monash University historian Professor Jenny Hocking used Kerr’s personal archives, which she accessed upon the expiry of a decades-long embargo, to demonstrate in her book Gough Whitlam, His Time, that Kerr had not merely “informed” the Queen ahead of his action, but that he had coordinated the whole operation with her. Kerr, Hocking wrote, “had already conferred with the palace on the possibility of the future dismissal of the prime minister”, and had acted to ensure Whitlam, should he have learned of this, would be prevented from exercising his own Constitutional power to remove Kerr first.
Hocking amplified her account in a second, just-released book timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Whitlam’s sacking, The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know About November 1975. The Guardian’sGabrielle Chan summarised some of its key arguments in a 26 October column, including that:
- Kerr wrote “regular and extended” letters to the Queen and her private secretary Sir Martin Charteris during the period leading up to the dismissal.
- Kerr was assured that every one of his letters was read by Charteris and the Queen “and she herself told me that if I found the need to write to her direct to feel entirely at liberty to do so”.
- One week before the dismissal Charteris informed the Governor-General of the Queen’s intentions if Whitlam moved against Kerr: “Charteris told him that should this ‘contingency’ occur, the Queen would ‘try to delay things’ for as long as possible…”, so that Kerr could sack Whitlam.
In fact, the coup had been long in the making. A full nine months before the 11 November dismissal, and eight months before the constitutional crisis over “Supply”, Kerr had established a secret “brains trust” of legal minds to concoct all the necessary “legal” preparations to oust Whitlam. Hocking reveals High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason played a key role in it, but its real leader was the Chief Justice of the High Court and member of the Privy Council Sir Garfield Barwick, with Mason acting mainly as a conduit between Barwick and Kerr. Barwick was an intimate of the Royal Family and the first president of the Australian Conservation Foundation founded by Prince Philip, in which office he was later succeeded by Philip himself. Their fellow High Court Justice and Privy Counsellor Sir Ninian Stephen, who lied that “I knew nothing until the news broke publicly”, was also involved.
Then, weeks before the supply issue had emerged, Kerr in September 1975 briefed Prince Charles in person during a visit to Papua New Guinea. Kerr confided his concern that Whitlam might get wind of his intention and ask the Queen to sack Kerr, before Kerr could sack him, as indeed he was empowered by Australia’s constitution to do. According to Kerr’s notes uncovered by Hocking, Charles’s attitude was the Australian constitution be damned, telling Kerr that he thought the Queen should not have to accept Whitlam’s advice in that circumstance. It was after Charles reported back to the Palace that Charteris wrote the above-mentioned 7 October letter, essentially to assure Kerr that the Queen had no real intention of taking Whitlam’s advice, but would disguise her deliberate disregard of Australian constitutional process behind delaying tactics.
The Guardian reported that Buckingham Palace refuses to release these letters between Kerr and the palace, including the Queen and Prince Charles. The Queen herself ordered them placed under strict embargo for 50 years, until 2027, and even then stipulated their release will require the consent of both the then-Sovereign, most likely Charles, and Australia’s then-Governor-General. However, with those involved determined to maintain that Kerr acted alone, it is unlikely they will ever be released. The Guardian continued, “As late as 2011, the Queen’s assistant private secretary at the time of the dismissal, Sir William Heseltine [an Australian—Ed.] said categorically, ‘the Governor-General gave no clue to any of us at the palace what was in his mind’.”
But, as summarised by Hocking, “Kerr’s journal, and his direct quotations in it from his correspondence with the Queen and with Charteris, show that the palace was kept informed of his consideration of the dismissal of the Whitlam government months before there was even any ‘political crisis’ [blocking Supply] to report”. In The Australian of 11 October 2012 Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston quoted Kerr’s journal entry noting that he had regularly spoken with the Queen by telephone, not just via correspondence: “Kerr writes in the journal of his ‘regular and thorough reporting to the Queen’ throughout the constitutional crisis. ‘Conversations with the Queen and with Sir Martin Charteris, her private secretary, as well as questions raised by me in the correspondence itself left me with the comfortable assurance that what I was writing, and the way I was going about the task, were welcomed in the Palace,’ Kerr writes.” Indeed, Kerr, as insecure as he was, would never have even established his judicial “brains trust” without approval from the highest levels.
Following his sacking, Whitlam called Buckingham Palace to ask if the Queen had known of Kerr’s intentions ahead of time. When Sir Martin Charteris lied that “The Queen knew nothing about” her viceroy’s plan, Whitlam swallowed it, hook, line and sinker, and pathetically recorded in his autobiography, The Truth of the Matter: “It is a fact that the Queen’s representative in Australia had kept the Queen in the same total ignorance of his actions as he had the Prime Minister of Australia.” And even though Whitlam also described Kerr as a grovelling toady who would sell his soul for Royal honours, he refused to draw the obvious conclusion that Kerr was working in cahoots with the Crown, even as he drily observed that following his sacking the Crown showered Kerr with so many gongs that he “had become in a single annus mirabilis the Rt Hon. Sir John Kerr, AK, GCMG, GCVO, K St J.”
Meanwhile Kerr bragged in his own book, Matters of Judgement, that shortly after Whitlam’s dismissal the Queen herself inducted Kerr into her Privy Council, among the other honours she rained down upon him: “In Canberra I was sworn in as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council at a meeting presided over by the Queen at Yarralumla. During an audience on board the Britannia in Fremantle harbour, Her Majesty invested me as a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. (I had previously, in 1975 when the Queen established the Order of Australia of which she is Sovereign, became the first Chancellor and a Companion of the Order and later, when the rank of knighthood was introduced, the first Knight of the Order of Australia. In 1976 Her Majesty had promoted me to the rank of Knight Grand Cross in the Order of St. Michael and St. George. Throughout my Governor-Generalship I was Prior in Australia and a Knight in the Order of St. John of Jerusalem…)”
Along with Kerr, the Queen also rewarded Kerr’s private secretary and co-conspirator, Sir David Smith (who publicly read the famous proclamation dismissing Whitlam), by anointing him as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. This Royal Victorian Order is the third-highest honour in the British Empire, and is awarded as “a recognition of personal service to the reigning Sovereign”. It is granted by the Queen herself, without the recommendation of any of her government.
The real reason for the coup: ‘buying back the farm’
Gough Whitlam, whatever his flaws, was a patriot. As expressed most clearly by his Minister for Minerals and Energy Rex Connor and his Treasurer Dr Jim Cairns, he intended to “buy back the farm”, to wrest control of Australia’s vast raw materials wealth from the transnational minerals cartel led by Rio Tinto (in which the Queen herself was the largest private shareholder) and utilise it to develop the nation for the common good, in the classic “old Labor” tradition. “We have an objective of full Australian ownership in development projects involving uranium,” Whitlam had announced in 1973, during a visit to Tokyo. “We also regard this as a desirable objective in oil, natural gas and black coal.” Whitlam’s program threatened the very basis of British imperial power—the City of London’s control of global finance and global raw materials. Were he allowed to succeed, others would surely follow suit, and the Empire’s house of cards come tumbling down. His removal ended that threat. Whitlam, the first Labor leader in 23 years when he was elected in 1972, was the last true Labor PM. By the time the ALP returned to power in 1983, its leaders had sold their own and the party’s soul to the Thatcherite dogma of austerity, privatisation and free trade, which both the ALP and its supposed opposition, the Liberal/National party coalition, have ever since lauded as the “bipartisan consensus on economic reform”. That agenda’s similarity to Thatcher’s was no accident, because it was designed by the same Mont Pelerin Society and Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) which had been set up by the Crown and the City of London, and produced Thatcher in the first place. As former IEA boss Lord Harris of High Cross bragged in a phone call to a CEC researcher in 1996, “We weren’t Thatcherites, she was an IEA-ite”, and we have documented how the MPS/IEA think tanks have run Australia’s economic policy since the advent of the Hawke/Keating Labor governments in 1983.
Royal crimes against humanity
Now the longest-reigning head of the British oligarchical power structure which sits above any supposed democratic institutions, Queen Elizabeth’s role guarantees not the rights of her subjects—as royal sycophants fantasise. Rather, her untrammelled powers ensure that a popularly elected government can never touch the network of wealthy families, private banks, corporate boardrooms, elite schools, permanent civil servants and secretive security agencies—“the Establishment”—who wield real power in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and in every other state where the Queen is the monarch. Prince Charles, the Queen’s heir and successor, including as Sovereign of Australia, has already distinguished himself in two of the British Crown’s several genocidal schemes:
- Building the apparatus of international terrorism, which is used to justify the Anglo-American agenda of permanent wars and fascist police-state regimes. On behalf of the Crown, Charles personally handles the Al-Yamamah oil-for-arms deal first struck in the mid-1980s between Margaret Thatcher and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that created a hundred billion dollar slush fund which has financed the rise of first Al-Qaeda and now its off-shoots including ISIS. A close personal friend of 9/11 financier Prince Bandar, Charles has personally managed the Al-Yamamah arrangement for more than 20 years, which has involved him making 12 official state visits and numerous private ones to Saudi Arabia; UK police have been blocked from investigating the financing of terrorism, on account of Charles’s relationship with the major suspects (see p. 4 of The New Citizen, Nov/Dec 2014).
- Green fascism, namely the push for a global green dictatorship in the form of a legally-binding global treaty on CO2emissions reductions, which the Crown intends to achieve at the Paris COP21 climate change conference starting 30 November. The Royal Family has directed the green fascism movement since Prince Philip founded the World Wildlife Fund in 1961 to finance the Crown’s genocidal agenda to reduce the world’s population to less than one billion people. Charles has taken the lead on demanding a global treaty that will have zero impact on climate but will condemn the world’s poor to permanent poverty and mass death. After his visit to Australia he will address the opening session of the Paris conference, as he did the last time the Royals made a big push for a global treaty, at the Copenhagen COP15 conference in 2009 (see “The British Crown Created Green Fascism”, starting p. 35 of The New Citizen, Oct/Nov 2011). And the Queen and Prince Charles will address the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) summit in Malta, 27-29 November, with the intent to force compliance with the global warming fraud in Paris.
But the truth has a way of asserting itself, if belatedly. Before he passed away Malcolm Fraser, the other major player in the dismissal—though largely opposed to the Mont Pelerin/IEA policies for which it had been conducted—declared that Australia has never been a sovereign nation. In his 2014 book Dangerous Allies, he issued a clarion call for Australians to assert their sovereignty and independence.
For almost 30 years now, the Citizens Electoral Council has led the fight to depose the Queen and her heirs and successors to whom our elected MPs presently pledge their allegiance; to replace the Crown with a head of state elected by the Australian people; and to thus free Australia from the death-grip of the thoroughly corrupt Crown and thereby establish our nation as truly sovereign and independent. In so doing, we can set Australia back on the trajectory of “old Labor” as embodied in the best of the Whitlam government. This is a fight for every Australian. If you do not want to remain a grovelling toady for Charles, isn’t it time you joined us in this noble mission?
