Life on the West Island - Not my king?

Many West Islanders watched the coronation of King Charles III on live television, drawn in by the spectacle and pageantry for which the British Royal Family is famous. But most West Islanders paid almost no attention to the medieval ritual, while others described the entire process as a nauseating display of royal excess and dynastic exceptionalism.

These were the words of Monash University Professor Jenny Hocking, a royal watcher for many years and author of the bestselling book The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. ockingHockingH

Professor Hocking spent many years seeking access under of Freedom of Information laws to the correspondence between Governor-General John Kerr and Buckingham Palace. When her High Court appeal finally succeeded, she found a mountain of evidence that the Royal Family took a leading role in undermining and ultimately dismissing the elected Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. To quote Professor Hocking’s recent commentary:

…still we hear the insistent refrain that the monarchy today wields no power and is not involved in political matters. It does and it is. It is simply staggering that despite the revelation by The Guardian of the direct involvement of the monarch in the drafting of legislation on any matter which may affect them through the ‘monarch’s consent’, the Palace continues to deny it and the British people continue to accept it. The monarch is neither powerless nor politically uninvolved, and Charles has relished the capacity to exercise both.

From his boorish, untutored, views on architecture to his letters to the Blair government on his favoured policy positions, Charles’s political interventions as Prince of Wales are well known. They show an opinionated, entitled, ‘meddling Prince’ who saw it as his right to push a political position to government, despite the professed requirement for political neutrality.

With Charles’s ascension as King Charles III of Australia, it is his involvement in governor-general Sir John Kerr’s 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government that should trouble us today. Charles’s coronation serves as a reminder of just how extensive the involvement of our new King, and the then Queen and her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, was in Kerr’s dismissal of the elected government. And, like all royal political interventions, this has been emphatically denied by the Palace for decades, despite clear evidence to the contrary in Kerr’s archives and of course in the Palace letters. In this, Charles played a pivotal role as the lynchpin between Kerr, who considered himself a friend, and the Palace.

It was a conversation between Charles and Kerr in September 1975 in Port Moresby that first drew the Queen and Charteris into Kerr’s planning and decision to dismiss Whitlam. Kerr told Charles that he was ‘considering having to dismiss the government’ should the Opposition block the government’s Supply bills – one month before Supply had even been deferred in the Senate.

From there, as the Palace letters and Kerr’s notes confirm, Charles relayed their conversation to the Queen and Charteris who then began a regular secret correspondence with Kerr about the ‘general principles’ involved – including ‘the reserve powers of the Crown’, whether their use would cause the monarchy ‘any avoidable harm’, Kerr’s likely refusal to accept the advice of the attorney-general and the solicitor-general on the reserve powers, and ultimately the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

All of this was of course secret from the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who always believed that the Queen knew nothing of Kerr’s plans because, as Whitlam later said, ‘Her immediate reaction would have been, “Have you consulted your Prime Minister?”. It is striking that this critical questions was never asked of Kerr. Neither Charles nor the Queen suggested that Kerr speak to the Prime Minister as his constitutional advisor and head of elected government about these intensely political matters, which clearly required the advice of the Prime Minister to resolve. Not only was the Palace thereby made a party to Kerr’s deception of Whitlam, the deception itself was a profound breach of the cardinal principle of constitutional monarchy that the monarch and their vice-regal representative act on the advice of ‘responsible’ elected ministers.

This pivotal conversation between Charles and Kerr in September 1975 traversed more than the possible dismissal of the government and Kerr’s fear that Whitlam might recall him as governor-general – as if that were not enough. Following the High Court’s decision in the Palace letters case, the National Archives released an intriguing document in Kerr’s papers which it had previously withheld from me. It provides further details not just about this conversation in PNG, but about ‘several important discussions’ between Kerr and Charles, and their ‘friendly relationship’ leading up to the dismissal.

During a visit to Australia in October 1974, Charles had approached Kerr with the extraordinary proposal that Kerr would, at some stage in the future, stand down to make way for Charles to become governor-general of Australia. This, Kerr writes, was ‘something which was very dear to his heart’ and which Charles sought fervently in several discussions involving the Queen, Charteris, Charles and Charles’s private secretary. What is remarkable is that none of these discussions about Charles’s great desire to be governor-general, certainly as described by Kerr, included any consultation with the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on whose sole advice the appointment of governor-general must be made. It was as though the choice of governor-general was still a decision of the British monarch.

Charles’s own interest stemmed from his view of the governor-general as a sort of training run for monarchy, in Kerr’s pompous description as ‘not irrelevant to what would be his later experience on ascending the throne’. And if we needed any further confirmation that our new King Charles III of Australia fully supported Kerr’s deceptive dismissal of Whitlam, it can be found in his handwritten letter to the embattled governor-general, then besieged by protests at every public appearance, four months after the dismissal; ‘I appreciate what you do and admire the way you have performed… What you did last year was right and the courageous thing to do’.

All of this has led Professor Hocking to loudly proclaim that Charles III is not my king.