Jenny Hocking

After a long fight, academic Jenny Hocking finally got access to the correspondence between the Australian Governor General and the Queen in the period surrounding the dismissal of the government in 1975.
The letters lay bare the stark reality that conservatives in both countries would do anything to disrupt the reformist, elected, Labor government in the early 1970s.
Governor General Kerr is confirmed as a cretin. The Queen's Private Secretary comes across as a manipulative meddler, playing a game much larger then he realised.
In context, it makes clear the Establishment, in Australia and the UK, was fundamentally unable to accept that a reformist government had the right to reform. Kerr was flummoxed by such things as the introduction of an Australian honours system to replace the British based system, the replacement of God Save the Queen as the national anthem, and the introduction of a universal health insurance system. All were retained after the Labor government was thrown out, and all seem entirely unremarkable today.
Thankfully, the world has moved on.… (more)

For me, one of the remarkable aspects of reading The Dismissal Dossier, Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975 is that the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975 seems to generate so little interest. The book isn't written for people like me who lived through the hours of November 11th with increasing shock and dismay, it's written for people who weren't paying attention at the time, or have come to adulthood in the ensuing years. I can't comprehend why people don't realise how much it matters for our democracy...

I'm not going to revisit the historical events of the day, because Wikipedia provides a readily available account and because the timeline of events is actually secondary to what matters. My father was one of those outraged by the Palace's role in these events, and he wrote to the Queen and in due course received the usual mealy-mouthed denial that the Queen had any responsibility for it. What matters is that this denial and all the others are shameless lies, and Jenny Hocking lays the deception bare in the first chapter 'What did the Palace Know?' The Palace knew what was going to happen beforehand, had provided advice beforehand, and went on to shower Kerr with honours after the event. So much for the oft-quoted assertion that the Queen is always neutral in matters of domestic politics. She wasn't neutral then — and she isn't neutral now because she is still refusing to release archival material that is obviously detrimental to the fantasy of Palace neutrality.

[Jenny Hocking took the case to the High Court to force the Palace to release the papers, and failed. You can read the judgement here, but the nuts and bolts of it is that the correspondence is not the property of the Commonwealth and therefore there is no authority to release them under the Archives Act. The Palace can embargo their release indefinitely...]

I was glued to the radio on November 11th 1975, and I remember the short-lived moment of relief when Whitlam returned to the House of Representatives after Kerr had dismissed him and the House carried a motion of No Confidence in Kerr's stooge Malcolm Fraser. I thought that everything would be resolved then... the Senate had passed Supply and it's the House of Reps that forms government in democracies like ours. But in the chapter 'Sir John Kerr's Second Dismissal' Hocking makes it explicit: from this moment on, this moment that I remember so vividly, Whitlam should have been restored to office.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/09/07/the-dismissal-dossier-by-jenny-hocking/… (more)