Australian constitutional crisis of 1975
The 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis refers to events at the height of which the then Governor General of Australia , Sir John Robert Kerr , dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party and instead appointed opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as Prime Minister.
background
According to the conventions of the Westminster system , in whose tradition the Australian system of government stands, the monarch or the governor as his deputy has to follow the advice of the head of government as an order. An example of this is the appointment of the country's first Australian-born Governor General, Isaac Isaacs, in 1931, originally rejected by the establishment which, according to the customs of the day, preferred a British noblewoman. The enforcement of Isaacs required a trip of the then Prime Minister James Scullin to London, where he finally forced King George V to appoint Isaacs with the direct words " I advise you " after persistent resistance . It should be noted that this event also represented the formal constitutional separation between the United Kingdom and Australia, as it was thereby established that the monarch, independently of the British government, also had to obey the advice of the Australian government. At that moment, the governor general mutated from a personal representative of the monarch to an organ of the Australian constitution.
Whether the monarch or his deputy can act in general or in special cases without advice from the head of government, and if so under what circumstances, is controversial. If the monarch acts without advice from the head of government, he has to interpret parts of the constitution as reserve powers.
Starting position
In October 1975, the Liberal Party used its Senate majority to reject several key government bills until Whitlam agreed to call new House elections, creating a political crisis. While Whitlam refused to step down and call new elections, Malcolm Fraser refused to allow budget laws to pass in the Senate. If this hopeless situation had continued, the government would eventually have run out of money and could not have made any financial commitments. It was expected that this situation would arise in late November 1975.
Whitlam was sure that some liberal senators would refrain from this extreme stance if he himself insisted on his position. He also assumed that public opinion was on his side because of Fraser's tactics, and that at a convenient moment he could call half the Senate by-election to break the deadlock and strengthen his government.
Fraser made these considerations as well, knowing that some Liberal Senators were in fact unsure of the blockade and were advocating an early abandonment of the deadlock. He also saw that public opinion was not in agreement with the use of the blockade option in the Senate. For this reason he endeavored to reach an early climax of the crisis and saw the quickest way to achieve this in an intervention by the Governor General.
Opposition backbenchers began asking Kerr to dismiss Prime Minister Whitlam in the course of October 1975. On October 16, 1975, however, a leading member of the Liberal Party, the former Solicitor General Robert Ellicott, published a legal opinion approved by Fraser and written for the Shadow Cabinet , in which Ellicott stated that Kerr had not only the right but the duty to dismiss the government would have if it had no support. Whitlam continued to believe that the Governor General could not intervene as he would always have to act on the advice of the Prime Minister. But Kerr saw this as intimidation towards him and also as an expression of a position regarding the consideration of the Reserve Powers, which he did not share.
Kerr therefore saw himself as an active actor in this unfolding political situation. In several discussions he made it clear to ministers of the Whitlam government that, as Governor General, he would have to actively counter the threat of the government going out of money. To this end, he submitted on October 30, 1975 Whitlam and Fraser a compromise solution, which provided for the approval of the budget by Fraser in exchange for the abandonment of Whitlam's plans to call by-elections to the Senate and thus a surrender of Fraser. Fraser refused this on November 2, 1975 and instead proposed the approval of the budget at the expense of a new House election in the first half of 1976, which Whitlam again refused, since according to the Westminster system it was not the leader of the opposition but the prime minister who set the date Elections.
Whitlam's dismissal
Governor General Kerr, who at the time did not have a strong relationship with the Prime Minister, saw Whitlam as unforgiving. In particular, he considered the actions of the Federal Executive Council during the Khemlani Loans affair to be inappropriate. Kerr also feared that Prime Minister Whitlam would ask the Queen to dismiss Kerr if Whitlam found out that Kerr was planning to dismiss the Prime Minister.
Whitlam, on the other hand, assumed that Kerr would accept the attitude of the government in the usual manner of the previous Governors General and would take no action against it. For this reason, he did nothing to dismiss the governor-general, although he did not have any talks with Kerr despite the constitutional crisis.
On November 6, 1975, Kerr, with knowledge of Whitlam, spoke again with opposition leader Fraser. Fraser stated that the opposition would not change its stance and would not accept a compromise. He also threatened Kerr that the opposition would publicly accuse the Governor General of failing to perform his duties. He wanted to force Kerr to hold new elections by the end of 1975. The time pressure arose in particular from the fact that, according to the electoral system in force at the time, a new election could only be called up to the end of the year until November 11, 1975 and Kerr therefore only had a maximum of five days to think about it. After that meeting, Fraser believed that Kerr would fire Prime Minister Whitlam.
On November 9, 1975, Kerr took advice from the President of the Supreme Court, Sir Garfield Barwick . The President of the Court Barwick confirmed to Kerr when asked that the Governor General has the constitutional power to dismiss the Prime Minister. Another judge of the court, Sir Anthony Mason, agrees. However, the confirmation was only an informal and personal account of Barwick, as Kerr had not sought advice from the Supreme Court as an institution, but only from its President, especially since the Supreme Court did not publish legal advice. In addition, Barwick himself was accused of not having made impartial decisions, since he had been attorney general ( Attorney General ) in the liberal government of Robert Menzies , among other things, before his work as Chief Justice . Barwick's advice ultimately helped Kerr get through to dismiss the Prime Minister, but he has not yet disclosed this to Whitlam.
On the morning of November 11, 1975, Whitlam asked the Governor General to speak to him after the celebrations marking the end of World War I in 1918 (Remembrance Day) . Whitlam wanted to ask Kerr to elect half of the Senate to end the stalemate between government and opposition.
After the conversation with Whitlam, Kerr allegedly asked opposition leader Fraser whether he would allow the budget law to pass in the event of an appointment as prime minister, approve the dissolution of the two chambers of the federal parliament and no appointments, no new political programs and no investigations against the current government would initiate. Fraser promised him that. However, Kerr denies in his memoir that this conversation took place.
At noon on that November 11th, Whitlam appeared at the governor-general's office . Kerr asked him about immediate House elections, which Whitlam said no. So he gave him the letter of discharge. Immediately thereafter, Kerr named Fraser, who was also in office, as the new Prime Minister.
New elections
On the advice of Prime Minister Fraser, Governor General Kerr immediately scheduled new elections for December 13, both for the Senate and the House of Representatives. This also meant the dissolution of both chambers of parliament (double dissolution) ; this has only happened three times in Australian parliamentary history. As a result, Whitlam could not get a vote of no confidence in Fraser in the House of Representatives.
The news of Whitlam's controversial dismissal was subsequently accompanied by massive protests against Kerr. But the elections held on December 13, 1975 won the Liberal Party Frasers with an overwhelming majority of 68 seats over the Labor Party Whitlams, which only got 36 parliamentary seats.
Although Kerr gave detailed reasons for his position and the dismissal, both the impeachment of Whitlam and the authorization to dissolve Parliament are classified as constitutionally questionable to this day . Such a procedure had never existed before or after. The motives that prompted the Governor-General to take this approach are still unclear because of the different portrayals of the people involved.
literature
- Nick Beams : The Canberra Coup, A documentary on the sacking of the Labor Government, November 11, 1975 , Workers news, Broadway (NSW), 1976, ISBN 9780959747904
- Paul Kelly: November 1975 , Allen & Unwin, 1995, ISBN 1-86373-987-4
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ ABC, 2000: "A Child Of The Empire" ( Memento from December 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Parliamentary Handbook of the Parliament of Australia ( Memento October 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive )