Jenny Hocking - The Dismissal Dossier: Everything you were never meant to know about November 1975

Praise forThe Dismissal Dossier

The Dismissal Dossier is shocking, compelling, and profoundly important. It is a constitutional horror story, in which democratic process is the victim, and the perpetrators got away with it. Jenny Hockings impressive research and analysis should dispel a forty-year fiction perpetrated on the Australian public: that the Prime Minister didnt have a political solution, and that Sir John Kerr acted alone. Instead, Kerr acted with the foreknowledge and implied consent of the Queen, and in concert with the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, another High Court Judge and the Leader of the Opposition to oust a democratically elected government. That these actors in the drama were able to conceal the true history is shocking. Hockings book is an important reminder about the vulnerability of democratic process, a revelatory account of the events of 1975 and, hopefully, a wise contribution for when we draft the constitution of the Republic of Australia.

Anna Funder

The Dismissal Dossier is short, but its content is nothing less than mind-blowing. It is a must-read, not only for lefties maintaining the rage, but for everyone with a stake in the Australian democratic process.

Joseph Sampson, Law Society Journal

Praise forGough Whitlam: A Moment in History

It lets us see who Gough Whitlam the person was before he became Gough Whitlam the politician We learn a lot along the way through the pages of this biography. And could I say it is an elegantly written and elegantly crafted biography.

The Hon. Kevin Rudd, Launch of Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History, 6 November 2008

This is the first instalment in what shapes up to be the best Australian political biography in decades. Monash University research professor Jenny Hocking has crafted a wonderfully detailed, but never boring, story of the man many consider to be the most charismatic prime minister this nation has ever had.

Greg Kelton, Adelaide Advertiser

It is a testament to Hockings research, her eye for the apt example, and her scholarship that she is able to expand our understanding of the man, and the influences that shaped such a significant Australian figure.

Carmen Lawrence, Overland, no. 194, Autumn 2009

Praise forGough Whitlam: His Time

A monumental project of several years duration reminiscent of the glory days of publishing.

Judges, Barbara Ramsden Award, 2014 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards

Professor Jenny Hockings remarkable second volume of her Gough Whitlam biography [has] enough fresh material and new angles to keep alive the intrigue with this period of our history, even for the aficionados.

Richard Ackland, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 2012

A fascinating and important account and a tour de force as a piece of history.

Associate Professor Frank Bongiorno, ANU, Canberra Times, 9 October 2012

Hocking creates a rounded portrait of a complex and flawed idealist her picture of Whitlam makes his governments wild ride seem entirely appropriate to the times and even more exciting in retrospect.

Short Takes, Herald Sun, 10 November 2012

There is no better account of how the triumph of 1972 turned into the catastrophe of 1975.

Neal Blewett, Australian Book Review, November 2012

Its time to hand Jennys book over to the Australian people for them to draw their own conclusions.

Hon. Gough Whitlam

PROFESSOR JENNY HOCKING FASSA is Australian Research Council, Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award (DORA) Professorial Fellow with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University and the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at the University of Western Sydney. She is the author of the acclaimed two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam, an award-winning biographer and scriptwriter and a regular media commentator on Australian politics and political biography.

Gough Whitlam: His Time was awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers Barbara Ramsden Award in 2014. It was shortlisted for the Prime Ministers Literary Awards (National History Prize) 2013, the Queensland Literary Awards 2013, longlisted in the Nib Waverley Awards for Literature 2013 and a finalist in the 2013 National Biography Award. Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year 2009, the Queensland Premiers Literary Awards and the Prime Ministers Awards for Literature 2009, longlisted for the Walkley Awards Non-Fiction Book Award 2009 and a finalist in the 2010 Magarey Medal for Biography.

Jenny Hocking is also the author of the major biographies Lionel Murphy: A Political Biography, shortlisted in the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature: National Non-Fiction Awards; and Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life, shortlisted in the NSW Premiers History Awards. She has also written extensively on counterterrorism and democracy, including Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-terrorism and the Threat to Democracy.

Everything you were never
meant to know about
November 1975

JENNY HOCKING

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

1115 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2015

This edition published 2016

Text Jenny Hocking, 2016

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Philip Campbell Design

Text design and typesetting by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Hocking, Jenny, author.

The dismissal dossier: everything you were never meant to know about November 1975/Jenny Hocking.

9780522870374 (paperback)

9780522870381 (ebook)

Whitlam, Gough, 19162014.

Australian Labor PartyHistory20th century.

AustraliaPolitics and government19721975.

324.29407

CONTENTS

Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But let this happen in such a way that no-one become aware of it.

Niccol Machiavelli

UNCOVERING A HIDDEN HISTORY

THE DISMISSAL OF the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr has always been as much about myth as reality. No single episode in our political history has been as thoroughly traversed as this. Yet despite the wealth of materialthe microscopic dissections of meetings, conversations, legal and political arguments before, during and after Kerrs actionsthe history was never really settled. It had always seemed to me that the dismissal could never be understood so long as it was presented in isolation from the trajectory of the Whitlam government itself, seen as the outcome of a four-week political crisis that began when the Opposition first blocked Supply in the Senate on 16 October 1975, rather than as the culmination of three years of sustained destabilisation and obstruction that had begun with the election of the first Labor government in twenty-three years. The historical perspective was simply wrong and so too was the dismissal narrative it had created. It had distorted the history and worse, obscured some of its most critical elements.