The Dismissal Dossier by Jenny Hocking

Author:Jenny Hocking
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

There has been discussion of the possibility that a half-Senate election might be held under circumstances in which the government has not obtained supply. If such advice were given to me I should feel constrained to reject it because a half-Senate election held whilst supply continues to be denied does not guarantee a prompt or sufficiently clear prospect of the deadlock being resolved.18

Kerr does not mention that the decision to hold the half-Senate election had been reached by Whitlam days earlier—in fact he does not mention Whitlam at all in relation to these half-Senate election discussions. However, a draft of this statement shows that Kerr had, literally, rewritten history. It reads; ‘Mr Whitlam, whilst asserting his right to govern without supply, advised a half-Senate election. I felt constrained to reject this advice’. The draft makes it clear that Whitlam had advised Kerr of the half-Senate election, that Kerr had rejected it and, worse, that Kerr elected to misrepresent this critical fact in his final statement.19 Kerr’s oblique ‘there has been discussion’ suggests that the half-Senate election had remained hypothetical, not the final and conclusive decision of the Prime Minister and the resolution of the deadlock that, Kerr claims, had warranted dismissal. Second, Kerr presents his own predictive imagination as fact—for on what basis could he state so definitively that Supply would ‘continue to be denied’ once the half-Senate election had been called?

This is not a moot point, for Kerr’s predecessor, Sir Paul Hasluck, had faced precisely this question just the previous year, following Whitlam’s request for a double dissolution in the face of the Senate threatening to block Supply. Hasluck’s response could not have been more different from Kerr’s and what is quite intriguing is how little this previous example was called upon to provide some guidance—either to Kerr in his deliberations or in subsequent analyses of the dismissal. In April 1974, in circumstances that provide the closest precedent for the events of 1975, Governor-General Hasluck had dealt very differently—more effectively and with negligible political upheaval—with the situation of a threatened refusal of Supply. A comparative examination of the 1974 threat to block Supply would have shown not only what had previously been done but also, and more importantly, what Sir John Kerr should have done on 11 November 1975.

Just eighteen months earlier, the Opposition leader, Billy Snedden, had led his party over an electoral cliff with the decision to move to refuse a vote on the Whitlam government’s Supply bills in the Senate. The Opposition at that time had a majority in the Senate of five, the Senate not having faced the voters at the 1972 election, and on 10 April 1974 the Opposition leader in the Senate, Reg Withers, proposed an amendment that the budget bills would not be considered until the government ‘agrees to submit itself to the Australian people’. This amendment was never actually put. Whitlam had already determined that this unprecedented threat of the ultimate Senate obstruction would provide the best opportunity for the government

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