3 months ago
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Paul Keating says he would have put then-governor-general Sir John Kerr under police arrest during the turmoil that led to the sacking of the Whitlam government.
Keating, who had been appointed the minister for northern Australia just a fortnight before the events of November 11, 1975, was with Gough Whitlam in the hours after Kerr sacked the prime minister and appointed Malcolm Fraser as the nation’s political leader.
Paul Keating has revealed he told Gough Whitlam to sack John Kerr, and jail him if he refused.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
According to Keating, who went on to become prime minister from 1991 to 1996, he told Whitlam that he should go directly to Queen Elizabeth II and sack Kerr.
If he refused to go, Kerr should be locked up by local police.
“My proposition was that Gough should ask the Queen to accept his advice to appoint a new governor-general,” he said. “In the event that Kerr resisted, I said to Gough he should be put under police arrest.
“That is certainly what I would have done if I was prime minister.”
Keating, in his first filmed interview on the dismissal for the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra, said there was a risk that Kerr could win support from the army to protect him from arrest as he was the nation’s commander-in-chief.
This was an issue that Whitlam had to consider.
“In other words, you’d have to have the soldiers with you for this to happen,” he said in an interview with Niki Savva, the veteran political journalist and columnist for this masthead.
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Keating said Whitlam dismissed the idea, arguing the then-prime minister was a constitutionalist.
But Keating said the events of that day were a coup against Australian democracy, led by one man: Kerr.
“It was, in every respect it was a coup. A coup by an individual, not a sort of violent gathering,” he said.
More to come.
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