Australian Broadcasting Corporation


LOCATION: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1505066.htm

Broadcast: 11/11/2005

Howard defends Kerr on dismissal anniversary

Reporter: Jim Middleton

MAXINE McKEW: John Howard has used the 30th anniversary of the dismissal to defend Sir John Kerr, the governor-general who sacked then Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam. The Prime Minister says Sir John Kerr has been vilified for being forced to handle a political deadlock not of his own making. From Canberra, Jim Middleton reports.

JIM MIDDLETON: Remembrance Day - dedicated to the memory of Australians who've died for their country. But the tumultuous events of November 11, 1975, are remembered for very different reasons - the only time an Australian prime minister's been sacked by a governor-general.

GOUGH WHITLAM (NEWSREEL): Well may we say, "God save the Queen," because nothing will save the Governor-General.

JIM MIDDLETON: Friendlier now, but time has wearied neither Malcolm Fraser nor Gough Whitlam in his enduring belief that he was right.

GOUGH WHITLAM, PRIME MINISTER, 1972-1975: Kerr should have allowed me to have a half-Senate election.

MALCOLM FRASER, FORMER PRIME MINISTER: Now, at that time, I really believed that we would have been held in contempt as an Opposition if we didn't give Australians the opportunity to have a vote.

MALCOLM FRASER (NEWSREEL): The great defence of our democracy is that the constitution must be upheld.

JIM MIDDLETON: Towering ambition versus towering ego. A junior frontbencher then, John Howard says it's politicians on both sides, including him, who are to blame for the crisis of 1975, not Sir John Kerr.

JOHN HOWARD, PRIME MINISTER: We are the people who brought about the clash of political wills, we are the people who stretched the fabric of the constitution.

KIM BEAZLEY, OPPOSITION LEADER: I think it's almost impossible to malign Sir John Kerr sufficiently.

JIM MIDDLETON: The PM's adamant the 1975 deadlock does not warrant major constitutional surgery, and he's taken the scalpel to Kim Beazley's conversion to the cause of a popularly-elected president.

JOHN HOWARD: You would pit against a popularly-elected prime minister an elected president who would get flights of fancy about his or her popular mandate.

KIM BEAZLEY: There are many people in this country who won't vote for a republic unless they have a say in the selection of a head of state.

JIM MIDDLETON: Gough Whitlam still has his fervent admirers, but at least one of Labor's new generation, Lindsay Tanner, thinks the dismissal's day is done.

LINDSAY TANNER, OPPOSITION FRONTBENCHER: It's about time we moved on. It's about time we got over it, put it there with our history.

JIM MIDDLETON: For Labor, the dismissal proved a brutal lesson in the limits to power - a lesson well enough learned by the time Bob Hawke became prime minister just seven years later. But it also seriously stunted Malcolm Fraser's authority to such an extent that some key policy initiatives, like John Howard's workplace revolution, did not see the light of day for another 30 years. Jim Middleton, Lateline.