The Whitlam government ended in 1975 with a constitutional crisis in which Governor-General John Kerr dismissed the ministry and appointed Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser as prime minister, an act in which the monarch herself was not consulted and, when approached after the event, pointedly refused to intervene, noting that she lacked authority to do so under the Australian constitution. The incident, though, raised questions about the value of maintaining a supposedly "symbolic" office that still possessed many key political powers and what an Australian president with the same reserve powers would do in a similar situation.