Paul Keating says Sir John Kerr should have been arrested

Howard rejected a proposal by former immigration secretary Philip Ruddock to strip the Senate of its right to block supply. Whitlam’s failure to pass budget bills through the Senate was at the heart of his government’s dismissal by Kerr.

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But he supported two constitutional amendments: It eliminated the requirement that the number of the House of Representatives be close enough to double the number of senators, and it removed the requirement for a double dissolution election when a bill is rejected twice by the upper house.

Appointed minister for Northern Australia just two weeks before the events of 11 November 1975, Keating was with Whitlam in the hours after Kerr sacked the prime minister and appointed Malcolm Fraser as the country’s political leader.

According to Keating, who was prime minister from 1991 to 1996, Whitlam was directly approached by Queen Elizabeth II. He went to Elizabeth and told her she needed to fire Kerr.

If he refuses to go, Kerr should be taken to jail by the police.

“My proposal was that Gough should ask the Queen to accept his recommendation to appoint a new governor-general,” he said. “I told Gough that if Kerr resisted he should be arrested by the police.

“If I were prime minister, I would definitely do that.”

Keating said that because Kerr was the nation’s commander-in-chief, there was a risk he would seek support from the Army to protect himself from arrest.

This was something Whitlam had to consider.

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“In other words, for this to happen, the soldiers must be with you,” he said in an interview with Niki Savva, veteran political journalist and columnist of this imprint.

Keating said Whitlam rejected the idea, arguing that the then prime minister was a constitutionalist.

But Keating said the day’s events were a coup against Australian democracy led by one man: Kerr.

“This was a coup in every respect. It was a coup by an individual, not a violent meeting,” he said.

The main reason why Fraser was able to defeat the Whitlam budget was the change in Labor’s representation in the Senate. NSW premier Tom Lewis and Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen breached constitutional convention by appointing non-Labour senators to fill two upper house vacancies.

A referendum in 1977 blocked such a move.

Anna Burke, the former Labor speaker of the House of Representatives under Julia Gillard, has revealed how close she believes Labor came to losing office during her tenure.

Burke was the speaker on 9 October 2012, the day Gillard gave her famous misogyny speech. The speech was part of a vote of confidence given by then opposition leader Tony Abbott.

According to Burke, Gillard did not go to the toilet or leave Parliament for five hours for fear of her government falling.

“I thought that day that the government would come down to a parliamentary vote,” he said.

Burke said it was unlikely that a future governor general would act like Kerr and consider himself “above the will of the people”.

“From a legal perspective, this could happen again. Will it happen again? No, it won’t happen,” he said.

Tony Smith, the liberal speaker of the House of Representatives, said a repeat of the events of 1975 was unlikely, in part because of the rise of minor parties in the Senate.

The Coalition and Labor held all but one of the Senate’s 60 members before Lewis and Bjelke-Petersen’s actions. Today, the Senate crossbench includes 18 out of 75 members.

Governor-General Sam Mostyn used the incident to argue that it was hard to imagine that a prime minister could be “surprised” by a royal representative, as Whitlam accused Kerr of dismissing him.

“It is true that I cannot imagine a situation in modern Australia under the circumstances of 1975 in which a prime minister would be surprised or taken off guard by the Governor-General,” he said.

“More importantly, I am not taking a more comprehensive approach to my role or redefining any of the fundamental principles of responsible and representative government. These are indisputable principles and are at the heart of our democracy.”