As we approach the 50th anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, the elites are asking – nervously – whether this could ever happen again.

To answer that, Australia urgently needs to return to being, as we once were, one of the world’s freest and most advanced democratic countries.

To help make governments accountable, Australians should vote strategically in the Senate, forgetting the elites’ unwise conclusions that terms longer than three years and a politician’s republic are the right way.

At the same time, Australia’s media need to advance their responsibility as much as they legitimately argue for their freedom.

So, as to whether the dismissal should be repeated, the Senate is duty-bound to force an incompetent government to an election.

As is the governor-general also duty-bound to save the nation by using the reserve powers to dismiss any prime minister unconstitutionally clinging to office.

In both cases that is what our founders intended, as did the generation who in public debates and ten referendums approved  these checks and balances as part and parcel of the constitutional system.

As to the charismatic Gough Whitlam, until he won the 1972 election, he too strongly supported both propositions. This was so fervently his purpose it is inscribed forever in Hansard. There, he declares Labor’s vote against the Coalition’s 1970-1971 budget was ‘no mere formality’. ‘Our purpose,’ he insisted in very clear terms , ‘is to destroy…the government.’

Note that: to destroy the government.

No Coalition politician voting to withhold supply has ever been so brutal.

To demonstrate the chilling effect of those words, he had Senator Lionel Murphy table a list of the previous 169 occasions since 1951 when Labor had opposed a money Bill with the aim of destroying a Coalition government.

Unlike the Coalition’s two meagre but successful attempts, not one of Labor’s 170  succeeded. This was only because of what Whitlam would have called Labor ‘rats’ in the Democratic Labor party who refused to vote with him.

The Coalition in 1975 persuaded the Senate to withhold supply when it was discovered the government was still attempting to borrow a massive amount from Middle Eastern sources through what most thought a confidence man to buy back mining investment, despite an announcement that this had been abandoned.

That such sources seemed to attract Mr Whitlam became obvious when it was revealed in the following year that he was seeking party funding from the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Whether the dismissal could happen again is just one of a marathon daylong series of panel discussions at the Australian Democracy Museum at Old Parliament House, Canberra, on 11 November.

With one crucial exception, just about everybody you can think of has been invited to speak, especially Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, authors of a 2015 book highly critical of Sir John Kerr: The Dismissal – In the Queen‘s Name.

Also invited is a republican academic notorious for trying but failing to implicate  the late Queen in the dismissal.

But Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Peter O’Brien, one of this magazine’s regular contributors, who has risked his life fighting for this nation’s freedom on the battlefields, is now fighting for her constitutional integrity.

The author of Villain or Victim: A Defence of Sir John Kerr and the Reserve Powers, (2022), has not been invited to the daylong Canberra talkfest. Yet his is a powerful and compelling answer to Kelly and Bramston’s book.

However, he has been invited to give the Neville Bonner Oration at a session of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy’s 26th National Conference at Sydney’s Parliament House on 5 November.

The subject is ‘Sir John Kerr, Australian Hero’. ( Free places can be reserved at https://events.humanitix.com/2025-acm-national-conference)

O’Brien believes the reserve powers must be rehabilitated. What we need is not less accountability but more.

It should be remembered that the dismissal gave birth to the long and expensive campaign to turn Australia into a politicians’ republic under which a prime minister governing in breach of the constitution could continue to do so with impunity.

Despite this being rejected nationally, in every state and 73 percent of electorates,  this was kept on the political agenda for a quarter of a century .

From the grant of self-government in the mid-nineteenth century, our constitutional system has involved responsible and representative government based on free and fair elections.

Responsible government means that, unlike the US,  which more strictly separates the executive from the legislative power,  governments under the Westminster system must enjoy the confidence of the lower house.

Until then, as in most of the world, ministers held office at the pleasure of the monarch.

The Americans hoped to improve the situation by vesting executive authority in a king-like elected president and separating the executive from the legislature.

Ironically, because of the loss of those American colonies, the prime minister at the time, Lord North, lost support in the Commons and eventually decided to stand down.

The good sense of that soon persuaded the eminently sensible British that any  government must enjoy the confidence of the lower house.

But, as Dr Karena Viglianti-Northway demonstrates in her excellent 2020 UTS doctoral thesis, the framers of the Australian constitution clearly intended a federal government be also accountable to the Senate.

What was demanded was not a weak or ornamental Senate but a powerful chamber capable of demanding executive accountability through its control over legislation and finance, a power  already proven effective at the colonial level.

This is the ultimate political weapon: the capacity to cut off the government’s money, the ‘power of the purse’.

This is confirmed in the convention debates and the terms of the constitution.

The most ludicrous argument advanced in Whitlam’s defence was that Kerr did not warn him.

Whitlam, a QC, famously joked to Malaysian PM Tun Abdul Razak about it being ‘a race to get to the Palace first’.

But he clearly misjudged the governor-general’s courage and the people’s good sense.

Peter  O’Brien explains all of this lucidly and in detail.