The Dismissal was no coup. It was our democratic process operating exactly as it was designed to. In fact, it was two-thirds chance and one-third decisive action, something it would be hard to reproduce today.

All day yesterday we heard the ABC and the far-left political complex crowing about it.

In their celebration of Whitlam, they have forgotten the chaos he caused, and that Australians voted twice afterwards to keep Whitlam out of office. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s statue crowns the man and ignores the mess.

This was my father’s generation. It took me a lot of research to get past the wall of propaganda erected around the event.

It has been very triumphalist. Comments have ranged from uninformed denialism about the system pulling an out-of-control Prime Minister into check, through to outright racist misinformation about ‘foreign powers’.

Many others will try to relitigate it in the modern era, though they will be drowned out by the state media that refuses to act on its own bias. More interesting to me is what happened afterwards: the day that political power in Australia changed forever.

The Governor-General is the only level of democratic leverage we have on a tyrannical regime. There is nothing else – no recall powers, no right of petition, no ability to instigate referenda, nothing…

Moreover, we have no Bill of Rights and the barest of constitutional protections. We are the most blissfully trusting electorate in modern Western history, with absolutely no reason to be. We arrived in chains under whips, and the same system still governs us.

When a government becomes tyrannical, and they truly can here, who is going to stop them? A puppet appointed by the Prime Minister of the day? The person who owes their patronage to the very government they may have to dismiss? Would a future Governor-General dare act against state media and the far-left political complex?

Westminster was not built to free the commons. It was built to control the executive.

That was what Magna Carta was all about, the elites replacing the executive, not liberating the people.

But neither was the Prime Minister ever intended to be a king.

Today, who would act? We have seen terrible liberties taken with the Australian people: attempts to divide us by race, moral stagnation over antisemitism, and radical injustices in immigration. Yet no one will act to restrain them, and we have an opposition that largely agrees with them.

Lord Hailsham warned in the 1976 Dimbleby Lecture that once a regime has a House majority and a pliant Senate, it can rule as an ‘elective dictatorship’.

In Australia, we now sit and celebrate that fact every time the Dismissal is brought up. In truth, we almost replaced the Crown with a republican model beholden to the same undemocratic legislature forever, and not to the people.