Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 23 October 2014

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Gough Whitlam—the elected leader sacked by the unelected Queen

Gough Whitlam was an Australian patriot whose pursuit of Labor’s vision for national economic development and national control of resources was such a threat to the British Crown that Queen Elizabeth deposed him.

Whitlam came to office determined to assert Australia’s ownership of its mineral resources, which task he entrusted to his Minerals and Energy Minister Rex Connor, who spearheaded the Whitlam government’s campaign to “buy back the farm”. The biggest foreign owner of Australia’s minerals was CRA—now called Rio Tinto, the British mining giant owned by Queen Elizabeth.

Whitlam also established a Department of Northern Development to implement comprehensive plans for the development of the underdeveloped and underpopulated north, in which Whitlam had personally been involved since 1961. The development plans included Rex Connor’s proposal for a transcontinental gas pipeline. This was the vision for which Connor, and Treasurer Jim Cairns, with Whitlam’s support, sought overseas loans to fund the investment and resource buy-backs.

And it was for this intention to assert Australian sovereignty, not the resulting scandals, that the Queen deposed him—an action so shockingly antidemocratic that Whitlam found it difficult to believe. He recorded in his book, The Truth of the Matter, that he telephoned the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, who assured him the Queen was not informed by Governor-General Sir John Kerr of the plan to dismiss Whitlam’s government. Kerr himself maintained he had not consulted the Queen ahead of time.

However, the claims of Kerr and Charteris were proven to be outright lies when the archives of Kerr’s papers were made public decades after his death, which became the basis for a 2012 book by Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: His Time.

The CEC publicised the key finding of Hocking’s research in a 29 August 2012 release. In honour of Gough Whitlam on the occasion of his passing, the CEC is hereby reissuing that release, for the sake of truth, and the ongoing fight for Australian sovereignty.

Media Release 29 August 2012

Whitlam sacking: the Queen did it!

For any blockheaded Australian who still doesn’t get it, that it was the British Crown which organised the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government with continuing, intended disastrous consequences for our economy and our national sovereignty, look in the background of Jenny Hocking’s new book, Gough Whitlam, His Time.

While in the foreground Hocking focuses on Sir Anthony Mason as the rumoured “third man” in the dismissal, it is the drama played out in the background that is the real bombshell, because it provides further proof of what the CEC has charged all along: that the Queen herself presided over the operation to sack Whitlam!

Hocking notes, “Neither Kerr nor the palace ever revealed that, weeks before any action in the Senate had been taken [to block supply], the governor-general had already conferred with the palace on the possibility of the future dismissal of the prime minister, securing in advance the response of the palace to it.” In plain English, “the palace”—the Queen herself—approved the sacking of Whitlam.

Hocking’s archival digging proves that Kerr conspired with the Palace to ensure Whitlam would not be able to use his powers under the constitution to avert the carefully-planned conspiracy to sack his government.

Hocking reveals:

A full nine months before the Nov. 11 dismissal, and eight months before the constitutional crisis precipitated by the blocking of “supply”, Kerr took the unusual step of confidentially arranging an ANU-centred “brains trust” of legal minds to brief him on his powers as governor-general, centred upon High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason.
A number of weeks before the Liberal-Country opposition moved to block supply, Kerr, during a September 1975 visit to Papua New Guinea, briefed Prince Charles in person on his concern that Whitlam might get wind of his intention, and ask the Queen to sack Kerr before Kerr could sack him. (Under the Constitution, the Queen appoints the G-G on the advice of the PM.)
According to Kerr’s notes of the conversation, uncovered by Hocking, Prince Charles told Kerr that he thought the Queen should not have to accept Whitlam’s advice in that circumstance; in other words, the Australian Constitution was irrelevant.
The Prince’s view was not naīve nor uninformed. Charles then spoke to the Queen’s personal private secretary Sir Martin Charteris, who wrote Kerr a letter acknowledging that the Australian constitution did mandate that the Queen would have to accede to advice from the prime minister to dismiss the governor-general, BUT… should “the contingency to which you refer” arise, the Queen would “try to delay things”. Thus the Queen herself signalled to Kerr that the plan to sack Whitlam would succeed.

With whatever its shortcomings, the Whitlam government—the first ALP government for 23 years—was the last gasp of “old Labor” in Australia. Whitlam supported the efforts of his senior ministers Rex Connor and Jim Cairns to “buy back the farm”, to wrest sovereign control of Australia’s huge resource wealth away from the Crown-controlled Anglo-Dutch raw materials cartel, the jewel of which was Rio Tinto (then RTZ and its subsidiary CRA), in which the Queen herself was the largest private shareholder. At stake wasn’t simply the Royal Family’s own investments, but the entire basis of British imperial power—the City of London’s control of global finance and global raw materials, through which it dictated to governments. As on other occasions, Whitlam had announced during a 1973 trip to Tokyo that “We have an objective of full Australian ownership in development projects involving uranium. We also regard this as a desirable objective in oil, natural gas and black coal”, while in other sectors, he said, the government sought “the highest possible level of Australian ownership.” His removal soon snuffed out that threat to the Crown, along with the remaining embers of the old Labor tradition of national sovereignty. By the time the ALP next took office in 1983, under Oxford-trained Rhodes scholar Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, Labor had abandoned its traditional commitment to the common good exemplified by tariff protection for agriculture and industry, national ownership of vital raw materials, and sovereign national banking. Instead, they sold out to the City of London by ramming through deregulation, privatisation, and free trade policies that turned Australia into a raw materials quarry from which Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and their cartel partners have ripped out hundreds of billions of dollars.

However, such is the power of the fairy tale believed by little children of all ages at all levels of Australian society—likely including you yourself—that “the Crown is above politics”, that when the Queen’s private secretary Martin Charteris assured Whitlam that “the Queen knew nothing about” his sacking, Whitlam dutifully recorded that as the gospel truth in his autobiography, The Truth of the Matter: “It is a fact that the Queen’s representative in Australia had kept the Queen in the same total ignorance of his actions as he had the Prime Minister of Australia.” And even though Whitlam also described former MI6 agent Kerr as a grovelling toady who would sell his soul for Royal honours, he refused to draw the obvious conclusion that Kerr was working in cahoots with the Crown, even as he dryly observed that following his sacking the Crown showered Kerr with so many gongs that he “had become in a single annus mirabilis the Rt. Hon. Sir John Kerr, AK, GCMG, GCVO, K St J.”

Meanwhile Kerr bragged in his own book, Matters of Judgement, that shortly after Whitlam’s dismissal the Queen herself inducted Kerr into her Privy Council, among numerous other honours she rained down upon him: “In Canberra I was sworn in as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council at a meeting presided over by the Queen at Yarralumla. During an audience on board the Britannia in Fremantle harbour, Her Majesty invested me as a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. (I had previously, in 1975 when the Queen established the Order of Australia of which she is Sovereign, became the first Chancellor and a Companion of the Order and later, when the rank of knighthood was introduced, the first Knight of the Order of Australia. In 1976 Her Majesty had promoted me to the rank of Knight Grand Cross in the Order of St. Michael and St. George. Throughout my Governor-Generalship I was Prior in Australia and a Knight in the Order of St. John of Jerusalem…)”

Along with Kerr, the Queen also rewarded Kerr’s private secretary and co-conspirator, Sir David Smith (who publicly read the famous proclamation dismissing Whitlam), by anointing him as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. This Royal Victorian Order is the third highest honour in the British Empire, and is awarded as “a recognition of personal service to the reigning Sovereign”. It is granted by the Queen herself, without the recommendation of any of her government.

The Crown’s Green Fascism

But this was far from the only evil which the Crown in this era perpetrated against Australia and its potential for agro-industrial sovereignty. In 1963 Prince Philip personally founded the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), for which he served as president from 1971-1976. As intended, the ACF spawned the entire green fascist movement of today (including the Green Party) whose purpose is to shut down development wherever it can. (See “Heil Philip! How the Royals Created the Australian Conservation Foundation to Unleash Green Fascism”) Typical is the Murray Darling Basin, which is being devastated according to the dictates of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, founded in 1971 by Philip’s crony Max Nicholson, the longtime permanent secretary to the Privy Council. As is universally acknowledged, Ramsar’s demands to preserve “wetlands” serves as the cornerstone of the Howard government’s 2007 Water Act.

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today challenged Australians to quit being little children, to finally grow up and face the truth about the Royals: “Most Australians despise the deregulation, privatisation, free trade and green fascist policies that have destroyed the Australian economy, but they have turned a blind eye to the clear evidence that it is the Crown which has created these policies, and it is the Crown which is ramming them down our throats. In fact, Australians often even tug their forelocks and curtsy to the same Royals who are killing them. If you want a future for yourself or for your children, you will join our fight to overturn all these British imperial policies, beginning with circulating our call, “The Future of Australia: Develop or Die”.

For a free copy of the CEC’s 1998 magazine, “Stop the British Crown plot to crush Australia’s unions”, which includes more background on Whitlam’s efforts to ‘buy back the farm’, click here.

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