Half a century ago this week, Australia was rocked by the removal of its prime minister, Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr.
Whitlam, a solid social democrat by the standards of that time — and as far left a leader as Australia has had since the 1950s — had lost control of the Senate, the Australian Parliament’s upper house. The right wing opposition, a Liberal Party–led coalition, used this advantage to deny the government “supply,” blocking essential government spending.
Although the situation was similar in some ways to a US government shutdown, one important difference is that Australia was, and is, a constitutional monarchy, with the governor-general serving as head of state.
According to decades of convention, the governor-general was supposed to act according to advice supplied by the prime minister. On November 11, however, Kerr dismissed Whitlam, called an election and appointed the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker PM. A few hours later, he dismissed (“prorogued”) parliament.
On both Left and Right, many like to take the Whitlam dismissal— as it became known — as a constitutional struggle between an old British-oriented establishment and a new, progressive Australia. But in retrospect, it’s hard to doubt that the 1975 dismissal was in fact a soft coup d’état, heavily influenced by US power and influence.
In this conception, which draws the interpretation decisively out of the narrow Anglo-Celtic frame, the dismissal was a bloodless, legalistic event in the chain of coups orchestrated by the United States to shore up domination over a series of client states, from Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, to South Vietnam in the 1960s, and to Chile in 1973. Indeed, in this reading, the closest analogue to the Whitlam dismissal is the overthrow of Chile’s elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who was violently deposed by General Augusto Pinochet after years of CIA and other agency conspiring.
Violence in the Global South and legalism in the Anglosphere: the methods differed but not the substance of events. Fifty years later, the global context and implications of the Whitlam dismissal are, if anything, far clearer.