It is election day

and I will shortly pedal off and do my civic duty.
A  piece of news has reminded me of another election...the one which followed the dismissal of the Whitlam government.
That has been in the news because there has been another attempt to have the correspondence between Queen Elizabeth and Sir John Kerr made public. The court, rightly, refused the application.
My own view is that this correspondence should never be made public. I know it is an event which still fascinates historians. I know that Nicholas Whitlam would like to find "evidence" that showed his father was wrongly dismissed but that is unlikely to occur. In all possibility the correspondence would show that the Governor-General was on stronger ground than is usually recognised.
Why? The problem is that we have concentrated too long on the dismissal itself and not the reasons for the dismissal. 
Labor had the numbers in the House of Representatives. It did not have the numbers in the Senate.
There had been a row over money. Rex Connor had resigned over his dealings with Tarith Khemlani - a man the government planned to illegally borrow money from. He was replaced by Paul Keating, a Prime Minister in waiting, but there was clearly much more to the affair than simply borrowing money. Whitlam had also told the head of ASIO (the Australian intelligence organisation) to stop talking to the CIA. He did this verbally rather than in writing but the head of ASIO recorded the order in his own records. If Whitlam had thought about it he would have realised this would happen but apparently it didn't occur to him. 
Are those two matters connected? I don't know but I suspect they might be.
The Governor-General met with Whitlam and then with the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser.  Whitlam was worried by this and by Fraser's warnings about blocking supply because of the government's dealings with Khemlani. It is evidenced by the no confidence motion in Fraser he managed to get through the House of Reps  - based solely on the numbers there. 
Whitlam's economic policies had been along the lines of tax and spend - spend more than the country could afford. If the proposed loans from Khemlani had managed to pass parliament we would still be paying them off today - and not just in monetary terms. 
Kerr knew all these things. He had met multiple people, not just Whitlam and Fraser, over it. He may well have known things not known to either man. 
Kerr first sought Whitlam's permission to consult the Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick, over these matters - and permission was denied. If Whitlam had been sure of his actions the permission would almost certainly have been granted. 
What happened next is uncertain. There was undoubtedly much more to it than the public has ever been told. It was late in the day before Kerr consulted the Queen's Private Secretary. We don't know what the advice was but it is likely that they were not going to interfere. Kerr then went to Barwick and asked if it was possible to sack the government given what had happened and what the government still intended to do. Barwick's advice was that there was cause. Did Barwick act alone? Perhaps - but it may be that he also sought the opinion of others. If he did we will never know.
If everything became clear it may well be that Whitlam would be found to have tried to exert undue influence in other ways as well. It may well be that others, still alive, would be found wanting too.
For those reasons it is better that the correspondence remains out of view and it is simply accepted that the Governor-General had the power to do what he did. Had the electorate wished to do so it could have returned the Whitlam government. It didn't. Months before every major newspaper in the country had said the government had to go - even those who were normally highly supportive of it. It's a nasty episode in history. 
The entire episode is best forgotten.