The "Palace Letters"

were made public yesterday.
For those of you in Upover and elsewhere these are the letters between Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General, and Buckingham Palace at the time of the Whitlam Government and the Dismissal of that same government in 1975. The Governor-General dismissed the Government, a matter of more than a little controversy. It was labelled a "constitutional crisis". There have been all sorts of conspiracy theories surrounding it. 
A history professor, Jenny Hocking, has been pushing for the release of the correspondence for many years. Now that it has been released she is still trying to suggest that the Queen was involved. It is clear she was not involved. Although there is a great deal of correspondence between Buckingham Palace, the Queen's Private Secretary and the Governor-General it has to be said that the Governor-General acted alone and in accordance with the Constitution.
At the time the Governor-General was also in discussion with the Chief Justice of the High Court - Sir Garfield Barwick. Barwick was offering advice with respect to constitutional matters. As many of those discussions were verbal there is no written record of them.
If you sit on the Labor side of the fence then the Dismissal should never have occurred. If you sit on the Coalition side of the fence then the Dismissal was probably the only course of action which was open when a government intended to do harm.
In order to understand what led up to it though one needs to be aware that the government of the day was spending far more than it should have been on things designed to keep them in office. I was working as a school librarian at the time - and looking after a group of special needs students as well. I remember wondering where the money for the millions being spent on school libraries was coming from. It was lovely to have but questions were being raised about the way Whitlam was spending money.
This sort of thing was going on all over the place. Whitlam's government was spending money it did not have. It then found it needed money to develop projects which would actually employ people. They decided they needed to borrow more money. 
Instead of going to the usual sources, the US, the UK or Europe the Whitlam government looked at borrowing money from the oil-rich Middle East where "petro-dollars" were looking for places to invest. Instead of using the government's own advisers about such things they employed a shady financial broker, one Tirath Khemlani. The reason for this was simple, the government would have been not merely advised but told not to borrow money through that source. Khemlani was supposed to broker a $4bn loan for them, a huge sum of money at the time. This was not something he could do or should have been allowed to try and do and the government was advised of this but persisted anyway.  The details of all this are complex and I won't pretend I understand them. I do understand that much and the constitutional reasons why it could not be done.
In short, the government had run out of money.
The Opposition had control of the Senate and, on advice from more than one quarter including the High Court, they informed the government they were blocking the supply bills. Governments cannot govern unless the supply bills are passed.
Kerr had seen all this coming. He had been in discussion with Barwick. He had been keeping the Queen's Private Secretary informed because Whitlam was aware that Kerr had questioned whether could dismiss him. Barwick had advised him that it was possible to do so if the Senate continued to block supply - because the government cannot govern without money, indeed it is illegal for them to do so. The Senate was saying they would block supply unless an election was called. Whitlam had also queried whether he could sack the Governor-General in order to prevent his own sacking.
Put simply what happened in the end was that the Governor-General dismissed the government of the day because it could no longer govern and it refused to call an election. Had it called an election then it would almost certainly still have lost it because of the government's dealings with Khemlani. It may be that they would not have lost quite so many seats but the population at large was worried by the idea that a government would even think of borrowing money from the Middle East. Later events showed it would have been very unwise to do so.
But the conspiracy theorists and the would be republicans have been trying to suggest for years that the Queen interfered in the internal affairs of the country. She did not. 
What the dismissal showed is what republicans do not wish to recognise - it shows that the country is completely independent, that the Queen cannot interfere, and that the Governor-General had the constitutional right to dismiss a government which was endeavouring to govern without supply but also refusing to call an election.
Hocking has probably not done the republican cause any favours although they are trying to suggest that the ability of the Governor-General to remove a democratically elected government was wrong. Even if it is democratically elected a government does not have the right to break the law of the land or do anything to deliberately harm it - even if  it claims to be elected to do just that.
Government is not above the law.