This newly uncovered material, exclusively published by Crikey, is the first indication from Sir John Kerr himself that Queen Elizabeth II approved of the position he had taken during his dismissal of Gough Whitlam.

A repost from 29 October 2025

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the dismissal of Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam by governor-general Sir John Kerr, new details about Queen Elizabeth II’s view of Kerr’s action have been found in the archives of former Canadian governor-general Jules Léger.

Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam Government followed four weeks in which the coalition of opposition parties had blocked the government’s supply bills in the Senate, demanding Whitlam call an election before they would vote on them. Whitlam held a clear majority in, and the confidence of, the House of Representatives, and was in the process of calling a half-Senate election when Kerr dismissed him and his entire government without warning. In Whitlam’s place, Kerr appointed the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, Malcolm Fraser, as prime minister, without the confidence of the House of Representatives.

It is hardly surprising that this unprecedented vice-regal dismissal sparked intense debate and drove an equally contested history reverberating throughout the Commonwealth. Many key details about the dismissal remained hidden for decades, locked in the Australian archives and denied by the key protagonists, creating a distorted and incomplete history of that tumultuous episode.

It took nearly 40 years, for example, before the secret role of Sir Anthony Mason, then a High Court justice, was revealed as Kerr’s long-standing adviser and guide throughout 1975, who even drafted a letter of dismissal for Kerr. And it took 45 years and a High Court legal action — proceedings I initiated in the Federal Court in 2016 — to secure the release of the secret Palace letters between Kerr and the Queen. After years of denial, the letters finally revealed the role of the Queen, her private secretary Sir Martin Charteris, and Prince Charles, now King Charles III, in Kerr’s decision to dismiss the Whitlam government.

New Palace letters between Canadian governor-general Léger and the Queen uncovered in the Canadian Archives are a significant addition to our shared Commonwealth post-colonial history. In addition to Léger’s correspondence with the Queen, his meticulous notes of his meetings with both Kerr and the Queen add a further dimension to the history of the dismissal. They are of particular interest here for the new light they shed on Kerr’s shifting perception of his own actions in dismissing Whitlam and, most importantly, for the Queen’s view of it.

The approval of Prince Charles for what he described in a letter to Kerr soon after the dismissal as his “right and courageous” action, and the approval of royal eminence grise Lord Louis Mountbatten, are now well known. But Léger’s meticulous notes of his........

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