Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will be entirely respectful in relation to the appropriate address to the Queen. I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) there is a current controversy pertaining to the so called 'palace letters' between the then Governor-General Sir John Kerr and Her Majesty The Queen in the months leading up to the dismissal of the Whitlam Government; and

(b) this correspondence has been declared 'personal' and therefore secret at 'Her Majesty the Queen's instructions';

(2) acknowledges that:

(a) these letters are a matter of our national history which should be made available to the Australian people;

(b) regardless of the merits or otherwise of the dismissal, Australians deserve to know the extent to which The Queen involved herself in the sacking of an elected Australian Government; and

(c) the very notion of 'personal' letters between the Monarch and the Governor-General offends all concepts of transparency and democracy that we hold dear; and

(3) call on the Australian Government to take steps to have the documents released.

I am pleased to move this motion regarding the so-called palace letters, which remain hidden from the Australian people. It calls upon the government to take immediate steps to have these documents, which belong to the Australian people, released. It is an intriguing affair, and I know it may seem less relevant than many of the important debates that confront our nation—the government's lack of plan for jobs, economic mismanagement, growing inequality and so on—but I do believe that these issues are also important and worthy of this 20 minutes of debate.

What are these documents, and why are they not being released? The letters are between the then Governor-General and the Queen in the months leading up to the dismissal of the Whitlam government. We do not actually know how many letters there are, although informed speculation suggests there are dozens. Ordinarily, we would not even be having this debate, because they would simply be released as a matter of course through the normal FOI or Archives Act procedures. These mechanisms do not exclude Government House, but these letters have mysteriously been marked 'personal', and therefore secret, at Her Majesty's instructions; hence the ordinary procedures are not working, and this veil of undemocratic secrecy has descended.

We understand that the final word on whether Australians will ever see these papers remains with the Queen's private secretary and the Governor-General's official secretary, even after 2027. In my view, this is outrageous and illogical, as dispatches to the Queen are part of the Governor-General's duty. Indeed, Sir John Kerr made that clear in his book Matters for Judgement. So how on earth can they now be marked 'personal'? They should be available like other important government records.

But why does it matter? Firstly, they are of great historical importance, and they are Australian documents—one of the few remaining missing pieces that relate to the greatest constitutional crisis our country has known. They may well provide the smoking gun as to how much the palace knew of Sir John Kerr's intentions to sack a democratically elected government. Whatever you think of the Dismissal, and there are a range of views, Australians do have the right to know the full story. It has been a bitter and abiding controversy for decades—to quote Professor Jenny Hocking, 'always with the lingering sense that there was more to be found'. It has taken decades to find out many of the basic facts, in large part due to the diligent work over many years of Jenny Hocking. Sir John Kerr, at the time and for years afterwards, provided a misleading and deceptive public account arguing that his dismissal of an elected government was necessary to break a political deadlock. Yet we now know that he was considering the possibility of dismissing the government for months and that he had certainly decided to do so some days earlier, apparently fearful for his own job.

Secondly, they raise important issues about our democracy, constitution and sovereignty. The defining feature of this, our parliamentary democracy, is that the party that commands a majority in the House of Representatives shall form the government. This was repudiated in 1975. The dismissal of an elected government is no small thing and history can repeat itself. So it is important that, even 40 years on, we eventually gain a full understanding of what happened. I believe that this raises genuine issues about our residual relationship with the Crown. Are we really a sovereign nation if we cannot access our own national records, just down the road in the National Archives, without the permission of 'a foreign queen'—those were the Prime Minister's words.

Finally, this is a matter of principle because this curious case breaks principle and practice in regard to the release of government documents. Cabinet documents will soon be released just 20 years after they were created, and there is no basis for these documents to be locked away. So how can they be released? We should not be having this discussion—but we are. The courts are one possible way. There is a current Federal Court case, on which I will not comment. I commend Professor Jenny Hocking, who has mounted this case on her own initiative and at considerable personal risk. But it should not be left up to a researcher.

It has been reported that, in November last year, the Prime Minister said he would make a formal approach to the Queen to ask her to release what are our national records. I have heard no more of that and I do not know whether it has happened. In any event, that is not good enough. I call on the government to take firm action now and advise the Queen formally to just release these documents immediately, understanding that she is required to act on such advice. Or so we are told; if not, then that is a shocking revelation about our system of government. A one-off request does nothing to ensure that similar documents are not hidden again. So we may need to review legislation and arrangements to stop this from happening. In summary, I believe this is an important matter of historical record. These are Australian documents. What is there to hide? Why not simply release them? They do raise important issues and it breaks the general principle that government documents are released—and Government House is not exempt from this legislation.

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