11 December 2025
Published on Substack
E&OE
——
It’s impossible to do justice to the life of Sir David Smith, whom we honour tonight, without considering the Whitlam dismissal, with which he will always be linked, the 50th anniversary of which has just passed.
Some of the most watched footage in our history has the comparatively diminutive David Smith, on the old Parliament House steps, reading the governor-general’s proclamation of the dissolution of the parliament; with Gough Whitlam towering over him, about to declare “well may we say ‘God save the Queen’ because nothing will save the governor-general”.
It was, indeed, to save that governor-general’s reputation, post 1975, and to raise understanding and respect for the office of the governor-general, and for the crown in our constitution, that David Smith worked for so much of his life.
As the relatively youthful director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, in 1993 and 1994, and subsequently as an enthusiastic supporter, I saw much of him over his final three decades. He might have been born David Iser Szmitkowski, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, who anglicised their name to Smith, but there was no more committed or proud Australian.
David Smith was determined to correct the myths, as he saw them, surrounding the Remembrance Day demise of the left’s great hero, the man who’d ended Labor’s 23 years in the electoral wilderness, and supposedly transformed the staid Anglo-Australia of the Menzies era into the progressive multi-cultural mosaic of today.
His interest was not in the turbulent politics of the Whitlam era, and the attempt to raise $4 billion overseas, via a shadowy intermediary, supposedly for “temporary purposes” that led to the blocking of supply, but in the strict constitutional propriety of Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s actions, in dismissing Whitlam and installing Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister, for the purpose of resolving the deadlock by holding an election.
On October 16, 1975, seeking to force the Whitlam government to an early election, the Fraser-led opposition deferred consideration of the appropriations bills that are legally required for the government to continue to spend money. Until that time, it had generally been accepted, including by Labor itself, that any prime minister who failed to get supply through the Senate, would resign, and if no alternative government could be formed, call an election.
Only this time, Whitlam claimed that deferring supply was a dangerous assault on a supposed convention that the Senate does not block money bills; and an outrageous departure from the normal democratic process: that an elected government cannot be forced to the polls by a recalcitrant upper house.
After almost a month, with the Senate refusing to buckle under Whitlam’s claims that it was acting in defiance of convention, and Whitlam refusing to call a general election; on the day that Whitlam intended to call a half-Senate election and that was regarded as the latest on which an election could be called before supply ran out, Kerr dismissed Whitlam and commissioned Fraser to form a caretaker government that secured supply and advised a double dissolution election including some 20 bills that had been blocked in the Senate.
In its obituary of Sir David, the ABC observed that “no one had suspected that Sir John would sack then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam before it happened”. In fact, there’s no basis for this legend of an out-of-the-blue vice-regal ambush. There was widespread public speculation prior to November 11 that the reserve powers could be exercised through the dismissal of a prime minister who could not secure supply, although most constitutional experts thought that it was “unlikely”.
Whitlam even publicly speculated upon it himself.
In October 1975, Sir John Kerr came to my school, St Ignatius College Riverview, for the annual academic prize-giving. When receiving my prize, I whispered to him that he might like to come with me later, to a Liberal Party rally in town. I’m sure this lame attempt at a joke had no influence on the bemused governor-general, but it testifies to the almost feverish speculation at the time about what, if anything, the constitutional umpire might ultimately do, should neither of the political protagonists back down.
So let’s examine the case against what the governor-general did, that Labor partisans have so assiduously maintained for 50 years, despite Kerr’s actions being politically vindicated by a landslide vote against Whitlam on December 13, 1975.
First, there’s the claim that, as the Senate had no right to block money bills, the Governor-General had no power to dismiss a prime minister who could not secure supply. As Sir David Smith frequently reminded people, the Labor Party, in opposition, had a long record of trying to force governments to an election by voting against money bills in the Senate. Whitlam himself, in 1970, had sought the numbers to vote against the budget and declared that “any government that is defeated by the parliament on a major taxation bill should resign…The bill will be defeated in another place. The government should then resign”.
Subsequently, Senator Lionel Murphy, Labor’s senate leader, tabled a list of 169 separate occasions since 1949 when Labor had opposed money bills in the Senate. So if there was a “convention” against the Senate blocking money bills, it was not one that Labor had ever respected until it was used against it.
Second, there’s the claim that Kerr should not have consulted the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, about his powers and duties should the political deadlock not be resolved. In fact, in 1951, when Robert Menzies sought a double dissolution election, from then governor-general Bill McKell, then-Labor leader Bert Evatt called on the Governor-General to seek the advice of the then Chief Justice before granting any double dissolution.
And as the distinguished legal scholar Professor Anne Twomey has recently observed, because the British state governors who were frequently appointed until the mid-1960s, needed local laws to be explained to them, the lieutenant-governor, invariably the state chief justice, came to be described as the governor’s “constitutional adviser”. Twomey said that Kerr, conscious of Barwick’s past as a former Liberal minister, deliberately chose to consult him only after he had made his decision, and was merely seeking confirmation of what could be done.
Third, there’s the claim that the governor-general should have warned Whitlam that he risked being dismissed if supply couldn’t be secured and if he wouldn’t advise a general election. In his memoirs, Kerr explained his anxieties about a “race to the Palace”, with Whitlam seeking to have him dismissed first, in the event of any warning being given. With Whitlam’s insistence that the Senate had no right to block supply and his dismissive references to Kerr as “my viceroy”, it’s easy to understand why Kerr thought he had to act without giving notice. Were a prime minister to have the governor-general dismissed in the midst of a deadlock between the two house of parliament, the Queen herself would have been involved and the crisis vastly deepened.
Fourth, there’s the claim that Kerr engaged in a conspiracy with Fraser to have Whitlam dismissed. As David Smith, who seems to have been in the office with him at the time has said, all Kerr sought from Fraser in a phone call on the morning of the dismissal was confirmation that there was still a deadlock. Of course, Fraser could have drawn conclusions from Kerr’s question; which Fraser subsequently claimed extended to seeking assurances on calling an election. Even if so, by that time, the governor-general had already made up his mind without any input from the opposition leader.
Finally, there’s the claim that, having dissolved the parliament and secured an election, Kerr should have recommissioned Whitlam because he continued to have the confidence of the House of Representatives. But by this stage, the parliament had been dissolved, and the dismissal of a second prime minister, in quick succession, would have made Australia seem like a banana republic, albeit still of the crowned variety.
What Labor partisans have trouble accepting, to this day, is that, far from being the wronged victim of a constitutional coup, Whitlam had only himself to blame for running a shambolic government, failing to act in accordance with the principle he himself had earlier enunciated, and then maintaining the rage against an innocent man. Kerr might have taken himself too seriously, as suggested by the subsequent publication of his many communications with the palace; but on the fundamentals, his actions were beyond reproach.
While it’s said that history is written by the victors, in this case, if not the history, at least the popular assessments of it, have been coloured by the losers’ insistence that what happened was somehow a crime against democracy – even though it’s hard to quibble with the resolution of any great question by putting it to the people.
While Labor partisans may have part-forgiven Fraser; perhaps because of his post political criticism of his former party, they’ve never forgiven Kerr who – to this day – is regarded as the villain who should have found a way to talk the antagonists into a different outcome. Yet why should Fraser have been pressured to surrender the Senate’s right to force a bad government to an election; and why should Whitlam have been allowed to bluff the opposition out of doing what he had himself earlier tried to do?
Given anti-Kerr flavour of much of the anniversary commentary, it’s worth recalling the Sydney Morning Herald’s editorial judgment, on the occasion of his retirement, that Kerr was “not only an eminent Australian but a great one…who did not flinch from his duty, in an unprecedented situation, regardless of the effect on his personal popularity”.
It’s greatly to David Smith’s credit that he dedicated such a large part of his post-retirement life to vindicating the actions of his one-time boss. It speaks to the fidelity, and the public spiritedness of the man, that he so often strove to correct the record, as he saw it, rather than let the attacks on Kerr stand; or, as Malcolm Fraser subsequently did, accept the result of the governor-general’s action without being prepared to endorse it without qualification.
Still, apart from supporting his characterisation of the governor-general’s actions in 1975, my main purpose tonight is to celebrate the David Smith conception of Australia and to endorse his arguments for Australia remaining a constitutional monarchy sharing a Crown with Britain and a further 14 Commonwealth countries, in order to keep part of the polity above and beyond party politics,
In his magisterial book, Head of State, he gives a near encyclopaedic account of the evolution and current role of Australia’s governors-general. As well, he makes a powerful case for the way non-British migrants used to adapt to life in Australia – and, in so doing, implicitly criticises contemporary multiculturalism’s tendency, no longer to insist on new migrants joining “Team Australia”; but rather, to accept them living in “Hotel Australia”, physically present in this country but emotionally often still connected with their old one.
As he says of migrants to Australia over the decades, “they have taken up what they have found here and have added their own contributions to to it, and our cultural mixture has become all the richer for it”. But he rejects any “argument that the presence of non-British migrants in this country should be used as an excuse to do away with anything and everything that is of British origin”. Given that all our migrants have volunteered to leave their countries for ours, he asks: “is it seriously suggested that we should therefore become another version of what they left behind?”
His long experience and observation of the office of governor-general lends force to his conclusion that a governor-general appointed like a judge to represent the Crown is preferable to a president chosen like a politician, supposedly to represent the people, but more likely to be beholden to the party that chose him.
Our system, he says, “has given us Australians of eminence and distinction, none of whom, not even the most popular among them, would have come to office had they been required to face a process of election, whether by the parliament or the people or a committee appointed for that purpose”. He goes on: “the personal role of the (monarch) and the symbolic role of the Crown in the appointment process act as restraints on prime ministers and governors-general to ensure that they act in the interests of the nation as a whole and not some partisan section of it”.
After his retirement from Government House, Smith could have had more appointments and won more applause had he distanced himself, however subtly, from the governor-general he’d once served. The fact that he never did, despite the baubles that might have come his way, testifies to the character of the man. He was one of those old-fashioned public servants, who saw serving the Australian people-at-large, to the best of his ability and judgment, as his near-sacred duty.
There’s no doubt that we would be an even better country had we more public servants like him. Successful nations cherish the lives and the example of their best citizens, of whom Sir David Smith was undoubtedly one.
