Okay. Jenny Hocking is not exactly an impartial reporter. Her quest from day 1 has been to blame the Queen. So far she hasn’t been able to.
Sorry, mixed him up with the ones whose votes were bought by Howard for the part sale of Telstra. In addition to Mal, Harradine.
That’s OK, you aren’t the only one to get the facts wrong.
But your interpretation that she set out to smear the Queen is contested. Rather, it was about our GG, delegated with the authority of acting as the Head of State within Australia, should consult the Palace. It is significant in Constitution law and it goes to the legal power to overrule the powers of Executive Government . Fortunately, we got rid of those Statute of Westminster provisions , including appeals to the Privy Council. .
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I don’t understand your point. Are you saying she doesn’t want to blame the Queen, but does want to blame the GG? I would say she wants to blame both.
If you’re saying that she thinks the Queen should have stopped the GG, I would say that I’m surprised that anyone would think the monarchy should intervene in the affairs of Australia.
Garfield Barwick was a major confidant of Kerr’s, wasn’t he?
PS I don’t believe in Australian knighthoods and damehoods.
He was. I was wrong above. Barwick was CJ of the High Court. Mason was Solicitor General. Kerr consulted both, and both said to go right ahead.
No conflicts for old Garfield.
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IDK where you got the idea Hocking is playing a blame game. It’s a significant constitutional issue and concerns Australian sovereignty. She writes about the lead up to the Dismissal and the key players in what was a Constitutional Crisis.
Whether you like it or not, an elected Government was overthrown by a decision of the GG. It is important to our history, at a time when the Government was seeking to become an independent nation, partly the reason why it was elected in the first place.
That’s the scenario for Hocking’s writings.
That earlier Constitutional crisis , in NSW - Game sacking Lang - is forever linked to the de Groote Affair of attempting to overthrow an elected government. ( de Groote is allegedly the basis for Kangaroo in the DH Lawrence novel) . The other big player was Niemeyer, IIRC, the Governor of the Bank of England, Lang wouldn’t obey his orders to pay up.
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Of course they would have. They would have been cheering him along. Barwick was also plotting along with Fraser at the time iirc.
I agree that the GG dismissed the elected government, relying on “residual powers” left to him in the Constitution. But it’s Jenny Hocking who is obsessed with the idea of involving the Palace, and assigning some responsibility to the Palace, when it appears to me, on the basis of everything I’ve seen, to have been wholly John Kerr’s decision.
I can’t see that it had anything at all to do with the very vague and by no means imminent aspirations of the Whitlam government to make Australia a republic. You will recall that it was Whitlam who got the Queen to assume the title of Queen of Australia, which hardly indicates ardent republicanism.
As for Lang, I don’t know much about it, but I will say that Niemeyer didn’t give any “orders”. He did point out that the State of NSW did owe very substantial debts to various parties, and that what Lang did was to decide, unilaterally and quite unlawfully, that the State of NSW wasn’t going to pay them until it was good and ready.
For context for the young ones here, let us recall what the Lang affair was about.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Lang was Premier of NSW and preferred to keep funds in Australia to help out Australians rather than paying to the Poms who helped bring about the Depression. This after 60,000 Australians were killed in their war, and Australia ran up huge debts from Pommy banks to pay for the war effort.
Not enough for the Poms so they got their flunkies to sack Lang.
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Well, that’s one point of view.
Passing strange how you could depict the decision to call our Head of State the Queen of Australia as anti-Republican in sentiment. There are requirements to swear oaths of allegiance to the Monarch. I’m not swearing an oath to a Monarch with the title of Queen/King of England. I owe no allegiance to the Queen/King of England.
Also at the international level it is practice/protocol for the title of Head of State in formal bilateral relations. It’s not done by name, but by title e.g. to the President of France. Mind you the French find it hard to keep a straight face when they toast the Queen/King of Australia.
But it’s a reminder that the Monarch imposed on us by the Constitution as our Head of State should act as the Monarch of Australia and in our interests.
There seem to be a few gaps in your Constitutional history.
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What facts in my post were wrong?
Australian casualties in WW1?
Australian debts incurred in WW1?
Australia not experiencing the Great Depression when the Poms wanted more payment?
Lang not obeying the Pommy bankers?
Lang getting sacked?
A nice reminder that the Queen gave huge honours to the Pommy cricketers when they finally won the Ashes back. She had no problem with any conflict of interest discriminating against her other subjects
And as Queen of Australia, she never did anything like that for the Australian cricket team.
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De Groote was a major player in the NSW Constitutional crisis.
De Groote was a member of the New Guard, a right wing military group. This was at the time of the the rise of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. There were very real fears of a coup in Australia at the time.
The symbolism of him in full military uniform, on his charger, waving a sword , to be the one to cut the ribbon to open the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was scary.
At this moment in time, with the rise of the extremist right in Europe and the prospect of Trump as US President , our history of Constitutional Crises is so topical.
TBF she gave a knighthood to Bradley Wiggins, who is half Australian.
But I’m not impressed with our future Head of Stste sighted barracking against the Wallabies at Twickers.
I didn’t say it was anti-Republican. I said that a republic of Australia was not in any sense a significant issue at the time of the dismissal, and I cited the change of style as indicative of the lack of urgency about it. Do you think that if Gough Whitlam had been preparing the country for a republic referendum he would have bothered about whether it was Queen of England and her other realms and territories, or Queen of Australia? Personally I would have thought he would make the Republic point stronger if we still had a Queen of England as our head of state.
I think she deserves her rest.
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I think all those poor royals deserve a rest…a rest from having anything to do with Australia.
They should just fark off and leave us be.
They have no useful role in Modern Australia.