by Bruce Page
But perhaps Murdoch had declared too soon. As October advanced, the sense that the government must fall receded, for Fraser’s problem was that his control of the Senate was fragile. The Coalition could win most votes; however, certain of its allies were irresolute on the great financial issue. If the government was unpopular, so was the prospect of social disruption should its payments be suspended shortly before Christmas, and opinion polls found that 80 per cent of voters thought Supply should be passed. (Newt Gingrich rediscovered in the 1990s that use of procedural devices to undermine an elected executive plays wretchedly with a democratic people.)
Senator Reg Withers, the Coalition’s floor tactician, reminiscing ten years later, he said he knew all along that two among ‘my blokes’ were quite likely to ‘collapse’. ‘I would have lost them some time about 20 November onwards. I know I would have lost them in the run up to 30 November, but it wouldn’t have been two then, it would have been ten.’
If ‘twere done, ‘twere best ‘twere done quickly, says Macbeth – for Fraser it was quickly or not at all. But, if Whitlam failed to surrender, there was no more Fraser could do. Only the Governor-General could act. And Kerr’s duty consisted of doing what Whitlam advised – short of using the emergency powers applied by George III. The more hysteria there was in Canberra’s air, the more plausible an emergency might seem, and here the Australian worked hard. Regularly, in the second half of October, Fraser issued accusations that the government was abusing the Constitution and clinging to power illegally. Though other papers saw more serial rhetoric than significance, the Australian reacted each time with headline treatment – typically, on 27 October, ‘WHITLAM ACT’S LIKE A DICTATOR’. The paper’s journalists had been depressed even before Peter Game had thunderously scooped them (and everyone else). Now its basic news judgment seemed to be unhinged, and an impressively large number of them signed a letter to Murdoch saying that the paper had become ‘a laughing-stock’.
But it was not a laughing-stock to one significant reader. Sir John Kerr’s memoirs show that he was closely engaged with the Australian’s coverage. Disclosure was not its leitmotif, but on 18 October it did attempt a scooplet, suggesting that without Supply the Governor-General might be personally stuck with the vast costs of the vice-regal establishment. Sir John rang Whitlam and complained that Murdoch’s men were trying to unnerve him – asking in the same call if he could seek counsel from Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick. Whitlam reassured him about the costs, and ‘advised’ – told – him not to contact Barwick. The Prime Minister didn’t know quite how hostile Barwick was, but he suspected.
The Australian essentially dealt in advocacy – a series of editorials and features canvassing the powers the Governor-General might use in ignoring Whitlam’s advice and ejecting him from office. Presented in a mode of intellectual discovery, they were in fact playing the Governor-General’s own thoughts back to him with embellishment and reinforcement. And as he studied them, the loquacious Sir John developed a new talent for discretion, indeed for dissimulation.
Whitlam’s team had assumed initially that dismissal was an option, but when the Opposition produced a legal opinion arguing the case, Kerr described it to them as ‘bullshit’. He did not reveal that this bullshit was essentially his own, laid out at Murdoch’s house the year before and now rehearsed in the Australian. (Whitlam only learnt about the Cavan gathering much later.)
Traces of inside knowledge appear in the Australian coverage. Very few people knew about Kerr’s desire to confer with the Chief Justice, yet on 24 October the Australian’s editorial urged Kerr to consult Barwick – irrespective of Prime Ministerial views. (Whitlam had a decent point which the editorial ignored: the High Court might become involved, and should not be canvassed in advance.)
Along with his legal theories, the Governor-General’s self-esteem was buffed up. Since his appointment, Sir John’s control of alcohol had notoriously declined – due, perhaps, to his new wife’s hyperactive socialising – but the Australian’s profile on 25 October showed nothing of that. Two authors produced ‘The Man in the Middle’: Graham Willis’ sources were Sir John’s officials – who described a modern Pericles – and John Lapsley’s were in unofficial Sydney, where White’s Falstaffian estimate prevailed. Little of Lapsley made the cut. The paper produced a portrait so sycophantic as to convince many of the Australian’s staff that its outlook had parted from reality. On 28 October the in-house committee of the Australian Journalists Association (AJA) wrote to Murdoch that the paper’s political coverage was ‘blind, biased, tunnel-visioned, ad-hoc, logically confused and relentless … [characterised by] … the deliberate or careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation [and] political censorship’. Seventy-five editorial staff signed, in spite of the known fate of dissidents inside News. Murdoch made no immediate reply.
Media critics, left and right, repeatedly assert that newspapers abuse power by manipulating electoral opinion. And surveys by political scientists repeatedly find the effects modest, even negligible (though recent, sophisticated inquiries suggest that this reassuring verdict may be slightly over-comfortable). But more potential exists for abuse – the Dismissal suggests – in manipulating protagonists within a political drama. This is harder to quantify, but probably no one who has seen a politician reading a newspaper (even a significant politician and an obscure journal) will much doubt the principle. Nor is it unique to politicians: for all of us, the tension of an event in which we participate raises the significance of anything written about it – and the writing only need be public in the least sense for the effect to intensify further. Really this is the obverse of the argument in Chapter 5, where sales figures show how modestly the editorial drama impacts on the disengaged. Reporters are engaged, protagonists far more so, and politicians are sensitised to coded messages and rapid feedback.
Realistically, perhaps, editorials should rank with postcards in real-world consequence, but realism and self-possession are early casualties in political war, where almost anything offering a pattern may be welcome. James Callaghan was only half joking when, as Britain’s Prime Minister, he said he read the papers to learn what he had been doing. Kerr read the Australian to learn how right he was, and it succoured him every time. And the paper’s other great task – Rupert Murdoch himself said this – was to sustain Malcolm Fraser, to help him ‘keep his nerve’ and uphold grand constitutional issues.
This process is distinct from disclosure, but political perception often conflates them. Lincoln, when discussing the power of The Times, probably didn’t separate its revelations about free trade in foodstuffs (a bonanza for the Midwest constituency) from the actual vote against the Corn Laws. Similarly, people say the Watergate disclosures ‘caused’ Nixon’s fall; in a lesser way, the present writer was said (with a colleague) to have brought remedy to victims of the drug thalidomide. What we actually did was reveal facts, on which others took action. Genuine journalism – Delane’s disclosure – is rarely the efficient or final cause of anything, and certainly not the outcome of a political intrigue.
Aristotle’s fourfold analysis of causation still helps in analysing a process. Material cause is the stuff it consists of; formal cause the shape in which it becomes visible; efficient cause is a deliberate act, as when parents cause a child’s birth; and necessary or final cause is the intention towards which actions move – the extension of a family, the death of a political regime. The Dismissal’s material causes were the conduct of Rex Connor and the structure of the Constitution, its formal cause the shape that material was put into by the Herald’s investigation. The efficient cause was Fraser’s refusal of Supply. The necessary cause – the aim
– was removal of Whitlam’s government.
Disclosure by general principle isn’t an efficient or final cause of outcomes, because its effects are not steerable. Inherently, it creates new situations (often, cascading disclosures) with complexity rising as dissemination expands. But h
ighly selective disclosure is different. It may potentiate rhetoric and persuasion. It may be steerable; it may turn journalism into effective propaganda for an efficient cause.
Propaganda may include an element of fabrication. But in modern conditions the rationing of information will better serve a necessary cause. The famous remark of C. P. Scott about free comment and sacred fact includes a perception Jefferson and Delane never had: that a newspaper always has ‘some character of a monopoly’. The papers Jefferson thought more important than government were many, ephemeral and subsidised; out of their largely mendacious Babel he hoped (warily) truth would emerge. Delane realised that his steam-driven, telegraph-fed Thunderer was changing things, but it was not yet clear that the world would support only a limited number of such beasts.
Scott, a pioneer of the commercial-professional newspaper, knew that the Manchester Guardian and its equivalents would grow stable and efficient by becoming fewer and by developing regular audiences – by growing large enough, indeed, that real people would rarely have time for more than one. To Scott the reader has a contract for general disclosure, making suppressio veri as evil as suggestio falsi. The newspaper must taint news neither ‘in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation’. He could have added that suppressio veri draws little risk, and requires little more professionally than lack of competence and volition. A fabrication always presents some risk – even if needed for a few days only – and truth is never quite simple, since it is much easier, as every reporter finds, to know things than to make them known in public. But the great point is that the more strictly truth is rationed the more its effects may be predicted.
The staff of the Australian at 28 October thought it was losing its credibility with ‘well-informed people’. But the protesters did not realise that the definition of a well-informed person – as in political Canberra, third quarter 1975 – was about to shift dramatically.
The Dismissal’s outstanding feature is the secrecy of its execution, making it one of democracy’s most paradoxical happenings. When Sir John Kerr invoked the royal powers on 11 November 1975, no one in Buckingham Palace, 12,000 miles away, had the slightest premonition. And hardly anybody in Australia did. Rupert Murdoch was among the rare exceptions. In the amazed aftermath the Queen’s Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, said to an Australian diplomat in London, ‘If faced with a constitutional crisis which appeared likely to involve the Head of State, my advice would have been that [the Queen] should only intervene when a clear sense of inevitability had developed in the public that she must act’ (emphasis added).
This blows away the fine-spun legalisms used later in Kerr’s justification. Emergency powers require an emergency, and there was no such thing. It also focuses on public knowledge, and the part information media play: a democratic emergency can exist only in newspapers and on television screens. And one of the few certainties about the Dismissal is that the public had no information at all, let alone enough to develop a ‘sense of inevitability’. Most people thought the prospects of an emergency had been receding for some time. Nor was this just a popular view. Nearly every professional in a highly sensitised political community thought likewise. Even in the Australian’s news pages, the story was fading out in the lead-up to the 1lth.
It is known that Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam became set on or about 6 November. Perhaps it was because of pressure from Fraser, who had been promising to accept any decision the Governor-General made and changed on that day to saying that if Kerr did not impose double dissolution he would be attacked for having ‘failed … his duty to the nation’. Whatever his reason, two personal fears acted on Kerr. It might seem plain that, if he thought Whitlam’s behaviour truly dangerous, he should issue a warning and allow time – however nominal – for a change of course. In 1932 Sir Philip Game, Governor of New South Wales, told the state Premier Jack Lang that his financial operations were illegal. When Lang persisted, Game called new elections.
But Kerr feared that his Prime Minister, if warned, might dispose of him. Though removal didn’t lie in Whitlam’s own gift, he could request the Queen. And unless Whitlam had simply no plan to resolve the deadlock was being irresponsible beyond debate – she would almost certainly ask for a fresh nomination. Kerr confided his fear to Sir Roden Cutler, currently New South Wales’ governor. But Cutler, a traditionalist war hero, was unhelpful. If great issues were truly in play, then risks must be faced and chips must fall – one’s own job didn’t count. Kerr reacted by more thoroughly concealing his views from the Prime Minister.
But, no less than Whitlam did, he feared Whitlam’s enemy Barwick. Legal gossip said that the Chief Justice thought the Prime Minister’s fall a most desirable end. Publicly, however, he seemed to deny the means. For months, conservatives had been petitioning the High Court to invalidate Whitlam’s 1973 voluntary dissolution – and in turn the House and Senate joint session. That would restore the great logjam, so the Court had been focusing on dissolution law. Little finally came of this, but at 6 November 1975 it was known that Barwick’s opinion – though unpublished – was anti-dissolution. If he had found some great pitfall, a government appeal might expose Kerr to the Chief Justice’s savage intellect. It was a predicament out of some Jacobean betrayal-melodrama like The Devil’s Law-Case. Sir John would have to take the Australian’s advice and talk to Barwick. But if he was seen at the High Court in Sydney, Whitlam would know attack was imminent. He set himself to fulfil his public role by clandestine means, an oxymoronic aim almost nobody divined.
Simultaneously with Kerr’s 6 November resolve, Whitlam’s team settled their plan. Under the Senate’s normal cycle half its seats were ripe for re-election: they would recommend to Kerr that he set a voting day. This sweetly married constitutional propriety to political advantage, as territories previously unrepresented were due for inclusion – areas where Labor would do well enough to restore Senate control. It would be formally put to Kerr on Tuesday 11 November. But nobody made it a great secret meanwhile.
On Friday 7 November John Menadue got a call from Rupert Murdoch, suggesting lunch. When they sat down, with Ken Cowley in faithful attendance, Menadue was surprised to find Murdoch quite sure that Malcolm Fraser would shortly be Prime Minister. For once, it seemed, his old boss was telling last week’s tale, or even older: Fraser’s chances now were surely receding. Menadue quoted the half-Senate plan.
Murdoch was unmoved. Before Christmas, he said, there would be a general election, and Fraser would win. Menadue knew well that the ALP would lose if it had to fight without a Budget – and that Murdoch, now Fraser’s ally, understood that well. But he still saw no plausible mechanism. Then Murdoch displayed his intimate knowledge of the Opposition’s tactics. A few weeks earlier, Fraser had revived the accusation that Menadue’s appointment was a case of jobs for the boys’: threatening that all the officials appointed in such unorthodox fashion would be dismissed from government service by a Fraser administration. This had been copiously reported, notably in the Australian. Now, said Murdoch over the lunch table, Fraser’s attitude had changed. Once Whitlam had been disposed of and the new government established in office, Fraser would appoint Menadue as ambassador to Japan. This, of course, is for Australia an appointment of great importance: also, a Murdoch knew, one which would have powerful appeal to Menadue, who had undertaken several missions to Japan for Newscorp, and was fascinated by the country.
The immediate effect it produced on the head of the Prime Minister’s Department was absolute bafflement. He could understand neither Murdoch’s certainty of a regime change nor the prediction about Japan. Nothing, however, appeared in the Australian to suggest anything remarkable was in train. Prime Minister and public continued to assume things were winding down.
At the weekend, Sir John Kerr left Canberra for a public tour, within which his mission to Barwick was hidden. Supposedly it was a search for artworks to enhance the national collection, and by Sunday night it brought him
to the viceregal premises in Sydney. Barwick visited secretly in the morning, and told a much relieved Kerr that if he would be bold he could shortly have supportive written opinions to take back with him to Canberra.
These were partly concerned with modifying responsibility, by arguing that the Australian executive should control both Houses. But more dramatic was Barwick’s advice that Kerr could dismiss Whitlam without warning and instantly end the Parliament’s life. This radically eliminated the doctrine of public involvement. (Barwick’s royalism appears to have been most selective. But a story about news media is concerned even more with idiosyncrasies relating to secrecy.)
On this same Monday Whitlam and Fraser were both in Melbourne at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, after which they returned to Canberra in the Prime Ministerial aircraft with Phil Lynch, a Fraser colleague. Menadue, meeting the flight, heard Lynch say to Fraser, ‘Do you think he knows?’ At the time Menadue didn’t link it to Murdoch’s predictions. At 9 a.m. next day the party leaders met to reconsider the Supply. Fraser said the Opposition would yield if Whitlam would call a general election. Whitlam said he would advise the half-Senate election, arranging to meet the Governor-General at 1 p.m. for that purpose. When Whitlam arrived, Kerr handed him a brief letter of dismissal. Fraser at almost the same moment began forming a caretaker administration to call a general election and put basic Supply through the Senate. Never before, said Whitlam, had ‘the burglar … been appointed as caretaker’.