After reviewing America’s involvement in supposed “conflicts” where overthrow or installation of a new government has followed, my recent high school studies have lead me to wonder whether or not America played any part in the sacking of Gough Whitlam (Australian Prime Minister - The only Prime Minister in Australia’s history to be removed in such a way) in 1975.
There are legitimate and public reasons for why he was deposed, with the main one being that his party did not hold a majority of the electorate in the Parliament and was henceforth blocked Supply Bills (The legislature approving Budgets and funding from the taxpayers) and forced the Governor-General (Sir John Kerr) into a position where he was “Forced” to sack Gough Whitlam, replaced by a caretaker Prime Minister named Malcolm Fraser.
However there are other reasons held that hint American, perhaps even CIA, involvement:
Whitlam’s policies were largely socialist leaning towards national reforms ( :eek: The stepping stone to Communism! :eek: ), he was blatantly against Australian and American involvement in the Viet Nam war and was also one of the first westerners to visit the then-communist nation China on a friendly diplomatic level.
And, coincidentally, the caretaker prime minister which replaced Gough Whitlam was of the opposing, more conserative Labor party.
I was 15 when Gough was sacked…and like many of my peers at the time, we were very politically savvy. Hey, the '70’s were THE time to be a political animal in Australia!!
However, I seriously doubt that the CIA had any involvement in Whitlam’s sacking, even though they would have much reason to. Given the incredibly liberal outspoken-ness of Malcolm Fraser in recent years, I’d be guessing he’d be more than happy to spill the beans if anything sinister had happened back in '75 or later. If the CIA were involved back then, we’d know about it now.
And btw, even though I despised Fraser with the heat of a thousand suns etc back then, and continued to do so for another twenty years, I now consider him a man of upstanding repute, and if he was shucking for election now, I’d vote for him.
Funny how things change.
Anything’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely. The US has generally not interfered in the internal affairs of the industrialized commonwealth nations (leaving such interference up to the UK). Instead, we seem to spend most of our time interfering in the third world and in South America, which we’ve claimed as our backyard since the days of James Monroe.
"The actions taken by the Whitlam government were generally left-wing policies relative to those desired by government and business in the United States, and relations between Gough Whitlam and the United States became tense during 1975, especially after Whitlam publicly declared that Richard Stallings was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative and that he had been in charge of the Pine Gap satellite tracking and communication base near Alice Springs. According to Tony Douglas, [1]
A cable from a senior CIA official and Task Force 157 member, Ted Shackley, on November 10 accused Whitlam of being a security risk and asked ASIO to do something about it. The Head of the Defence Department, Arthur Thang, described him as “the greatest risk to our nation’s security that there has ever been.”
Christopher Boyce, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, has claimed that the CIA wanted Whitlam removed from office because he wanted to close United States military bases in Australia, including Pine Gap, withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam, and had begun making diplomatic overtures to China, as President Nixon had previously done. Boyce also claimed that at least one CIA agent referred to Sir John Kerr as our man Kerr. Kerr had earlier been a member of the executive board of the CIA front organisation, the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom.
Claims were made by Tony Douglas, although no significant evidence was produced, that the dismissal happened just hours before Whitlam planned to reveal secret information about the nature of the CIA communications facility at Pine Gap in Parliament.
Few people consider the United States government pressure to have been a significant factor in the dismissal of Whitlam by the governor general Sir John Kerr. Whitlam himself appointed Kerr as Governor-General and the Australian public had the opportunity to vote Whitlam back in immediately after the dismissal. Neither of these factors were felt to have been able to be controlled by a foreign power.
Both the Governor General (John Kerr) and the Leader of the Opposition (Malcolm Fraser) may well have been encouraged in their actions by support from the US (e.g., from the American ambassador), and by US opposition to some of the Whitlam government’s actions. It is alleged that John Kerr had CIA connections, but I don’t think that’s ever been proven. However, that seems to me to be the strongest reasonable case for US involvement.
(And I’m a very biassed observer, who was outraged at the time by the actions of John Kerr, who handed out how-to-vote cards and scrutineered for the Labor candidate in what had been a marginal coalition electorate on December 13th, 1975, and who joined the Australian Labor Party at the earliest opportunity after that because of my outrage at what had happened to the Whitlam government.)
You know, there are also people who believe that former Prime Minister Harold Holt was a spy for Red China, and was picked up by a Chinese Submarine off the coast of Victoria.
And if you’re one of those people, I’ve got a Bridge in Sydney for sale that you might be interested in…
I don’t buy it either. Sure, the CIA may have funded anti-Whitlam causes. But the Whitlam government’s major wounds were all their own work. And the Kerr/ Whitlam dynamic was not something that could have been procured.
Not quite. The anomaly in the Australian system is that government is formed in the lower house - where Whitlam did have a majority - but that that can be stymied by the upper house - where though a combination of the Senate electoral system and some machinations of various people, he did not. The tiebreaker of the system is the joint sitting of both houses. The difficulty was that after the election of 1974 - when Whitlam retained power and passed various bills in the joint sitting - the non ALP parties went back to denying the government access to supply (ie money to keep the government working).
Having called an election the first time this happened, the government was not inclined to break the impasse the same way (apart from anything else, they’d been shown to be monumentally hopeless during the meantime). Calling the Senate’s bluff was another option. Kerr’s actions were another circuit-breaker.
I doubt there was any CIA involvement. More than enough internal political pressure had built up to trigger Whitlam’s dismissal without the need to look for foreign intervention.
Perhaps **rhitchen1988 ** was confused by the concept of a conservative “Liberal” party. Or perhaps Australian history simply isn’t taught very accurately in the US.
