Humphrey McQueen

For the golden anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975, ADMASS media can be sure to focus on who advised the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. The role of the Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick, has been known almost from the start. Knowledge of a second counsellor has been around for many years, with the near certainty that he was also a member of the High Court, and later Chief Justice, Sir Anthony Mason.

Mason was not a principal in this process. At the bar, he had been junior to Barwick and carried that deference into his first years on the bench, concurring with his Chief’s opinions. His advice to Kerr was more like that of a judge’s associate than a second opinion in all but one respect. His experience as Commonwealth solicitor-general from 1964 to 1969 made him the ideal person to draft a letter of dismissal in terms most likely to survive judicial challenge.

As diverting as these details might be to legal eagles, two aspects of the dismissal are unlikely to get the scrutiny they deserve. The first is the role of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The second is the class nature of the legal system culminating in the High Court.

Kerr and Barwick were both involved with the security police; the High Court is one more state apparatus in a covert dictatorship of the bourgeoisie; the same goes for the office of Governor-General. One mark of the extent to which bourgeois ideology pervades even the broad Left is that these facts of political life can appear extreme. This commentary puts some flesh, no matter how putrid, on these bones.

Governors-General
In these proto-republican days, the Governor-General’s job is ceremonial, coming no closer to political involvement than 30-second grabs of moral exhortation. Most Australians find it harder than ever to recognise that gubernatorial posts carry a legacy of intrigue in international and domestic affairs. Once that past is recognised, the notion of Kerr as the CIA’s man in Canberra is normalized.

Munro-Ferguson 1914-20
For the Commonwealth’s first twenty-seven years, the Governor-General was not only the monarch’s representative but also served as the channel for the British government. The tasks were split after 1927 with Britain’s appointing a High Commissioner. Hence, no one should be surprised that, during the First World War, Government House, then in Melbourne, was the headquarters for the Counter Espionage Bureau, run by the Governor-General’s Official Secretary, George Steward, and watched over by His Excellency, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson.

Steward had come from the army Intelligence Corps, was also secretary of the Executive Council, and retired to become Victoria’s Police Commissioner. (Christopher Cunneen, King’s Men, pp. 141-2.)

Bill Slim 1953-60
For the next thirty years, London could rely on its High Commissioners to influence the Commonwealth government, buttressed by what radical nationalists called ‘the British Garrison’ of admirals, bishops, editors, headmasters and professors. That arrangement proved insufficient as Canberra agreed to exclude Great Britain from the ANZUS Alliance. The Australian cabinet fractured when prime minister Menzies wanted to back Britain in the Middle East against External Affairs minister Spender who committed combat troops to Korea late in June 1950. To protect Empire interests, Whitehall sent out the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Slim, although he was seriously unwell at the time.  Three years later, in 1953, Menzies appointed him Governor-General, in effect, taking the office back to the days when the incumbent was also the prime agent of the British government. Chief of the Imperial General Staff is one of those jobs from which you never ‘retire.’

The difference between Munro-Ferguson and Slim, on the one hand, and Kerr on the other, is that Sir John was Washington’s man, not Whitehall’s, one of the President’s men, not the Queen’s man.

Kerr 1974-77
Like a lot of Cold-War Warriors, John Kerr had started on the extreme Left in the 1930s. He abandoned his Trotskyist rejection of the Second World War as a new round of inter-Imperialist contests to join the Directorate of Research, which he later described as living

on the fringe of the Army, it was not of the Army in any true and deep sense, it was a peripheral institution existing for the purposes of the Commander-in-Chief’s [Field-Marshall Blamey] relations and the Army’s relations of a slightly unorthodox character with outside institutions in this country and abroad. (quoted Richard Hall, The Real John Kerr, 1978)

Continuing his interest in Papua-New Guinea, he became first principal of the School of Pacific Administration in 1946, and served on the Council on New Guinea Affairs in the 1960s when defence and intelligence hierarchs feared that calls for self-government would turn towards communism.

In 1950, Kerr joined forces with Santamaria’s Industrial Groups in legal work for another erstwhile Trotskyite, Laurie Short, to wrest control of the Ironworkers from the Communists. Kerr forged links with other right-wing NSW unions, including the gangsters at the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation who entertained him at Abe Saffron’s Roosevelt Club.

Around this time, he began his association with CIA fronts, never finding one he was too busy to join, from LawAsia to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. As a judge in the Commonwealth Industrial Court, he sent Tramways Secretary Clarrie O’Shea to prison in 1969 for refusing to pay fines. Kerr later told intimates that ASIO had paid them to head off the ensuing strike wave. Through ties to the Liberal Party, Kerr became NSW Chief Justice in 1972 before Whitlam picked him as Governor-General in September 1974.

The Labor government’s relations with the U.S. corporate-warfare state had got off to a bad start in December 1972 with two senior ministers denouncing the Christmas Eve bombing of Haiphong Harbour in Vietnam. As a sign of Washington’s concern, it sent a career diplomat, and not some Nixon crony, as Ambassador. More tellingly, the choice was Marshall Green who had been in Jakarta orchestrating the massacre of over half-a-million leftists in 1965-66. Green calmed the State Department but not the CIA’s head of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, whose suspicions were fed by the ‘raid’ on Melbourne’s ASIO offices in March 1973, led by Labor’s attorney general Lionel Murphy. From that point on, the spooks convinced each other that the Whitlam government had to go. Whitlam further enflamed the crazies by setting up a Royal Commission into all the intelligence agencies.

By the end of October 1975, the Australian intelligence community was in chaos. Whitlam had sacked the heads of Australian Secret Intelligence Service and ASIO. One by-product of this lack of ‘safe’ leadership was that cables from the CIA found their way to public servants and from there to journalists who published them. The prime concern of those communications was the CIA’s key communications base at Pine Gap. (The traffic is reprinted in Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson’s The Book of Leaks, 1987).

The crux of the matter was whether Whitlam’s loose talk portended a rupture in the Alliance. The Pine Gap Treaty was to be renegotiated in a month’s time. Head of the CIA’s East Asia division, Ted Shackley, sent an official demarche on a service-to-service basis, that is, not to be seen by politicians. The cables feared that Whitlam was about ‘to blow the lid off those installations in Australia … which are vital to both of our services and country, particularly the installation at Alice Springs’ and ‘if this problem cannot be solved they do not see how our mutually beneficial relations are going to continue.’ (watch John Hughes’s doco Twilight Time.)

Those who seek to deny any link between protecting the CIA interests at Pine Gap and the dismissal have a load of evidence to sweep away. Kerr had resisted huge pressures, notably from the banks, to intervene over the state of the economy. The alarms at Langley about what the hell was going on in Canberra and what Whitlam might expose next would have been enough to trigger any action which Kerr had been contemplating on purely local grounds for more than a year. On the day he was sacked, Whitlam identified the previous boss at Pine Gap, Richard Stallings, as CIA.

The part played by the CIA in the downfall of the Whitlam government returned to the spotlight when a young US American claimed that he had decided to sell CIA secrets to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City because of his disgust at his government’s dirty tricks against Australian Labor. Robert Lindsey told this story in The Falcon and the Snowman, which became the bases for the eponymous feature film in 1984. (see www.surplusvalue.au links to relevant pages) Another bunch of investigations to circle CIA doings down-under followed the apparent suicide, outside Lithgow (NSW) in 1980, of a co-founder of the Nugan-Hand Bank, an asset in the CIA’s money-laundering, drug-trafficking and gun-running. (see Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots)

The High Court
The propriety of a judge’s blurring the supposed separation of powers between the judiciary, executive and legislature offends only those who cannot see how all branches of the state underpin the interests of capital.

One way to demonstrate the class nature of the High Court is to track the careers of its members. Striking as many of the justices are as embodiments of reactionary politics, and business interests, a head count proves little about the place of the Court in a class society. To establish that relationship requires penetrating to the biases embedded in bourgeois jurisprudence, an appellation which law students are trained to dismiss when they cannot ignore the charge of systemic class prejudice.

Nonetheless, one benefit from a biographical sketch is to show that Barwick’s and Mason’s engagements with Kerr were not unique, or even unusual. The Chief Justice had been the preserve of far right-wing politicians for fifty of the seventy-two years of the Court’s existence by 1975: Griffith from 1903-19; Latham from 1935 to 1951; Barwick from 1964 to 1981. When we speak of Lefties on the bench we are dealing with Deakinite liberals – Isaacs, Higgins, Evatt, McTiernan, Webb, Murphy, Gaudron and Kirby.

Griffith CJ 1903-19
The first Chief Justice, Sir Samuel Griffith, had stared out as a small-l liberal in Queensland, been impressed by Marx’s Capital in 1888, but then sent mounted police to break shearers’ strikes while forming a coalition with the corrupt premier Thomas McIlwraith (the Griffilwraith). Griffith found time to translate Dante and to draft the Constitution which he interpreted according to his own lights once on the bench from 1903. In particular, he struck down every Act or judgement which strengthened the hand of labour under the industrial power (section 51 xxxv). Judicial activism was off to a flying start.

Supping with devils – Knox CJ 1919-30
Although commercial and corporate law takes up most of the time of most lawyers, the crossover between business and the bench is spectacular in the case of Chief Justice Knox, scion of the family atop the sugar monopoly CSR. He took over from Griffith in 1919 but resigned in 1930 to manage, as residual legatee, the estate of the coal baron John Brown, notorious for his attacks on his workforce.

The everyday workings of class dominance are nicely illustrated through an examination of the 1920 volume of the diary of the managing director of BHP, G.D. Delprat. (National Library, MS 1630/15) Because the diary was only an appointment book, it is necessary on occasion to identify from wider reading what was going on, though there is no need to invent anything. Interpolations are given in square brackets:

18 February: Called on Inspector-General Mitchell in connection with B[roken] Hill police. Promised to give one of his detectives work at Electric shop.

[A spy in the works during the 18-month lockout.]

15 May: dined at Melbourne Club with The Chief Justice (Knox) Judge Stark[e] Judge Cussen Judge Duffy General White Admiral Grant.

[Here was an executive committee of the bourgeoisie. White headed the paramilitary ‘White Army’ during the 1923 Police strike in Melbourne.]

2 October: Taken silver plate out of the safe deposit for Tuesday’s dinner.

4 October: Invited Chief Justice and Stark[e] to dinner, next day – they accepted. Meeting of mines committee – about Broken Hill.

5 October: In evening gave dinner party at my house … Guests [names four BHP directors] and Rt Hon Chief Justice Knox and Mr Justice Stark[e].

22 November: Montheath and Payne came to see about cutting off supplies from Firm not keeping compact.

[One more instance of the minerals cartel.]

18 December: High Court Decision – (in our favour). [28CLR, 456-94]

20 December: Left with 7.10 train for Melbourne. Chat with … Sir Robert Garran [Solicitor-General].

22 December: Met Sir Robert Garran at his office by appointment. Explained in connection with Hobbles tribunal – Advised find out if Edmunds would give a statement that coke-workers cannot belong to Coal and Shale Workers Union.

Here are nine entries covering a year, and what do we find? First, the managing-director of BHP arranges for a policeman to be placed in his firm; has dinner twice with leading judges while BHP has a case before the Full High Court – a case which it wins; is involved in a restrictive trade practice against firms which negotiate separately with unions; gets advice on how to proceed in an industrial dispute from the Commonwealth solicitor-general, whom he had bumped into two days before on a train.

The hourly functioning of capitalist domination is not a run of conspiracies, though there is always need for organisation. Rather than plotting every step of the way, it is enough to see that the paths and ideas of the rich and powerful cross naturally so that when they meet they do not conspire but go about their business of running the country.

Ultra vires – beyond Powers
Among the most contemptible of the High Court judges was Chas Powers, appointed in 1913 with a mildly progressive outlook. The surge in class conflict soon moved him to the position of lickspittle for the bosses. In April 1925, he wrote to the Attorney-General asking for a knighthood on the grounds that, as President of the Conciliation and Arbitration Court, he had blocked the increases recommended by the Royal Commission into the Basic wage, restored the forty-eight-hour week and cut twelve shillings a week from the wages of fitters and turners: Continue reading →