WHITLAM DISMISSAL SOLVED

Dedicated to the 33rd anniversary of the Whitlam dismissal

As the reader will learn The Hon. Gough Whitlam, The Hon. Dr. Jim Cairns & the Hon. Clyde Cameron first saw an early draft of the enclosed in February 1991, I then shelved the project for ten years until, with the concept of FOI promising revelation from government files and cabinet documents, I again outlined to Mr. Whitlam in 2004 that an arms deal and the Arab funds residual to it being offered to his government, were the real reasons behind the dismissal.

The home page of this web site is taken from an actual telex sent between Cairo and Geneva by an Australian arms dealer named Michael Murphy and it concerns the sale of Hercules and Comet aircraft to an internationally perceived terrorist, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya in 1974. This document concerns relatively soft military transports -which were still under a veto for Libya- but as the reader shall learn from official documents from no less than secret government files and our own papers, jet fighter planes and other armaments were also involved. We have scores of documents concerning this illegal operation to validate this claim. These documents both of an official and unofficial nature, gave us unique reference points and thus access to secret files and papers within the Australian Government National Archives, released under the Freedom Of Information Act after 30 years. These validating Archival documents were concealed in intentionally hidden files, the result of a massive cover up in 1974/75. The Whitlam Federal Government was sacked in 1975, the files placed under lock down and nobody suspected the existence of these documents for three decades. Here is one of them.

Document taken from Australian Government National Archives, file series A1209, Item 1975/2513, Part 6, Page 100 in my copy of the file.

Note the Michael Murphy from our Geneva telex. The real reason behind the dismissal of the Whitlam Federal Labor Government in 1975, was that the ministerial heads of Federal departments such as Treasury and the Department of Minerals and Energy, on broadcasting plans to develop Australia’s mineral wealth in the interests of self sufficiency and promoting employment, by borrowing funds from Middle Eastern sources awash with oil revenue at cheap interest rates, were being approached by the arms dealers. These men with massive Arab funds residual to the arms deal, offered huge loans at low interest rates, from the banks that were to fund the illegal armaments operation, in order to secure multi-million dollar commissions for themselves. This was Arab money and the reader shall see documents that prove the ministers and even the Prime Minister himself were linked in ignorance and innocence to the arms deal, for such documents as the one you have just seen were never revealed to them by the relevant departments. Therefore the ministers always believed they were dealing with ordinary businessmen, at worst with mere scammers. Go to the web site whitlaminstitute.com, perhaps the greatest repository of information on the Whitlam era and type in Michael Murphy or another name mentioned in the armaments violation document, Fil-Sam Manufacturing or even Misrepresentation of Australian Government Armaments Authority and as of this date 5 November 2008 you will not find one mention of these names. The same is true of the National Archives. Why? The reason is because neither Gough Whitlam nor any of his ministers saw the armaments violation or related documents.

I have had nearly twenty years to study the events surrounding the dismissal, aided by documents and testimony which nobody else possessed. It gives a unique perspective. But back in 1974/75 I was actually in Canberra on holiday and watched first hand events unfold. The legendary ‘loans affair’, a huge scandal was created around essentially two men, Tirath Khemlani and George Harris and back then it looked to me like a beat up. Fifteen years later I would learn I was right and these men were put forward as decoys to draw everyone off the scent of Michael Murphy and the other arms dealers. The Whitlam Institute and National Archives will have reams of information on Tirath Khemlani and George Harris and other, to use the Treasury Department parlance ‘rogues’ or ‘carpetbaggers’ or ‘funny money men’ and the National Archives even put out their own academic work on the ‘loans affair’, detailing the documents and activities of these men derived from the 1974 cabinet documents and released officially in 2005. Of course none of these institutions or government repositories had any idea of the hidden files. However the real scandal is that the ‘loans affair’ revolving around Khemlani and Harris and Arab money assaulted the senses of the average citizen from every media outlet and was the excuse that gave opposition leader Malcolm Fraser the reason to block money supply in the Senate to the government for essential services in late 1975, almost bringing the nation to a standstill! This was intentional and the blocking of supply was then used in a carefully constructed chain of events as the excuse for the Governor General Sir John Kerr to remove the Whitlam Government. To facilitate this Sir John Kerr, the Queens representative, did not give advice to His elected minister, the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, as is the convention, but instead gave advice to an unelected citizen, Malcolm Fraser, that on condition of a few promises, he would be made caretaker Prime Minister of Australia! The Governor General later denied he had made such demands but as in the case of this story, testimony and documental evidence later surfaced and despite the corroborative testimony of the Governor General’s private secretary to the contrary, it proved the untruths concerning the promises, the implication to Fraser of Prime Ministerial office on acceptance and thus a cover up.

Concerning the convention on Prime Ministerial advice, Sir Garfield Barwick the Chief Justice of Australia and the Governor General went against the advice of the Prime Minister and met secretly and judicial advice was tendered to the Governor General. Barwick’s advice essentially reinforced the unheard of notion that facilitated the blocking of supply in the Senate, that is that the Parliamentary system of Australia is not of the Westminster System and thus does not follow the tradition as it stands in Britain, that the government is only responsible to the Lower House. Whitlam had the overwhelming confidence of this, the House of Representatives, but by moving us away from the Westminster tradition, the government suddenly had to be responsible to the Upper House as well, or in our case the Senate. Thus money supply for essential services was originally denied in the Senate under the guise of reprehensible circumstances stemming from the scandalous ‘loans affair’ and further denial of supply reaffirmed on the eve of the sacking. All this was achieved through the breaking of the conventions that the Governor General gives and receives advice and acts on the advice of elected ministers, not the Opposition and again because a secret meeting with the Governor General by Barwick, against Whitlam’s advice was called. A further convention was shattered when there was Vice Regal acceptance of judicial advice that our Parliament, which is opened and closed and presided over by the Queen of England -who is also the Queen of Australia- or Her representative, is actually indeed not of the Queen’s Westminster Parliamentary tradition! This three time breaking of conventions, offering advice to the Opposition leader, meeting with the Chief Justice against Prime Ministerial advice and the Chief Justice offering advice denying the Westminster antecedents of our Parliamentary System was actually a triangulated crossfire, an ambush and Whitlam claims Kerr offered him no advice and ministers such as James McClelland, a life time friend of John Kerr believe they were actually lulled into a sense of false security by Kerr’s attitude and actions prior to the dismissal. It was a conspiracy and a plot and as the reader will see outlined to a certain extent here and comprehensively in the forthcoming book “Oranges and Lampshade” -a title derived from two covert operations- the idea was to get the Whitlam ministers away from the approaches of the arms dealers and Arab money and bury all the documents and correspondence not just for 30 years but for all time!

Despite the seeming nuances of these allegations they are actually observations of the overt knowledge of events that surround the dismissal and the reader is directed to Mr Whitlam’s literary tour de force “The Truth Of The Matter”, a devastating rebuttal of Kerr’s own book and a clinical and stunning dissection of the above triumvirate to form a fascinating insiders view. For an enthralling look at the behind the scenes Malcolm Fraser initiated investigation into the ‘loans affair’ carried out by the Premier of Queensland Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen, we recommend Sir Joh’s book “Don’t You Worry about That!” For the covert unknown knowledge, the answers to events behind the scenes brought up by both these books, they lie herein.

The following story is therefore a short summary, a rundown of an alternative history of the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.  It has progressed in successive stages from its beginnings in my transcribing the recollections of an old commodities dealer who was unintentionally caught up in the arms deal, through the study of documents he presented to confirm his story, to the validation and more of everything by the release of archival papers from the National Archives of Australia under the Freedom of Information Act.  However, there is always a problem of retrospectivity faced by every researcher of history who believes he is in possession of unprecedented, unknown and unique material he is sure will ultimately be confirmed by FOI – that is by eventually presenting what he has found, no matter how difficult to track down and how obscure the file, the sceptics will, quite rightfully claim the researcher stumbled on it by accident or good luck.  Fortunately, I was exposed to the following story in 1986 and realising what I had potentially at my fingertips, I contacted key politicians, prominent people and journalists from the Whitlam era in the early 1990’s to sound out their opinion of my revelations, ask them if they had ever heard of the characters involved and if I could quote their own respected works on the dismissal that were relevant to my story.

Click here for the introduction continues - This is in PDF format and opens in a new window.

To read the PDF you will need to Adobe Reader.
If you don't have it you may download and install Adobe Reader available here free of charge.