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The election of the Whitlam government in 1972 marked a turning point in 20th century Australia. Shaking off the vestiges of two decades of conservative rule, Gough Whitlam brought new ideas, new policies and new people to the task of governing

Governor-General Sir John Kerr's dismissal of the elected Whitlam Government in 1975, more or less at the behest of the Liberal-Country Party Coalition led by Malcolm Fraser, was among the most momentous events in Australian political history. Born into a privileged life Whitlam joined the Australian Labor Party, rose to be its Parliamentary leader and took it into power after twenty-three years in the wilderness. But the pace of change scared too many people, and sudden changes in the world economic environment threw down challenges he just could not overcome. Nor could he overcome the local political challenges thrown down by the conservative forces,and he and his colleagues seemed determined to keep providing him with the ammunition they needed to shoot him down. On 11 November 1975, they did.

Australia's constitutional crisis of 1975 was not simply about the precise powers of the Senate or the Governor-General. It was about competing accounts of how to legitimate informal constitutional change. For Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, and the parliamentary tradition that he invoked, national elections sufficiently legitimated even the most constitutionally transformative of his goals. For his opponents, and a more complex tradition of popular sovereignty, more decisive evidence was required of the consent of the people themselves. This book traces the emergence of this fundamental constitutional debate and chronicles its subsequent iterations in sometimes surprising institutional configurations: the politics of judicial appointment in the Murphy Affair; the evolution of judicial review in the Mason Court; and the difficulties Australian republicanism faced in the Howard Referendum. Though the patterns of institutional engagement have varied, the persistent question of how to legitimate informal constitutional change continues to shape Australia's constitution after Whitlam

"The election of the Whitlam-led Labor government in December 1972 ushered in fresh ideas and audacious initiatives in Australia's foreign policy. Whitlam's approach was shaped by a vision of taking Australia forward to its "rightful" and "independent" place in the future of the Asia Pacific region. Examining a series of episodes in Australia's foreign relations under Whitlam, Chen pays attention to a broad range of hitherto insufficiently researched domestic and international issues in Australian's foreign relations of the early 1970s. They range from immigration policy and the abolition of appeals from Australian Courts to the Privy Council to such major international issues as the Anglo-American base in Diego Garcia, French nuclear testing in the Pacific and the Five Power Agreement with respect to Malaysia and Singapore. Chen demonstrates how the pursuit of foreign policy independence repeatedly placed the Whitlam Government in a position wedged in between Australia's traditional allies and the Third World; and how it navigated Australia's national interests on a series of dilemma situations involving conflicting strategic interests between Australia and its traditional allies, and those between major powers and the non-aligned countries. The analysis presented in this book contributes to not only historical literature on the subject but also to the understanding of how a middle power, like Australia, can navigate intensifying great power rivalry. Essential reading for scholars of Australian foreign policy, as well as being an invaluable case study of Middle Power diplomacy in the Asia Pacific region"--