British High Commission, Canberra, 15 December 1972
Confidential
New Australian High Commissioner in London
1. Would you please refer to Canberra telegram number 1749 about the appointment of Mr Armstrong.1
2. His appointment for a 2 year term has been widely reported in the Australian newspapers and certain additional information about him has come to light which supplements that provided in our telegrams numbers 1727, 1728 and 1739. He is a member of a wealthy Irish Catholic Family who built up extensive hotel interests in New South Wales in the early part of the century. As a Labor Branch official and a parliamentarian he listed his occupation as ‘barman’ to avoid being labelled a liquor tycoon by Labor supporters. As a young man he was much influenced by Jack Lang, the then Premier of New South Wales, who was ultimately dismissed by the State Governor for his refusal to accept the so-called Premier’s Plan for dealing with the problems of the Depression. Lang’s proposals involved battles with the British Government, the Bank of England and British finance houses as part of his policy was to repudiate New South Wales interest payments to United Kingdom bond holders. We have no reason to believe that there is any residual antipathy towards us.
3. Since his retirement from the Senate, which was provoked by Senator Murphy’s decision to oppose his pre-selection, he has devoted most of his time to his business interests but has maintained his link with the Labor Party in New South Wales which, like him, has been predominantly on the right of the spectrum. He was an able Lord Mayor, but it must not be supposed that the position of Lord Mayor of Sydney is in any way comparable with that of a major city in Britain. The geographical area of responsibility is quite small and the politics surrounding the office and that of the associated aldermen are somewhat of the Tammany variety.
4. When interviewed after his appointment, Mr Armstrong declined to comment on Britain’s entry into the Common Market, saying that it was our business, but he is widely reported as having condemned our immigration policy. The decision to treat Australians as ‘aliens’ in some ways was ‘something Australians could never wear with dignity’, he said, adding ‘My Irish father and mother would turn in their grave’ (sic). Mr Armstrong also said to pressmen that he considered it inevitable that Australia would become a Republic ‘although this may not be in my lifetime’. He supports strongly Mr Whitlam’s decision to introduce a New National Anthem.
5. When I spoke to Mr Armstrong on the telephone on 13 December he was extremely. friendly and clearly excited about his appointment to London. In his own words he was ‘treading on air’ and did not know when he would come back to earth. He has been in Britain before–I gather during the war he had some contact with Mr Churchill and still cherishes a memory of visiting Churchill’s daughter who commanded an ack-ack battery in Hyde Park.
6. The High Commissioner has arranged to see Mr Armstrong in Sydney next week.
7. Mr Whitlam has now announced that D. McNicol, presently Australian High Commissioner in Canada, is to be Deputy High Commissioner in London. Mr McNicol is a very senior member of the Australian and Diplomatic Service–now aged 59–with a reputation for abrasiveness. Some of my Australian colleagues told me that they think that one reason for his appointment to London is that he will have the weight and the qualities required to re-shape Australia House along lines which the DFA consider appropriate.
Removing the ‘relics of colonialism’
Britain’s failed overtures and final entry into the EEC and the progressive withdrawal of British military forces from East of Suez which occurred in parallel helped focus Australian governments on the shape of life after the British had gone (Document 420). This not only meant fundamental shifts in economic and strategic policies but also a reassessment of remaining constitutional links to the UK (such as appeals from Australian courts to the Privy Council and procedures for appointing state governors) and a deep rethinking of the nations symbols (such as the Queen’s style and titles, the national anthem and, indeed, citizenship itself). The Constitutions founding fathers in 1901 had left a number of key ‘colonial’ connections in place and these came under increasing scrutiny first under Menzies’ successors in the 1960s and 1970s, but later particularly under the root-and-branch modernising agenda of Labors Gough Whitlam. The British instinct, however, was to ‘let sleeping anomalies lie’ (Document 427).
The first symbolic stirrings came at the British end as early as 1961 when the UK government decided to call itself exclusively ‘British’ and asked the old dominions to stop using the term of themselves (Document 414). This led to ideas about a separate Australian honours system, first put by the Queens secretary to Governor-General Lord Casey in 1967 (Document 419) and brought to fruition at ‘break-neck speed’ by Whitlam in 1974–75 (Documents 491, 498, 500, 503). Other manifestations were the Whitlam Government’s adoption of a new national anthem, ‘Advance Australia Fair’, in April 1974 (Documents 442, 448, 477), its streamlining of the Queens style and titles to make her unambiguously ‘Queen of Australia’ (Documents 451, 45 7), and the progressive removal of any special treatment of British citizens in Australia’s citizenship procedures (Documents 429, 443, 449). As Whitlam explained in an important speech at the Mansion House in London in December 1974, all of these ‘actions’ were ‘in no way anti-British … simply pro-Australian’ (Document 496).
Other ‘relics of colonialism’1 proved more difficult to shift. The ‘anachronism’ of appeals to the Privy Council from federal courts was abolished by the Liberal Attorney-General Billy Snedden in 1967 (Documents 415, 420, 421 ), but try as he might Whitlam found that he could not overcome the states’ resistance to the proposed removal of their rights to appeal from their courts to the Privy Council, and the British Government rightly adopted an attitude of letting the Australians sort it out for themselves (Documents 432, 445, 462, 481, 482, 485, 501, 504). This important matter was exacerbated by Whitlam’s impetuosity—he was hell-bent on implementing Labors ‘independence’ program as quickly as possible—and also by some pressing practical disputes between the states and the Commonwealth, particularly the vexed issue of who had jurisdiction over the seabed and offshore oil drilling (Documents 473, 474, 497). The High Court resolved the seabed question after the British Governments official advice to the Queen fortunately agreed with the Australian Governments, thus enabling her to disallow the states’ appeal to the Privy Council without controversy (Document 473). Similarly, Whitlam discovered that he could not channel through the Governor-General nominations from state premiers for appointments to state governorships as state governors were appointed by the Queen as Queen of Britain not as Queen of Australia and the British Government advised that it was a ‘trustee’ of the states’ sovereignty under a little-known clause of the Statute of Westminster of 1931 (Documents 426, 427, 445, 460). The removal of these ‘relics’ with the states’ consent had to wait for politically less turbulent times and the Australia Acts of 1986.
While these symbolic and constitutional battles raged, both Australian and British diplomats identified what they saw as more important concerns—each of their nation’s material interests. ‘[W]e need Britain much more than Britain needs us’, wrote Australias Deputy High Commissioner in London in 1972 (Document 435) and a departmental paper later that year pointed out that British investment in Australia was still of first importance as were Britain’s atomic power status and membership of the UN Security Council and the European Union (Document 5.25). Similarly, the British did not wish any squabbles over ‘colonial relics’ to get in the way of vital financial, trade and security concerns (Documents 489, 490, 497).
British reporting of Australian domestic politics was remarkably astute, especially at the time of the constitutional crisis of 1975. Sir Morrice James, the British High Commissioner in Canberra at that time, had earlier noted that Whitlam had declared to a visiting Prince of Wales that Sir John Kerr’s appointment as Governor-General was a ‘“triumphal” success’. A year later, on 11 November 1975, the wheel had turned. Whitlam’s government was hamstrung by a hostile Senate which had refused supply. After considerable thought, Kerr, Whitlam’s choice as Governor-General, used his reserve powers to dismiss the hapless Whitlam as Prime Minister and thereby forced supply and a general election. James called the episode ‘The Remembrance Day Massacre’ and judged that while ‘Sir John acted with courage and from the highest motives … it may be that he has used a power which, because it has been used once, cannot be used again’. James went on to quote the great nineteenth century British constitutional authority Walter Bagehot ‘on the evil of two co-equal Houses’ where any harmony was due ‘not to the goodness of the legal constitution, but to the discretion of the members of the Chamber’ and that this convention had come ‘unstuck’ (Document 507). The republicanism the dismissal unwittingly fostered (Document 508) became a key feature of Australian politics in the .first truly post-imperial era which ensued.
1 Document 412.
1 This phrase, which Lord Casey uses first here in Document 419, was coined by the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, in his speech at the inaugural meeting of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa on 24 May 1963.
[UKNA: FCO 24/1369]