London, 28 February 1968
Confidential
I have been thinking about the interesting problem you raise in your letter of 7 February1 about the channel of communication for the announcement of appointments of Australian State Governors.
I am afraid that I must differ from your understanding that State Governors are appointed by the Queen as Sovereign of Australia. This is in fact not the case. They are appointed on the advice of the Secretary of State (who in practice, of course, always consults the State Premier), and therefore it can only be that the Queen acts in this matter as Queen of the United Kingdom. Moreover it is the Queen’s United Kingdom Style and Titles that are used in the Governors’ Commissions of Appointment. This is no doubt a relic of colonialism and is but one of the many anachronisms surrounding the whole concept of State Governors.
Nevertheless we would not wish to dissent from your view that it might be more appropriate for any communication to the Australian Prime Minister not to be made by the British High Commissioner. The alternative would be either, as you suggest, the Governor-General— or possibly the State Government. But before we make any change of this kind in our procedure, we should be glad to know what you think, having regard to the constitutional position as I have described it above.
Incidentally, this correspondence has thrown up one further oddity—the practice of the Secretary of State telegraphing direct to the Governor-General. This seems to me to be anomalous, as we have officially had no direct relations with Governors-General since the implementation of the Imperial Conference Report of 1926—except in the special case of honours.
I wrote a minute recently about the question of Commonwealth Ministers becoming Privy Councillors, which ended ‘Let sleeping anomalies lie’. Should the same doctrine perhaps apply to Australian State Governors?
1 See Document 426.
[UKNA: FCO 49/134]