Gough Whitlam - Dismissal

Australia confronted its most controversial and arguably its most far-reaching constitutional crisis when the Governor-General of the day, Sir John Kerr, exercised contentious reserve powers to dismiss the Gough Whitlam-led Labor Government on November 11, 1975. Whitlam’s defiance was immortalised in his televised ‘nothing will save the Governor-General’ rebuttal; an impassioned speech in which he implored the electorate to ‘maintain the rage’ and which took on the gravitas of Shakespearean tragedy in the face of Labor’s landslide election defeat only a month later, in December 1975.