Someone on soc.hstory.what-if asked some years ago: "WI Whitlam strikes first, by Advising the Queen to dismiss Kerr as G-G, before Kerr has a chance to dismiss Whitlam as PM?"
My response:
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I am no expert on Australian constitutional law, so I will just quote David Butler's discussion of this question on pages 320-321 of Howard R. Penniman, ed., *Australia at the Polls: The National Elections of 1975* (Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute 1977) in his "Appendix A: Politics and the Constitution: Twenty Questions Left by Remembrance Day":
"(12) Can a Prime Minister Secure the Dismissal of a Governor General? There has been only one recorded instance of this happening: in 1932 Eamon de Valera, the newly elected prime minister of Ireland, asked the Crown to change the governor general of Ireland who had been appointed on the advice of the previous government and who had protested publicly about being treated with discourtesy. But the opinion is strongly held that the Queen ought to accede promptly to almost any request from a Commonwealth prime minister for the dismissal of a governor general. It is open to question whether 'promptly' means that if Whitlam had been able to get to the phone at 1 p.m on November 11, he could have insisted that the Queen (at 2 a.m. English time) should have agreed on the spot to his request and taken immediate action. If she had asked for time, the governor general could, of course, have dismissed Whitlarn in the interim (though she might have asked for a truce while she considered the matter).
"She would have been in a great difficulty in seeking advice. Her British ministers and the British high commissioner in Canberra would be scrupulously anxious to keep out of an Australian domestic concern. The Australian high commissioner in London could only speak as the mouthpiece of the Canberra government. Her own palace advisers, skilled though they may be about British politics, would hardly be able to help on the Australian scene. The natural
contact, the governor general, though he might have a right to give his side of the story, could hardly guide her on the proper action. She would be under great pressure to give a speedy answer--and it is hard to see how she could
prudently refuse such a request.
"But if that is so, it raises a specter to hover over any future Australian crisis. Will every governor general carry a letter of dismissal in his hand when he confronts a prime minister? Will every prime minister carry a radio telephone with an open line to Buckingham Palace?
"It makes nonsense of any picture of the governor general as an umpire, if he can be first dismissed by any batsman whom he thinks of declaring out. But there is, of course, a qualification to this picture. Even if the prime minister technically has the power to get rid of an uncooperative governor general, from a political point of view it would usually be very rash to invoke such a power. Certainly if Whitlam, after dismissing Cairns and Connor, were to have dismissed the governor general, his own appointee, the howls of indignation, the innuendos of dictatorship, would have been overwhelming. Despite his remarks on November 11 about contacting the Queen (quoted on page 321 [1]) Whitlam himself later indicated that in the last resort he would have chosen an election.
"But it is worth pursuing the question of what might have followed if Whitlam had secured the dismissal of Sir John Kerr. To provide for the absence of a governor general, it has been customary for some of the state governors to be entrusted with a dormant commission to act as governor general. Until ten years ago the task seems always to have been allotted to the senior of the governors of New South Wales and Victoria largely because of geographical convenience, and only these two governors held a dormant commission. Although practice has changed somewhat, it seems that in 1975 the task would naturally have fallen to Sir Roden Cutler, governor of New South Wales since 1966. But it could have been transferred to, say, Sir Mark Oliphant of South Australia, a Labor-appointed governor [2] Yet there can be no certainty that he or any other governor would have proved more cooperative with Whitlam than Sir John Kerr--if each in turn was obdurate, are we to envisage the successive dismissal of one acting head of state after another? Even to outline this fantasy underlines the hazardousness, perhaps even the unlikelihood, of an actual dismissal of the governor general."
[1] "The governor general dismissed Whitlam summarily, it seems, because he thought that any other course would lead to his own dismissal and a continuance of the crisis. There is no doubt that Whitlam had given some grounds for such a belief. His whole approach to the governor general had been truculent and uncompromising. He had spoken in jest perhaps, of the governor general as 'My Viceroy'; on October 17 he said 'Unquestionably the Governor-General takes advice from his Prime Minister and no one else.' He had moved swiftly to get the Queen to revoke the dormant governor general's commission from Sir Colin Hannah on October 23 after the governor of Queensland had publicly sided with the Senate. And in his press conference on November 11 he was to say, when asked if he would contact London, 'The Governor-General prevented me getting in touch with the Queen by just withdrawing the commission immediately. I was unable to communicate with the Queen, as I would have been entitled to if I had any warning of the course the Governor-General was to take."
[2] In a footnote, Butler adds here, "It can readily be argued that the process of appointing a new governor general would involve no more delay than the routines of swearing in an acting governor general and that Whitlam could in a matter of hours have got into office some immediately available outsider. But that is by no means certain."