I'd have arrested Kerr: Keating From: AAP November 09, 2005
SIR John Kerr, the governor-general who sacked Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975, should have been placed under house arrest during the constitutional crisis, former PM Paul Keating said today.
Mr Keating, then a junior minister in the Whitlam government, drew laughter at a book launch when he recalled: "I said to (Fred) Daly (Labor's leader in the house of representatives) we should put Kerr immediately under house arrest. "And had I been prime minister, I certainly would have."
In such a scenario Mr Whitlam then would have had to take the country to an election, but with himself as prime minister – a different circumstance altogether from what actually happened, with Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser installed as a caretaker prime minister by Sir John.
Mr Keating dismissed the late governor-general as a "pumped-up bunyip potentate" who was "completely devious" in his treatment of Mr Whitlam.
Advertisement: He was speaking at the launch of Michael Sexton's updated The Great Crash, a book about the Whitlam dismissal, ahead of Friday's 30th anniversary of the most dramatic day in Australia's political history.
