The former prime minister Paul Keating says he advised Gough Whitlam to arrest the then governor general Sir John Kerr at the height of the dismissal saga, calling the incident a “coup” from which Australian politics “never really recovered”.

Keating, recently promoted to a junior ministry position in the Labor government when Prime Minister Whitlam was dismissed on 11 November 1975, said Kerr should have been detained by officers of the law, but admitted he was concerned about a potential standoff between military and police.

“My proposition was that Gough should ask the queen to accept his advice to appoint a new governor general,” Keating said in an interview with the journalist Niki Savva, to mark half a century since the dismissal. Gough Whitlam’s dismissal ‘a calculated plot’ t

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