Abstract
On 19 November 1975, soon after my decision of the eleventh, Sir Robert Menzies wrote to me. I quote an extract from his letter:
I fear that some people when they nominate some distinguished man to be Governor-General of Australia imagine that he is their humble, obedient servant and that he must do as they say. This is, of course, pathetic nonsense. It is not only an insult to the holder of the office, but it converts the Governor-Generalship into a mere automatic post in which the Governor-General must, under all circumstances, do what his advisers tell him to do. If this is what a Governor-General is for, we might just as well not have one; we might as well have an automatic machine — a kind of robot. And if that is what we are to have, then plainly we do not need a Governor-General at all, but merely a recording machine.
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Notes and Sources
John Burney, Sydney Daily Telegraph, 3 March 1978.
H. V. Evatt, The King and his Dominion Governors, Frank Cass and Company, 1936, p. xxxv.
See J. R. Kerr, The Ethics of Public Office, Garran Oration 1975.
For those interested in the nature of problems of judicial administration and its reform in New South Wales during my tenure of office reference may be made to my writings of the period, published then or early in my Governor-Generalship. See for example: J. R. Kerr, ‘Modern Problems of Judicial Administration’, in Australian Law Journal, vol. 48, Mar. 1974, pp. 116–7. J. R. Kerr, ‘The Modern Task of Judicial Administration in New South Wales’, in Journal of the Australian Regional Groups of the Royal Institute of Public Administration, Sept. 1974. J. R. Kerr, ‘Renewing the Law’, in The Sydney Law Review, vol. 7, p. 157.
Geoffrey Sawer, Federation Under Strain, Melbourne University Press, 1977, p. 154.
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Kerr, J. (1978). Appointment as Governor-General. In: Matters for Judgment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81403-9_2
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