Australia's Constitution after Whitlam

Australia's constitutional crisis of 1975 was not simply about the precise powers of the Senate or the Governor-General. It was about competing accounts of how to legitimate informal constitutional change. For Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, and the parliamentary tradition that he invoked, national elections sufficiently legitimated even the most constitutionally transformative of his goals. For his opponents, and a more complex tradition of popular sovereignty, more decisive evidence was req...