When Sir John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government, only welded-on Labor Party supporters and a handful of Marxist university students objected. Kerr claimed that he possessed a royal prerogative, ‘a reserve power’ with which to dismiss that government, but if you read Kerr carefully, his prerogative was nothing more than a personal discretion that permitted him to dismiss Whitlam under Section 64 of the Constitution without ministerial advice.