Labor veterans remember The Dismissal

Rage has given way to ridicule as Labor luminaries marked the 30th anniversary of Sir John Kerr's sacking of the Whitlam government.

Gough Whitlam, now 89, mocked the late governor-general's taste for the trappings of office - the top hat "one size too small", the morning suit bedecked with ribbons and gongs - and referred to his second wife, the late Lady Anne, as "fancy Nancy".

Mr Whitlam said the Kerrs were also privately held in contempt by Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal leader Sir John installed as caretaker prime minister, and Mr Fraser's wife Tamie.

The Kerrs were "figures of ridicule still", Mr Whitlam said, underlining an earlier observation that Sir John had exactly the same books as his predecessor in the Yarralumla library, with one addition - Debrett's Peerage, the guide to the British aristocracy.

Former prime minister Paul Keating, one of Mr Whitlam's junior ministers in 1975, took up the theme this week when he derided Sir John as a "pumped-up bunyip potentate" who heard voices about his own self-importance.

Former NSW Premier Bob Carr chimed in: "Living in the gilded cage of Admiralty House (in Sydney) and Government House at Yarralumla, being attended to by security chiefs, ambassadors and visiting heads of state, created the illusion in this man that the paper role of governor-general had a reality."

Mr Whitlam and Mr Fraser still disagree about the rights and wrongs of Australia's greatest constitutional crisis.

Mr Whitlam maintains Sir John had no right to deceive him and "conspire" to dismiss a democratically-elected prime minister.

Mr Fraser insists he had the right to use the opposition's senate majority to block money supply bills and force the government to an election, which Mr Fraser subsequently won with a crushing majority.

But the two old political adversaries - Mr Whitlam once dubbed Mr Fraser "Kerr's cur" - have found much common ground since.

"He's vastly improved," Mr Whitlam told an interviewer.

"There is no difference between us now that I can detect in any matter of international or regional affairs or human rights."

Mr Fraser said he had always admired Mr Whitlam's grand ideas, and "quite apart from that I enjoy Gough's company".

Mr Whitlam, along with current Labor leader Kim Beazley, has called for the constitution to be changed to prevent the senate ever again blocking supply bills.

But Prime Minister John Howard rejected the idea.

He also sprang to Sir John Kerr's defence, saying Mr Whitlam's dismissal was not the fault of Sir John or the constitution but the product of a clash of political wills.

"This retrospective attempt to paint John Kerr as the dark evil-doer of terrible deeds has been so unfair and one of the great historical distortions of my life," Mr Howard said.

"I think it's been one of the great injustices of Australian history that John Kerr, whose fate it was to resolve a deadlock he did not create, that he has been so savagely maligned by history.

"And I think the continued personal invective and spleen against a dead man which is engaged in by people who should know better is quite depressing."

Mr Whitlam once famously told his supporters to maintain the rage, but Labor frontbencher Lindsay Tanner said it was time to relinquish the rage.

"For most people under 45 it (the dismissal) is an obscure item of history," he said.

"We need to celebrate it but get it in perspective, and I think that 30 years is long enough.

"It's time we got over it."