Turnbull's lessons from the dismissal

Forty years afterwards, Malcolm Turnbull can still find lessons in the constitutional crisis that split Australia.

The prime minister was a "baby journalist" when governor-general Sir John Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam's government on November 11, 1975.

Mr Turnbull recalled on Wednesday, when launching The Dismissal by Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, that he wrote at the time that Kerr should have given Whitlam notice of his intentions and his fear that he could be sacked was not sufficient justification for keeping him in the dark.

He hasn't changed his mind on that.

But he'd also argued the dismissal would benefit Labor in the following election.

That, Mr Turnbull now says, is one of the lessons of the crisis - that the Australian people voted on economic management, not on a vice-regal crisis.

And it will always be so. In President Bill Clinton's famous phrase, it's "the economy, stupid".

However, the enduring message was that Australia's political institutions survived an incendiary political crisis without violence through having a vote.

The Dismissal is Kelly's third book on the drama.

It sheds new light on the relationships between Kerr and Malcolm Fraser, the ultimate beneficiary; Kerr and two High Court judges, and Kerr and Buckingham Palace.

Kelly said it was a drama with no heroes.

He summed up the key qualities of the three principals as Fraser's ruthlessness, Kerr's duplicity and Whitlam's incompetence.

The three principals are dead.

But in the audience was Sir David Smith who, as Kerr's official secretary, read the proclamation dismissing the Whitlam government from the steps of old Parliament House on that fateful day.