Sir John Kerr in the context of Industrial law

Edward Gough Whitlam (11 July 1916 – 21 October 2014) was the 21st prime minister of Australia, serving from December 1972 to November 1975. To date the longest-serving federal leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), he was notable for being the head of a reformist and socially progressive government that ended with his controversial dismissal by the then-governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, at the climax of the 1975 constitutional crisis. Whitlam remains the only Australian prime minister to have been removed from office by a governor-general.

Whitlam was an air navigator in the Royal Australian Air Force for four years during World War II, and worked as a barrister following the war. He was first elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 1952, becoming a member of parliament (MP) for the division of Werriwa. Whitlam became deputy leader of the Labor Party in 1960, and in 1967, after the retirement of Arthur Calwell, was elected leader of the party and became the Leader of the Opposition. After narrowly losing the 1969 federal election to John Gorton, Whitlam led Labor to victory at the 1972 election, after 23 years of Coalition government.

The 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, also called the Dismissal, culminated with the dismissal of the prime minister, Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), by Sir John Kerr, the governor-general of Australia, on 11 November 1975. Kerr then commissioned the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, as prime minister on the condition that he advise a new election. It has been described as the greatest political and constitutional crisis in Australian history.

The Labor Party under Whitlam came to power in the 1972 federal election, ending 23 consecutive years of Liberal–Country Coalition government. Labor won a majority in the House of Representatives of 67 seats to the Coalition's 58 seats, but faced a hostile Senate. In May 1974, after the Senate voted to reject six of Labor's bills, Whitlam advised governor-general Sir Paul Hasluck to call a double dissolution election. The election saw Labor re-elected, with its House of Representatives majority reduced from nine to five seats, although it gained seats in the Senate. With the two houses of Parliament still deadlocked, pursuant to section 57 of the Australian Constitution, Whitlam was able to narrowly secure passage of the six trigger bills of the earlier double dissolution election in a joint sitting of Parliament on 6–7 August 1974, the only such sitting held in Australia's history.