 Forty years ago an extraordinary event took place at this very site old Parliament House. Australian Prime Minister Edward Goff Whitlam was sacked by the Governor-General and replaced by an interim Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor-General. Of course no scandal of this size is complete without its conspiracy theories and one of the big ones is whether of course the American intelligence had any role to play in prompting Sir John Kerr to do what he did. There were concerns from the very outset of the Whitlam government. Whitlam himself didn't want his ministerial staff to be security vetted by Asia. New Attorney-General Lionel Murphy searching for information to corroborate his theory that there were Croatian terrorists intending on killing, assassinating the visiting Prime Minister of Yugoslavia raided the headquarters of Asia in Melbourne with police in tow looking for information to prove his theory that Asia had been complicit or negligent in its duties. If an Attorney-General could barge in like that without giving any forewarning to his own Director-General about his intentions, what next was going to happen? Subsequently there was concern about Pine Gap. Pine Gap had been built in the late 1960s under very secret conditions and at that stage in the mid-1970s it was not public knowledge what was going on there and the Prime Minister was on the cusp of revealing details about this facility in the middle of Australia. A couple of days before the dismissal itself the Asia Liaison Officer in Washington is called in by his American counterparts for what is effectively a Dimash. Ted Shackley speaks to the Asia representative and says you've got to do something. This is deeply worrying. What did Asia know? What did Asia do?