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Obituary: the paradox of Malcolm Fraser

Mar 20, 2015
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser relaxes at The Lodge in Canberra in 1978. Photo: National Archives of Australia

Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser relaxes at The Lodge in Canberra in 1978. Photo: National Archives of Australia

Malcolm Fraser was a paradoxical prime minister whose record remains controversial.

He was a ruthless politician, yet widely seen by his side as an economic policy wimp; a workaholic who produced less than expected; a deep conservative; and a bleeding heart.

He was an aloof patrician and a fervent anti-communist, yet an ally of militant African leaders.

In short, he was more complex than his critics from either end of the political spectrum believed.

But the stereotype of the big, stolid, rarely smiling man remained throughout his political life. It was captured by Paul Keating’s cruel jibe: “You look like an Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades.”

Labor was later more generous about the instigator and beneficiary of one of the most divisive events in Australian politics, the 1975 dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s government.

John Malcolm Fraser, who died on Friday aged 84, was prime minister from November 1975 to March 1983, making him the third longest-serving Liberal PM after Robert Menzies and John Howard.

He was born on May 21, 1930 into a wealthy and political Victorian family.

Fraser’s first 10 years were spent on a family property in southern NSW. It was a lonely life and it was there, his authorised biographer Philip Ayres believes, he learnt self-sufficiency.

Margaret Simons, who co-wrote his memoir, says his parents believed children should be seen but not heard.

His later childhood was spent at Nareen, a magnificent property in the squattocracy country of western Victoria, which he inherited.

With that background, it was unsurprising he often seemed more Country Party than Liberal.

Throughout his political career, he was closest to the leading lights of the coalition’s junior partner, especially Doug Anthony and Peter Nixon.

He also absorbed typical bush attitudes, such as a suspicion of banks.

The other big early influence was Oxford University. While his academic record there was mediocre, he imbibed the tradition of rational debate and emerged an idealistic conservative.

He also had more fun than his later detractors would have thought possible.

In 1955, he won the western Victorian seat of Wannon in a by-election. He was 25, the youngest member of federal parliament then.

The following year, he married Tamara Beggs, eldest daughter of another prominent farming family whom he’d met at a woolshed dance.

While staying out of the spotlight more than many prime ministerial wives, Tamie was to be a permanent source of strength as wife, mother and, when necessary and then reluctantly, political partner.

There was no advancement during the Menzies hegemony and it was 11 years before Fraser became army minister in Harold Holt’s first ministry.

He then rose steadily, being education and science minister twice and defence minister before Labor under Whitlam finally returned to power in 1972.

There was one great eruption in this period.

In 1971, Fraser helped to destroy John Gorton, whom he’d backed to replace Holt, by resigning as defence minister and, in an emotional speech, accusing his prime minister of disloyalty. Gorton never forgave him.

There was nothing emotional about his next destruction.

As the Labor government faltered amid scandal and disunity in 1975, Fraser and his supporters turned on then opposition leader Bill Snedden, who was still unable to match Whitlam. After a classic stalking exercise, Fraser toppled Snedden by 10 votes.

He then turned to Whitlam.

Fraser was convinced, especially after a massive Liberal swing in a by-election, that Whitlam could be defeated. But first he had to force an election.

His method was to refuse supply in the Senate, which the government didn’t control. His justification was the government’s “reprehensible” behaviour over the loans affair.

The varying interpretations of the events leading up to governor-general Sir John Kerr sacking Whitlam and appointing Fraser as caretaker PM ahead of a general election have been told in detail.

While some are irreconcilable, there’s no doubt Fraser was ruthless. He dealt with Kerr, whom he thought weak, cleverly. He knew the G-G was very concerned by how history would judge him. And he kept the coalition’s nervous senators in line.

After the dismissal, Whitlam made his riveting Remembrance Day speech – calling Fraser “Kerr’s cur” and urging his supporters to maintain the rage – but in the election he was slaughtered.

Fraser had pulled off the biggest political gamble in Australian politics, though some thought the manner of it poisoned his administration.

He was to win a second election against Whitlam and a third against Bill Hayden. Moreover, he also controlled the Senate – a parliamentary authority no subsequent PM was to enjoy until 2005. However, he could never take the vote of all his senators for granted.

Conventional conservative wisdom is that Fraser failed to use this authority when he had the chance. By the third term, with the economy souring and the unions stirring, it was too late.

He cut public spending, but not as deeply as the emerging Liberal dries would have liked. He promised tax indexation, but never fully delivered; and only flirted with financial deregulation.

He quickly negated his notorious “fistful of dollars” 1977 election campaign promise to cut taxes.

Paul Kelly has argued in Australian Prime Ministers that Fraser, the last PM before globalisation forced Australia to break from its introspective economic past, was a rural paternalist – a regulator, a protectionist and a champion of state intervention.

Ayres is kinder and dismisses as myth the view Fraser scuttled the efforts of his last treasurer, John Howard, to radically reform Australia’s financial institutions.

However, Howard has said Ayres’s biography is inaccurate history based on poor research.

In his own memoir, Howard said Fraser was highly intelligent with prodigious energy, but was insensitive to cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats.

There were regular policy clashes and Howard considered resigning in 1982.

Patrick Weller, in a study of Fraser’s prime ministership, says Fraser took Australia some way down the free market track, including setting up the Campbell inquiry, whose deregulatory recommendations were largely implemented by Labor.

In other less expected areas, Fraser earned a different reputation.

He was an environmentalist, saving Fraser Island from sand mining, to the fury of Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The world’s largest sand island became the first place to be listed on the National Estate Register.

He set up the first part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and ended whaling in Australia.

Believing it was wrong to turn his back on old allies, he was welcoming to Vietnamese refugees.

He allowed thousands of Muslim Lebanese fleeing their country’s civil war to live in Australia, despite official warnings many lacked the background to integrate successfully. The consequences, his critics claim, exploded on Cronulla beach almost 30 years later.

Fraser believed in multiculturalism and established broadcaster SBS.

He listened to Aborigines and wrestled with the states to implement his indigenous land rights legislation.

Foreign affairs often consumed him.

His opposition to Soviet communism became even stronger after the invasion of Afghanistan. But he failed to persuade Australian Olympic officials to fully boycott the 1980 Moscow games.

Fraser’s greatest success was in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He was an effective bridge between Britain, front-line African states and the nationalist leaders on the ground.

The ultimate beneficiary of the settlement Fraser helped hammer out may have been Robert Mugabe, who became one of Africa’s most reviled leaders and with whom Fraser became “deeply, deeply disappointed”, but it ended a long and bloody conflict that set white against black and gave Australia an unprecedented standing in Africa.

Fraser’s leadership style was unsettling. His workload, his mastery of briefs and constant questioning left ministers and public servants exhausted. Although he consulted widely, he almost always got his own way.

Weller wryly notes while none of his ministers admitted to being scared of him, all remembered colleagues who were.

“Government by exhaustion”, “domination and fear” and “meddling” were among Weller’s descriptions of his style.

One of his ministers, Neil Brown, later complained that in its declining years, Fraser’s cabinet spent more time saving the Abbott’s booby bird – an endangered seabird – than dealing with rising unemployment, reducing the size of government or encouraging new industries.

Fraser was also unforgiving of ministerial transgressions, sacking a swag of ministers over what many of their colleagues felt were very minor matters.

One victim was Reg Withers, who’d been his key Senate lieutenant during the dismissal crisis.

In his third term, as the economy soured – partly because of a massive oil price rise and partly because of a wages push on the back of the now faltering resources boom – and union militancy grew, Fraser became vulnerable.

Andrew Peacock challenged and, although decisively beaten, it was symptomatic of growing unease.

Voters who’d been relieved to see the end of the Whitlam adventure were returning to the safer Labor Party of Hayden.

Nor had they ever warmed to Fraser. A slim booklet appeared called The Wit of Malcolm Fraser. Its pages were empty.

His best-known quote – “Life wasn’t meant to be easy” – appeared to sum up his morose view of life.

Encouraged by an unexpectedly comfortable by-election win in December 1982 and believing he could still beat Hayden – who was being stalked by Bob Hawke – Fraser called an early election.

But as Fraser went to Yarralumla for then governor-general Sir Ninian Stephen’s approval – which was delayed because he turned up unexpectedly with lengthy documents – Hayden stood aside – and Fraser found he was facing the formidable Hawke.

The former ACTU president promised economic revival based on consultation and consensus rather than Fraser’s confrontation. His easy manner and larrikin image was a welcome contrast to Fraser’s unbending style.

A measure of Fraser’s desperation was his much-derided claim that under Labor, savings would be safer under the bed than in a bank.

Hawke won a 25-seat majority on a four per cent swing. Uncharacteristically moist-eyed, Fraser accepted responsibility, resigned the leadership and anointed Peacock – rather than Howard – as his successor.

Like Whitlam, but unlike Kerr – the third principal in the dismissal drama – there was to be a long and rich life post-politics for Fraser.

In 1986 Hawke, who shared Fraser’s detestation of apartheid and recognised his old rival’s expertise on southern Africa, nominated Fraser to be a member of an Eminent Persons’ Group to try to reach a South African settlement.

As the group’s co-chairman, Fraser had two long talks with the still-imprisoned Nelson Mandela (who asked him if Don Bradman was still alive).

But despite promising early signals, the mission foundered on South African government intransigence.

The Hawke government also threw its weight behind Fraser’s unsuccessful bid to become Commonwealth secretary-general in 1989.

Former Australian prime ministers Paul Keating, Bob Hawk and Malcolm Fraser are seen in the chambers to hear Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd deliver an apology to the Aboriginal people for injustices committed over two centuries of white settlement at the Australian Parliament on February 13, 2008 in Canberra. Rudd's apology referred to the "past mistreatment" of all Aborigines, singling out the "Stolen Generations", the tens of thousands of Aboriginal children taken from their families by governments between 1910 and the early 1970s, in a bid to assimilate them into white society. AFP PHOTO / POOL

Malcolm Fraser (right) with fellow Prime Ministers Bob Hawke (centre) and Paul Keating (left) in Parliament to hear successor Kevin Rudd deliver an apology to the stolen generations. AFP photo

His most consuming interest was Care Australia, which he headed from 1987 to 2002 and built into a leading international welfare agency.

In 1999, he went to Belgrade to work for the release of three Care workers jailed on charges of spying.

He was backed by many international leaders, one of the first being Mandela.

While many old PMs periodically annoy their party’s present leadership, Fraser made it an art form.

His relations with Howard had long been frosty. In 1993, before recapturing the Liberal leadership, Howard helped defeat Fraser’s bid for the Liberal national presidency. The job went to Tony Staley, who’d been Fraser’s numbers man during the Snedden challenge.

Fraser paid the party back with a blistering attack that claimed it had been captured by a small group of economic rationalist ideologues.

After Howard came to power in 1996, Fraser became a major critic, particularly over the government’s hard-line policy on asylum seekers. He opposed the Iraq war.

More quickly than Howard, he warned of the dangers of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Fraser, who maintained he was consistent and it was the Liberals who’d changed, finally quit the party after Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull in December 2009.

For years he’d seemed closer to Whitlam than the Liberal leaders, with the old foes making common cause on issues as diverse as the republic, Aboriginal reconciliation and media ownership.

He’d reversed the usual ideological journey of moving to the right with age.

Fraser had misadventures, too.

As a Lloyd’s “name”, he lost heavily on the London insurance market in the 1990s.

In 1999, a court ordered him to pay more than $400,000 compensation to a couple who were badly injured by a runaway bull called Mountbatten during a stock sale at Nareen.

Around then, saying farming was a young man’s business and his children had other interests, he and Tamie sold Nareen for $3.8 million and moved to a splendid 40ha property on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula where they continued their passion for flower gardening.

His greatest misadventure was in 1986 when he turned up at the Admiral Benbow Inn in downtown Memphis minus his trousers.

Just what happened has never been explained. Fraser maintained he had no recollection and believed he’d been drugged and robbed.

Tamie Fraser’s take on the affair, in 2007, was: “He’s such an innocent in some ways … Poor old boy. It’s really horrible. He was so embarrassed. And still is.”

However unfair it may be to a major and complex political figure, it’s likely Fraser will be most remembered for the dismissal and the Memphis trousers.

But then, history wasn’t meant to be kind.

– AAP

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