The prime minister history forgot: Malcolm Fraser’s government 50 years on
Fraser was a significant prime minister, the fourth-longest-serving, who won three elections and left a raft of achievements after seven years in office (1975-83). But he has been largely forgotten by history and is rarely invoked today. He was politically homeless when he died a decade ago, overlooked by and estranged from the Liberal Party.
Over a decade and a half, Fraser was generous to me, granting interviews, corresponding by mail and exchanging messages. Although he was interested in contemporary policy and political matters, he was a window into history. He was elected to parliament when Robert Menzies was prime minister, and served as a minister in the Holt, Gorton and McMahon governments.
Despite being shy, he came across as aloof and arrogant, and his ruthlessness earned him the characterisation as a political giant-killer. Fraser denounced John Gorton as “not fit” to be prime minister in 1971, following a dispute over civil aid in Vietnam, and hastened his demise. He challenged and defeated Billy Snedden in a leadership ballot in 1975.
How Fraser came to power – engineering Whitlam’s dismissal by using manipulated Senate vacancies to block supply to force an election – made him polarising. Fraser never regretted his actions but I discovered a note among his papers that revealed he later thought John Kerr should have warned Whitlam before using the reserve power of dismissal about 1pm on November 11, 1975.
Fraser had been tipped off by Kerr at 9.55am when the governor-general phoned to ask if he would accept certain terms and conditions if commissioned as prime minister. Fraser turned over the agenda paper for a joint party meeting that was on his desk and jotted down a summary of what Kerr said, including that he obtained supply, and called a double-dissolution election.
There is no doubt the note is genuine, affirming Kerr’s call, although Fraser signed and dated the note later. Fraser gave me a copy. The phone call and note were witnessed by Reg Withers and Vic Garland. Dale Budd, private secretary to Fraser, made a copy. Fraser and Budd made statutory declarations attesting to its authenticity. Claims by Gerard Henderson that the note was made later cannot be substantiated and are rather silly.
In any event, the dismissal did make Fraser cautious in government, mindful of the divisions that had been unleashed during 1975. His senior ministers, Andrew Peacock and John Howard, told me this. Fraser, however, rejected this and pointed to a range of achievements he said belie the cautious characterisation. He highlighted: the fight against apartheid South Africa; welcoming increased numbers of refugees, new migrant settlement services and establishing SBS; expanding environmental protection to safeguard the Great Barrier Reef, Fraser Island and Kakadu National Park, and banning commercial whaling, and; liberal reforms such as the Human Rights Commission, commonwealth Ombudsman, freedom of information laws and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Although the Coalition promised to “turn on the lights” in 1975, it supported much of Labor’s agenda. It kept Medibank but slowly dismantled it. Fee-free university education was not abolished. Labor’s Northern Territory land rights legislation was passed. Indeed, government activity expanded in many areas Whitlam pioneered. Fraser thought Whitlam’s conception of “Australia’s place in the world” and some “social programs” had “intrinsic merit”.
However, the Fraser government did not live up to the expectations of many voters and supporters on economic policy. Unemployment and inflation increased. The Coalition spent and taxed more than the Whitlam government. It did not produce a budget surplus nor deregulate capital, product and labour markets – that was left to the Hawke-Keating government.
The Coalition’s approach to government was methodical, process-minded and outcomes-focused. Fraser was demanding of ministers and public servants, required cabinet to meet long hours and drove some ministers to exhaustion. He had authority and respect but was never overly popular. Most Australians never warmed to him. His tears on election night 1983 was a rare sign of emotion.
Fraser was a Cold War ideologue, a strong advocate of the US alliance at a time of tension with the USSR, a staunch protectionist and regulator. But he was, as noted, liberal on refugees, multiculturalism, environmental projection, land rights and apartheid. He was a patrician liberal humanitarian. He insisted the party he joined and led, in the Menzies tradition, was liberal not conservative. “Menzies was a thoroughly liberal and progressive prime minister,” Fraser told me. “He wanted the party to be forward-looking, progressive, willing to make experiments, in no way reactionary and in no way conservative – all his words.” In later years, Fraser clashed bitterly with Howard, sometimes unfairly, and left the party. Tony Abbott tried to talk him out of it. Fraser argued the party left him. Fraser had a philosophical approach to governing, often absent from politics today, which partly explained the breach.
Fraser, from a wealthy farming family, was the last of the Menzies-era born-to-rule generation. Some Liberals saw his government as a missed opportunity and could not forgive him for bringing down Gorton and Snedden. He could never be legitimised by Labor because of the dismissal of Whitlam. He often came across as remote, reserved, detached – his image like an Easter Island statue.
But five decades on, Fraser deserves to be remembered as an important prime minister, an election winner with significant achievements. Although he cast himself adrift from the party he led longer than anyone after Menzies and Howard, Liberals would benefit from revisiting not only what he achieved and where he failed, but how he led what he said was a true liberal government.
Troy Bramston will be speaking at the symposium, True Liberal? The Record and Legacy of the Fraser Government, at Trinity College, University of Melbourne, on Friday.
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