Contrarian Malcolm Fraser claims he's consistent

MALCOLM Fraser defends his legacy and says politics has moved far to the right.

Malcolm Fraser

SITTING behind a desk in his office high above the Melbourne CBD, Malcolm Fraser, who resigned from parliament 30 years ago, is asked if he is the most controversial and misunderstood Australian prime minister.

For a brief moment a smile flashes across his face. He reclines in his chair. He mulls the question over in his mind. Then, in his unmistakable patrician and commanding voice, he brushes off the notion he was controversial and focuses on the second proposition: being misunderstood.

For Fraser, who became prime minister on Remembrance Day 1975 when governor-general John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government at the height of the constitutional crisis, controversy is the price he paid for power.

The Liberal Party did not embrace his legacy; it distanced itself from it.

"John Gorton, Billy McMahon, Billy Snedden, all tried to distance themselves from Robert Menzies, who got out at his own time and at the pinnacle of his career," he says of the trio of Liberal leaders who preceded him.

"I had lost an election -- they were certainly going to try and dissociate themselves from me."

After an electoral defeat, parties realign. They must accept the judgment of voters. Their challenge is to accept their vices but not trash their enduring virtues. No prime minister gets everything right; nor do they get everything wrong.

"The other factor" in why he is misunderstood, Fraser argues, is the man he outmanoeuvred and replaced: Gough Whitlam. "For many people in the press gallery, Gough Whitlam was a hero. He was a god. I was the terrible person who had brought him down. And they weren't going to forget that."

In the course of the interview, Fraser shrugs off criticism, bristles at being asked about the dismissal, and tries to pilot the conversation towards topics he is comfortable with. Yet on some matters and on certain men, he is frank and revealing.

In the past three decades, Fraser has become a barnacle on the body politic, needling Labor and the Coalition parties by exposing their lies, misjudgments and loss of compassion. From terror laws, the US alliance and the republic to refugees, indigenous policy and economic rationalism, Fraser has become contrarian.

He was once seen as aloof, divisive, ruthless. Critics say the Cold War ideologue who pursued elements of Thatcherism and Reaganism before Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were in power has become a bleeding-heart liberal.

But Fraser says the character of the Liberal Party, which he resigned from in 2009, has changed. Politics, he argues, has moved leagues to the right.

As the Liberals, led by Andrew Peacock and John Howard, disowned his government and ignored his three election wins, and the media never gave him a fair go, much of what he achieved is forgotten or ignored, he says.

"Freedom of Information laws, the ombudsman, refugee policies, multiculturalism and the Galbally report (on settlement policies), the Human Rights Commission: all of those things were entirely consistent with what I've been saying since leaving politics," he says.

There is a small-l liberal philosophy that runs through the achievements of the Fraser government, also including: opposition to apartheid South Africa, protecting the Great Barrier Reef, the establishment of the Federal Court, Northern Territory self-government and implementing Whitlam's Aboriginal land rights legislation.

"There was a whole industry in saying 'Fraser didn't do this when he should have', when it wasn't even on the agenda," he says about the criticism he didn't move fast enough on economic reforms such as floating the dollar, deregulating industries or abolishing tariffs.

While still sceptical of free-market policies, Fraser says the financial sector, the Treasury and his treasurer, Howard, were not pushing beyond the reforms they did make to interest rates, foreign bank entry rules, a partial float of the dollar and exchange controls over capital flows.

He accuses Howard of a "failure to press forward" on key financial market policy recommendations proposed by an inquiry led by businessman Keith Campbell. "Treasury was archaic in its attitude. It believed that the more control you had over the economy, the more power you had."

Howard contests the suggestion he failed to push for reform.

On the dismissal, Fraser is defiant. "It would have been very wrong to leave that government in power one day or one week longer if I could prevent it."

But in response to reporting in this newspaper about Kerr's previously undisclosed collaboration with chief justice Garfield Barwick, Fraser says it was "totally inappropriate".

That response may surprise those who take a critical view of Fraser's role in the dismissal.

He characterises Kerr as "not a strong man" who was lonely and "concerned about his place in history". Kerr's decision to terminate the government was, in part, based on his fear of being recalled if he did not authorise the government's attempt to borrow $US4 billion from overseas to fund minerals and energy projects. "He was frightened that Gough Whitlam would dismiss him," Fraser says.

Fraser is a link to a political era that is long gone. The Oxford-educated grazier's son won the Victorian seat of Wannon in 1955 in the early years of the Menzies government.

He later served as a minister under three prime ministers.

Menzies "was a thoroughly liberal and progressive prime minister", he says. Today's Liberal Party has "lost its character" and he wants it to reclaim the Menzies legacy.

He is generous towards Harold Holt, who appointed him minister for the army in January 1966 and was lost at sea in late 1967. Fraser says Holt was being undermined at the time of his death and that he might have faced a leadership challenge in 1968, most likely from Gorton. Fraser fell out with Gorton over civil aid policy in Vietnam. In 1971, he said Gorton was "not fit to hold the great office of prime minister". Paul Hasluck, who lost a leadership ballot to Gorton, would have made a better prime minister, he suggests.

Gorton was replaced by McMahon, whom Fraser describes as "a flawed person" who "ignored everything that he had been told by his ministers".

Nearly four decades after McMahon lost an election, Tony Abbott is poised to win one. If he does, Fraser urges him not to "slash and burn" expenditure but to focus on repairing the "social fabric". He wants Abbott to put the genie of racism, propagated by the main parties, back into the bottle.

He says Abbott tried to talk him out of resigning from the Liberal Party a few years ago. So would he like to be a behind-the-scenes adviser to Abbott, whom he has lashed over refugee policy? "If a prime minister rings up and asks, 'I'd love to talk to you either on the phone or meet for a coffee over this or that', I think there is an obligation, if you can, to help."

So high above a busy city sits Australia's most controversial and perhaps misunderstood prime minister. Now aged 82, is he extending an olive branch to the party he has long been estranged from? He doesn't seem fussed about whether Abbott takes it. He is happy, he says, just to "make people think".

Malcolm Fraser on . . .

ROBERT MENZIES

(Prime minister, 1939-41, 1949-66)

"Menzies was a thoroughly liberal and progressive prime minister. If you called him a 'conservative' he would regard it as an offence. 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."

HAROLD HOLT

(Prime minister, 1966-67)

"A far better man than he is given credit for. In some respects, maybe he was not tough enough. He was tormented by the thought of sending conscripts to Vietnam. But at the same time he believed that it was in Australia's national interest."

JOHN GORTON

(Prime minister, 1968-71)

"He wasn't a hard enough worker. He was not in command of the range of policies that he needed to be in charge of to be prime minister. He believed that he had the right to get his own way."

BILLY McMAHON

(Prime minister, 1971-72)

"He was a flawed person. He ignored everything that he had been told by his ministers. But it is remarkable that Gough Whitlam won against McMahon by such a small margin. McMahon did everything he could to help Whitlam win that election."

JOHN HOWARD

(Prime minister, 1996-2007)

"He was a remarkably effective prime minister for a while. The most difficult time was in 1997 and, to give credit to the government, they tightened the supervision over the banking system. The thing I recall (however) is the introduction of race and racist attitude into the body politic, especially over refugees."

TONY ABBOTT

(Liberal Party leader, 2009-present)

"I've never had any cross words with Tony Abbott, not even when he tried to persuade me not to resign from the Liberal Party. I suppose I've said some fairly harsh things about some of his attitudes on turning the boats back."