Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased rise to speak on this condolence motion for former Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Malcolm Fraser. Mr Fraser was a dominant figure in national politics in the 1970s and the early 1980s, a period that stands out in my mind because by the late seventies and early eighties I was in high school and was starting to become very interested in politics. As the Prime Minister of the day, Mr Fraser was a towering figure, both literally and metaphorically, and as I joined the Young Liberal movement in 1981 I became much more interested in him and his government and the policies that they were pursuing. I had the opportunity to meet Mr Fraser only once, at a Liberal Party function which would have been in around 1981 or 1982, and the memory is strong and it made an impact on me.

In the time that I have available I would like to observe that as a nation we should be profoundly grateful to Fraser for his actions in restoring order at a time of chaos in 1975. I would also like to acknowledge the way that he demonstrated, through his career and through the things that he did while he was Prime Minister and the leading member of a centre-right political party, that moral and ethical principles are not the province of one side of politics. I also want to reflect briefly on the question of economic policy in the Fraser years.

When Malcolm Fraser led the Liberal and National parties to power in 1975 he did so at a time when many Australians were increasingly alarmed about the chaos, disorder and mismanagement into which our nation was descending thanks to the economic ineptitude of the Whitlam government. I want to quote from an article in TheSydney Morning Herald by Ross Gittins in which he assessed the economic performance of Gough Whitlam. He cited a chapter by John O'Mahony of Deloitte Access Economics, in a book, The Whitlam Legacy, edited by Troy Bramston. Gittins notes that O'Mahony's review of the economic statistics had this to say:

… the years of the Whitlam government saw the economic growth rate halve, unemployment double and inflation triple.

As Gittins notes, by mid-1975, inflation was at 17.6 per cent, wage rises had hit 32.9 per cent and, after a boom in 1973 and the first half of 1974, the country was facing a severe recession.

There were two particular actions that the Whitlam government took which made the economic situation particularly precarious. He hugely increased government spending and the size of government. Indeed, government spending as a ratio of gross domestic product rose by a remarkable six percentage points in a mere three years. The second action of the Whitlam government that Ross Gittins makes some observations about in this article is that, while inflation was already running very high, the Whitlam government introduced a series of measures which sharply increased pay levels: the introduction of equal pay, a fourth week of annual leave and a 17.5 per cent annual leave loading. Gittins had this to say, a rather tart observation:

Clyde Cameron, Whitlam's minister for labour, simply refused to accept that the cost of labour could possibly influence employers' decisions about how much labour they used.

Ross Gittins went on to say this, I think a fair and measured observation:

From today's perspective, there's nothing radical about equal pay or four weeks leave. But to do it all so quickly and in such an inflationary environment was disastrous.

We should remember that this gross economic mismanagement, this very high, troublingly high, level of inflation came at the same time that many ministers were behaving in demonstrably self-indulgent ways. In particular, there was the alarming discovery that a minister of the Crown was seeking on behalf of the Australian government to borrow billions of dollars from an extremely shady figure and to do so while skirting around the normal processes and safeguards of government. It is no exaggeration to say that the economic situation that Australia faced was chaotic and precarious.

When you look at the experiences of countries around the world that have tipped into galloping inflation, you cannot help but be struck by how profoundly socially damaging that can be. Perhaps the textbook example is Germany, the Weimar Republic, where there was an enormous rate of inflation; the savings of middle-class people were essentially destroyed; and the degree of social dislocation that resulted is cited by many historians as being one of the causal factors of the Nazis coming to power. I simply make the point that the consequences of chaotic inflation and economic mismanagement have been seen in a number of nations around the world over a number of years. Argentina is another country that could be cited, as is Zimbabwe. And the social consequences are always extremely severe.

Our country—it is no exaggeration to say—was facing a material threat at the time that Fraser took the bold and decisive action that he did to bring the Whitlam government's time to an end and to have an election, at which there was an overwhelming vote for the coalition because the large majority of Australians were extremely anxious about the dangerous economic territory into which the Whitlam government had navigated the country. They were very eager indeed to see economic management back in the hands of people with a proven competence at doing that.

And, of course, the record shows that, once the Fraser government came to power, having won that landslide election, it did chart a vastly more economically responsible course. It took some time to retrieve the situation, given the mismanagement that it had inherited, but it navigated in a prudent and responsible fashion, and the dangers that Australia was facing as a result of the economic chaos under the Whitlam government were, thankfully, avoided. I think Australians have every reason to be very grateful to Malcolm Fraser for his tough-minded and strategic approach to ending the Whitlam government as early as possible, to bringing on an election and to getting into power, which then resulted in being able to pursue a much more sensible and prudent course of economic management, which was very much in the national interest.

I think another thing that we can reflect upon as we look at Malcolm Fraser's career is that he demonstrated that he was certainly a man of high principle. He was prepared in government as Prime Minister, as the leader of a centre-right party, to act upon those principles and give effect to them. He opened the door to Vietnamese refugees in a way that markedly transformed and made more diverse the character of our country and of course was in many ways a precursor of subsequent stages of immigration from the many nations of Asia, which has contributed enormously to the diversity and richness of the modern Australia. He was a leader in the fight against apartheid and in bringing together international action designed to bring to an end the regime which supported apartheid. He introduced many path-breaking environmental reforms.

I think one of the lessons we can draw from Malcolm Fraser's actions as Prime Minister is that it is quite wrong to assume that one side of politics or the other has any particular mortgage on moral authority. He acted in many ways, on many issues, from a classical liberal perspective, a perspective which attaches great weight to the rights of the individual, an important moral and ethical tradition and one which is embodied in the modern Liberal Party.

The third area I want to reflect on briefly is the question of the process and progress of economic reform in the Fraser years. In reflecting on that question briefly, it is noteworthy that we have seen, within days of the death of Mr Fraser, the death of another very significant statesman in our region, Lee Kuan Yew. He is remembered for many, many things but also for one very pithy, rather harsh but extremely powerful observation about Australia—that we were at risk of becoming the 'poor white trash of Asia'. That was something that he said in 1980, when Australia's economy was very much more closed and fixed than it became in the subsequent quarter century.

At the time that those comments were made, we did not have a floating exchange rate. It was, in the main, not possible for foreign banks to operate in Australia. The government was the owner of corporations in many sectors of the economy. Both one of the two domestic airlines and the international airline, TAA and Qantas, were owned by the government. The Commonwealth Bank was owned by the government. Many other corporations were owned by government. Within a few short years, there would be a dramatic reversal in the economic policy orthodoxy and a sustained process of liberalising the Australian economy with a view to making it more flexible and competitive.

The question for Liberals is whether it is a matter for regret that more could not have been achieved in that liberalising direction in the years between 1975 and 1983. I found it instructive to listen to the observations of other speakers on this condolence motion over the past few days. The member for Berowra, who served with Malcolm Fraser in the parliament for many years and who came into the parliament in 1973, spoke about the divisiveness in Australian society that emerged from the circumstances of the 1975 election, the Dismissal and the election which followed it, and made the point that this acted as something of a brake on the vigour with which the Fraser government felt it could pursue economic reform. This was because of a concern to not worsen divisions which were seen to be very substantial as a result of bitterness which emerged from the Dismissal and the subsequent election result. I acknowledge that argument; I respect that argument.

However, it is interesting to look at the fact that the intellectual case for economic reform was being made with considerable vigour in the Fraser government years. The Campbell report was a major piece of work looking at changes to the structure of the economy. When the Hawke government came to power in 1983 another report, the Martin report, was commissioned, which essentially revisited and drew on much of the substantive work of the Campbell report.

There was certainly intellectual effort within the government, as well as outside it, going into the question of whether it was time to change Australia's economic model to liberalise the economy. In the field of telecommunications there was another major report, the Davidson report of 1982, which was another example of exploring deregulatory and liberalising directions. Ultimately, these directions were not taken up with any vigour under the Fraser government and it was some time before the directions that were pointed to were given effect to.

These questions can be debated at length. Ultimately, we are considering whether a particular path the country took over a number of years was the right one or whether another path could have been taken. Fundamentally, there is no answer to that question, but it is interesting that, in the observations and reflections that have been made about the Fraser government over the past few days following the death of Malcolm Fraser, a number of observers have mused on that question.

Let me close by acknowledging the extraordinary contribution made by Malcolm Fraser in the political life and the history of our nation. He was a member of the parliament for many years. He was, as I observed at the outset, the dominant figure in Australian politics for much of the seventies and the early eighties. Many decisions that his government took are reflected in features and characteristics of modern Australia. It is appropriate that we should acknowledge his contribution, mourn his passing and express condolences to his widow, his family and his friends. And I do that.

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