Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to join in this debate marking the life of Australia's 22nd Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser. Malcolm Fraser was a giant of Australian politics: a towering man and a towering leader throughout his very long time in public life. A leader he was indeed. As controversial as the double dissolution of this parliament that ensued following the dismissal of the Whitlam government was, and no matter what side of politics people sat on, throughout the years it became clear to all that there was no doubting Mr Fraser's ability to lead, to take hard decisions and to stand by them. Yet alongside that hard-man image that many had of Mr Fraser over the decades was a man who would apply his courage to principles that demonstrated compassion, tolerance and a conviction to Liberal ideals.

The Fraser government faced difficult economic times. The aftermath of the world oil shock, record-breaking droughts, unsettled world markets and the fiscal legacy of the reckless Whitlam Labor government ensured that the Fraser government had a challenging period. As a national leader, Mr Fraser also faced a challenging public environment, not least due to the circumstances of his ascendancy and the demise of the previous government, but he enjoyed public endorsement at elections, particularly those of 1975 and 1977. His sometimes cautious approach to government has been criticised by some in hindsight but ensured, when you think about the era and times in which he governed, that he helped to heal the nation following his ascendancy to the prime ministership. It was those factors, and indeed his choices of governors-general Sir Zelman Cowan and Sir Ninian Stephen, that contributed to ensuring that the nation he left in 1983 as Prime Minister was a nation far better in terms of its national spirits, identity and direction than the one that he inherited in the chaos of 1975.

Many have spoken, as Senator Wong did, of the contradictions inherent in perhaps all of us as leaders in this national parliament, particularly perhaps in our prime ministers, and indeed through the life of Mr Fraser. Alongside those contradictions stood very much a man who is known for strongly defending anything or anyone he believed in, and a man who held his principles above political rhetoric throughout his life.

He also was a man who was a constant optimist throughout and beyond his parliamentary career. In 1980, as he faced his second-last election campaign and his last successful campaign as Liberal leader, he said at the commencement of a new decade:

We are entitled to be confident of our capacity to march through the decade ahead at a better pace than almost any nation. We are entitled to be optimistic about our future.

It was an optimism that he maintained. He maintained it right through to his last televised interview, shown last night. In the interview with George Megalogenis aired on the ABC, he said:

… if you’re interested in public policy there is one thing that is absolutely essential–even if it’s long term, you have got to remain an optimist.

An optimist, Malcolm Fraser was. Through that optimism, he was a man who changed Australia and the world for the better.

His achievements on the benches of parliament, in the cabinet room as the Prime Minister and as an advocate beyond the parliament are significant, real and numerous. He perhaps epitomized John Lydgate's famous phrase, famous piece of poetry: you can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but never all of the people all of the time. It is certain that throughout Malcolm Fraser's life—and I think we can say this with broad agreement—never did he please in a public discourse and political debate all of the people all of the time, but in almost all ways he pleased all of the people some of the time.

He incited important debates, fought important battles and achieved genuine reform. I want to touch on a few areas of particular achievement by Malcolm Fraser—areas that have overlapped some of the responsibilities and issues that I have pursued in this parliament during my nearly eight years here. The election of the Fraser government was a turning point for environmental issues in Australia—a point acknowledged by a number of other speakers. By the time Malcolm Fraser became Prime Minister, the importance of protecting our natural heritage and the role of government in that protection was widely recognised. But Malcolm Fraser's connection and association with, and commitment to, environmental issues far predated his time as Prime Minister. He had a personal connection that was of course not uncommon and to this day is quite typical of farmers and those involved in primary production who are intuitively conservationist in their actions. He demonstrated this through a long-term commitment as a backbencher and as a minister to the Australian Conservation Foundation.

In his first year of government, Malcolm Fraser implemented the recommendations of the 1975 commission of inquiry on Fraser Island, ending all sand mining on that Queensland island. Fraser Island also became the first listing on the Register of National Estate. The register was established by Malcolm Fraser. It is Australia's record of natural, cultural and Indigenous places deemed worthy of future protections for generations to come. In keeping with that strong environmental protection record, the Fraser government enacted the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act. Our iconic red centre—which has for thousands of years been the focus of religious, cultural, territorial and economic relations among the Aboriginal peoples—Uluru, then better known as Ayres Rock, was proclaimed as the first national park under the act, with Kakadu added in 1979. These proclamations by the Fraser government not only recognised the unique environmental surroundings and cultural importance of those sites but also opened up the development of a sustainable tourism industry for the Northern Territory and modern economic opportunities for Indigenous peoples that could be pursued in a manner sympathetic to their cultural beliefs.

It was a credit to Malcolm Fraser's forward-thinking approach to environmental matters that Australia was among the first nations in the world under his leadership to have places listed on the prestigious World Heritage List. The Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and the Willandra Lakes Region were all listed in 1981. Lord Howe Island and the Western Tasmanian Wilderness National Parks were also nominated by Fraser's government and were listed in 1982. It was his government that banned drilling in the Great Barrier Reef and established the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which is notably continuing the work he had commenced and pursued as minister for science back in 1965 in protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

Close to my heart, as many in this chamber would appreciate, are matters regarding the regulation, management and stewardship of our inland waterways, particularly the Murray-Darling Basin. Having personally been a part of many of the negotiations between basin states and within this parliament, I can sympathise with what Malcolm Fraser and the Fraser government may have been up against when deliberating over a new River Murray water agreement. They did what many had failed to do over a century of debates around water management in Australia: they reached agreement. In 1982 they were able to ensure the establishment of the new River Murray Commission to look at water quality as well as water quantity in the River Murray. This stands as an important step in the very long battle to achieve sustainable and effective management of our largest inland river system.

Alongside the environment, Malcolm Fraser had a long-standing interest in education. The 'ever optimist', as he was, was against free education for reasons of equality, which I will touch on; but he championed the concept of tertiary colleges of advanced education. In the 1980s he lent support to then Prime Minister Bob Hawke in their pursuit of university reforms. Even before he became a minister, Malcolm Fraser had combined his interest in education with strong encouragement of the development of colleges of advanced education—colleges which focused on more immediate vocational preparation than universities did, in an area for which I am proud to have ministerial responsibilities today. He supported the great expansion of higher education and of opportunity for students under the Menzies government and the increased opportunity of scholarships for students from all walks of life. In 1968, when John Gorton became Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser succeeded him as Minister for Education and Science.

After a period as Minister for Defence under Gorton and then some time back on the backbench, he again served as Minister for Education and Science for most of the McMahon government. As Minister for Education and Science, Malcolm Fraser continued the growth of government support for Catholic and independent schools, arguing that this support outside of the government system was both fair and good economics. He said to the House in May 1972:

The Government believes it has a responsibility to all Australian school children and for the first time in Australia's history the Prime Minister has taken steps that will give effect to that belief in a realistic and fair manner.

He expanded support for school libraries and for preschool teachers colleges. He promoted the study of Asian languages and culture, seeing Australia's future in Asia and also seeing the need for Australia to be genuinely multicultural. He expanded scholarships, both for students to complete their secondary education and for them to go onto higher education.

In 1972, as a minister who was expanding opportunity for students through Commonwealth scholarships, Malcolm Fraser opposed Gough Whitlam's policy of so-called free education. He did so on equity grounds. He argued the same grounds later in life, demonstrating consistency of principle and conviction, when Prime Minister Hawke, Treasurer Keating and Education Minister Dawkins were pursuing higher education reform and the re-introduction of university fees at the time that HECS was created. Malcolm Fraser said that a free education:

… would result in the gigantic inequality of a wharf labourer paying taxes to subsidise a lawyer’s education.

Many in this debate have reflected on the commitment Malcolm Fraser had to human rights. He was a leader of human rights in our country and also of those abroad. In particular, in the contributions I have heard, Senator Ryan and Senator Payne made very effective contributions regarding the role that Malcolm Fraser played in dismantling once and for all Australia's legacy around the White Australia policy; as Senator Ryan put it: 'putting the final stake through the heart of that policy.'

He was a tireless campaigner on social justice issues and human rights whose legacy will be felt for many a generation. He was a leader in the recognition of Aboriginal rights in Australia, and it was his government that passed the Aboriginal land rights act in 1976 that returned a large portion of the Northern Territory to its traditional owners. He had a deep interest in the advancement of our Indigenous people, while also understanding rural Australia like perhaps no other Prime Minister.

Many remember Malcolm Fraser for him welcoming the resettlement of tens of thousands of Vietnamese people in Australia, who have subsequently added a rich, new dimension to our national life. The impact of the Fraser government was best seen in its revitalised immigration program. During his time as Prime Minister, some 200,000 migrants arrived from Asian countries, including nearly 56,000 Vietnamese people who applied as refugees. The immigration program focused on resettlement and multiculturalism. It changed life in Australia, and I can but reflect on the impact it had on my own life. I grew up in Adelaide's north, went to high school at Gawler High School, around the area of the Adelaide plains, a rich horticultural district full of market gardeners. Many of those who came as Vietnamese migrants in the Fraser era followed the previous generations of migrants, from Italian and Greek families, in setting up market gardens in the fertile areas of the Adelaide plains. My time at high school saw me attending school alongside students with names like Nguyen, Van and Tran, all of whom were the children of migrants, first-generation migrants, from those terrible days of the Vietnam War and who had been supported to Australia under Malcolm Fraser's leadership, giving somebody like me a richer, deeper and more diverse exposure to the world through my secondary schooling.

Under Malcolm Fraser's leadership Australia was of course also an unwavering opponent of apartheid. After he left office, Malcolm Fraser continued to work for the end of apartheid. His subsequent appointment to roles with the United Nations and the Commonwealth of Nations reflected his high international standing. Indeed, in his pursuit of equality of recognition he was ahead of his time not just in Australia but around the world. His work in standing up for equality and standing against racism in all of its forms is something that is to his enduring credit and legacy and that the Liberal Party should forever be proud of being able to associate with.

I was just eight when Malcolm Fraser lost office. I remember watching the news footage with my grandmother, who I then lived with. It is perhaps one of my first vivid political memories. One of the challenges with somebody who left office as someone as young, in relative terms, as Malcolm Fraser did, at age 53, is that no senator in the chamber today ever served in the parliament with him, and a debate like this sometimes lacks the personal stories or anecdotes that go with a person's time in the parliament. I am, however, fortunate to have a link in my office. I am fortunate to employ Jim Bonner, a former journalist and very long serving Liberal Party staffer, who worked for Malcolm Fraser as a press secretary when Mr Fraser was Prime Minister. I invited Jim to provide some insight into the man, Malcolm Fraser, and into what it was like working with him. He told a story that in 1982 there was a Liberal Party meeting in Portland, in his electorate of Wannon. Malcolm Fraser was the guest speaker. Mr Fraser left early, much to the disappointment of the local Liberals, who wanted to get into his ear. But in news that would probably please Senator Cameron, given the contribution he made earlier, Mr Fraser headed instead to the Portland wharf workers smoko. They got a surprise to see him there but welcomed him in, and he spent the rest of the evening with the waterside workers. At the end of the night he was invited to have a coffee at one of their homes. Mr Fraser insisted that he ring the man's wife first, to say that they were coming. When they arrived, being late at night, the wife greeted them in her dressing gown and with curlers in her hair, for she had not believed that her husband was bringing the Prime Minister to her home at that hour of night. Needless to say, the kettle had not been switched on. Pretty soon the neighbours arrived to check out what was going on and eventually even the lady of the house warmed enough to get her box Brownie camera out so that her photo could be taken with the Prime Minister.

His explanation on the way home as to why he had wanted to leave the Liberal Party event and head to the wharves was that many of the wharfies had small blocks of land and supplemented their income by working on the wharves. There might have been members of the Waterside Workers' Federation, but to him they were his constituents first and foremost. He also noted that it was with the help of preferences that he won the seat of Wannon in his second election. He lost when he contested the seat the first time; but, after the ALP split, he benefited from Democratic Labor Party preferences and he reckoned that most of the wharfies probably had put the DLP first and him second. As for abandoning the Liberal Party meeting, Mr Fraser said that he already had their votes, but he needed to keep to those of those on the waterfront. Mr Fraser was a different person amongst the people who elected him to parliament. Canberra never saw that side of him. It is a testament that even as late in his career as 1982, as Prime Minister, he was still thinking of how to ensure the support of those to whom he owed his seat in this parliament.

Another story that Jim regaled me with is that Malcolm Fraser was a very keen car enthusiast. In fact, it was the faster the better for Malcolm Fraser, apparently. Sometime in 1981, his good friend and fellow Liberal MP Tony Street got hold a new Alfa Romeo from a Canberra dealer to try it out. The result was there for all to see one Sunday afternoon. Adelaide Avenue, the major road out the front of the Lodge, was apparently the scene of some exhaustive car testing, mainly to see how fast this Alfa Romeo could go. The Canberra police were apparently not impressed and the PM 's bodyguard in the accompanying car was hard-pressed to keep up. But this was not the first time Malcolm Fraser had indulged in his love of speed.

Once, apparently, on a trip from Portland to his home at Nareen in Victoria's western districts, the PM persuaded his Commonwealth driver to sit in the front passenger seat instead. With Mr Fraser behind the steering wheel, he put his foot down on the accelerator of the Holden Caprice and soon he was travelling at allegedly up to 160 kilometres an hour on the gravel back roads. The motor of the Caprice had been blueprinted by Holden to get maximum performance out of it. Of course, the Prime Minister wanted to see how it went for himself. When he got to his destination, there was uproar from the Victorian police, mainly because their vehicle had not been able to match the pace of the Prime Minister's vehicle. They threatened to book him if he ever did it again.

Mr Fraser had fraught relationships with some members of the Canberra press gallery. That is not new for a Prime Minister. If anybody feels in this day and age that certain journalists from time to time engage in campaigning, we can probably only imagine the situation and what it would have been in like in and after 1975. Today's journalists' predecessors were in many instances determined to avenge the removal of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister and punish Malcolm Fraser for his role in Whitlam's sacking by the Governor-General.

Over subsequent years, relations never really improved between Mr Fraser and many members of the fourth estate. On many occasions, daily newspaper editors were regularly invited to dine at the Lodge with the PM as a means of him getting around their correspondents, who seemed to have little time for Mr Fraser and what he stood for. Even nearly seven years later, the mood in many cases was apparently one of mutual loathing. In 1981, the then PM aroused some antipathy by going fly fishing in upstate New York when on a visit to the United States and leaving the accompanying press pack in New York City. A free weekend in the Big Apple was no hardship to the journos, but it did not impress their editors when few stories were forthcoming from their journalists' time overseas. The result was an influx of anti-Fraser news reports in the Australian media.

No PM today would dare to take a weekend off in the midst of an overseas trip. It would seem that perhaps that was the last occasion that anyone did so. One year later, another visit to the US and New York was again on the itinerary. This time, there was no fishing and no weekend off in New York. It was a mighty trip through the United States and Canada and then to Japan and South Korea. It was nearly two weeks of international relations without a break. Soon, the reporters were fed up with a major foreign affairs obsession of the PM. It was one called north-south policy, whereby he was pursuing a policy arguing for developed nations to provide more help to less developed countries.

After just a fortnight of hearing about Mr Fraser's policy day in and day out, the journalists had apparently got to the stage of mouthing his words as he said them, for they knew them off by heart. By the time the Canberra reporters had spent three days in Seoul, they had enough. At the final press conference, they went on strike and they refused to ask any questions. They just wanted to get back on the plane and fly home. While the exact north-south policy concept of Malcolm Fraser's may have never prevailed, his commitment to helping developing and less developed nations would never wane. It was reflected very much in his post-political life, especially his time with CARE Australia and CARE International.

Malcolm Fraser, when he was Prime Minister, only operated from Old Parliament House in Canberra; but he was the Prime Minister to approve the building of this institution that we stand in today. In 1984, during a radio interview with Jim Bonner—his former press secretary, who had returned to the media after the loss of the Fraser government—he revealed that he had strong reservations about this new Parliament House. He said that it was too big and commanding and was in a position that dominated its surroundings. When his government approved the project going ahead, Mr Fraser said that he did not realise at the time that it would dwarf everything around it. When asked why he agreed to the structure of the new parliament, Mr Fraser confessed that even he did not always get his way cabinet and, on this occasion, his colleagues had overruled him. The irony is that someone in the bowels of the basement of this building is a plaque from 1982 commemorating the laying of the foundations, with the then Prime Minister's name—Malcolm Fraser—upon it.

Like many, perhaps most, of my colleagues, I was saddened by Malcolm Fraser's estrangement in recent years from the Liberal Party. Our broad Liberal church is strengthened by dissenters and debate within it. From those of classical Liberal thinking to those of conservative values and all shades in between, we should warmly welcome them, encourage their debate and encourage them to help shift us to a position whereby we have the best of all possible policies through such constructive and active debate. Mr Fraser did persevere, despite some of his misgivings, with Liberal Party membership over a very long period of time. I wish he had done so throughout his entire life. And I would say, on his passing, to those who may share some disillusionment in some ways with the modern Liberal Party—I would urge them—to remain engaged or to become engaged, because the best way to effect change, particularly change within either of our parties of government within Australia, is to effect that change from within and by being involved, as Malcolm Fraser was for the overwhelming majority of his life.

Australia is a robust democracy, and our robust democracy tends to ensure that all Australian leaders are somewhat controversial figures. Malcolm Fraser was no less controversial and probably much more controversial than most in different ways, at different times, throughout his career. But, for all of the controversy throughout his life, in eulogising this man, it is clear that certain traits stand out. He was a man of conviction and of courage. He was a man of compassion. He was a man who led our country in a period marked by great social change and an emerging debate that would lead to great economic change. We should all give thanks for him, give thanks for what he contributed to the life of our nation, to the direction of our nation, to the development of policy within our nation.

Perhaps at this time of their grieving, we should, most importantly, give thanks to his family. I noticed reported today comments attributed to his daughter Angela, who said:

I guess over all those years he touched people in so many walks of life. And he was a man of many, many different sides, not just the political side and all his enthusiasms and things. He touched people and it was just very nice to hear …

It is pleasing to know that, in the marking of the life of Malcolm Fraser, the contributions in places like this, the contributions that Australians of all walks of life make through the media, make a difference to his family, because Angela Marshall, his daughter, went on to say when asked about sharing her father with the public:

"It was just our life, for us it was just our life. He was a politician from when we were born so that was just the way we lived. We didn't know anything else."

It is a selfless attitude shared not just by his daughter Angela but clearly by his wife, Tamie, of 58 years standing; his other children, Phoebe, Mark and Hugh; his grandchildren; and all of those close to him—that, for them, it was just life to share their husband, their father, their grandfather with the nation, to be part and parcel of the public debates of this country. We thank them for that sharing. We are richer for it.