tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/malcolm-fraser-1603/articlesMalcolm Fraser – The Conversation2023-10-11T19:06:33Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2149602023-10-11T19:06:33Z2023-10-11T19:06:33Z‘We should be listening’: the long history of Liberal innovation – and failure – on Indigenous policy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552624/original/file-20231007-19-4viaai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains the names and images of deceased people.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>We have had compelling accounts from Indigenous activists of “<a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/long-road-uluru-walking-together-truth-before-justice-megan-davis/">the long road to Uluru</a>”. But another perspective on the Voice debate can also be gleaned from the political insiders – especially Coalition leaders – who engaged with Indigenous communities, learned from them, sought to develop consultative and policy solutions, yet failed to “close the gap”.</p>
<p>The furious opposition of the current Coalition parties to the Voice disowns their own history and an initiative that was arguably their own creation. So it is illuminating to explore their divergence from some of their former leaders who were passionate about trying to fix Indigenous disadvantage.</p>
<p>Paul Hasluck, journalist, historian, and diplomat was elected for the Liberals to parliament in 1949. Growing up in country Western Australia with Indigenous friends, he empathised with their connection to Country. </p>
<p>Curiosity stimulated his masters thesis, Black Australians, an account of 19th century relations between Indigenous people and colonists in Western Australia, published in 1942. He was appointed minister for territories in 1951.</p>
<p>He sought first to work with the states but faced resistance: they insisted they were already doing everything possible for “native welfare” and that it was a minor problem. Hasluck tried to bring change to the Northern Territory, hoping success would induce states to follow his lead. The difficulties were considerable: a department whose efforts were desultory, an administration that dragged its feet, a lack of bureaucratic and economic infrastructure in the Territory.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552612/original/file-20231007-15-v2l57o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck tried to introduce policies to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage, but ultimately failed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.robertmenziesinstitute.org.au/afternoon-light-podcast/william-sanders">Robert Menzies Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hasluck persisted, aware of key factors driving policy failure in settler-Indigenous relations: racism, inequality, disparity in administration across states, inability to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage, denial of agency. He sought to address this through cooperative federalism. </p>
<p>But his was a vision of assimilation, limited by inherited patterns of thought. It discounted the affiliations that tied Indigenous people to social and group identity. </p>
<p>Hasluck <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1891893">eventually understood</a> that he had been captured by tunnel vision. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>My outlook on aboriginal welfare […] influenced by the evangelism of mid and late Victorian England […] placed emphasis on the individual. The individual made the choice and made the effort and as a result was changed. This influence […] meant that we did not see clearly the ways in which the individual is bound by membership of a family or a group.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Success in 1967 – but deep division remains</h2>
<p>In the 1950s and 1960s, widespread recognition of the need for change led to bipartisan support for and success in the <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2017/May/The_1967_Referendum">1967 constitutional referendum</a>. </p>
<p>Prime Minister Harold Holt then established the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. His successor, <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-2408">Billy McMahon, signalled policy change</a>. McMahon said Indigenous peoples </p>
<blockquote>
<p>should be encouraged and assisted to preserve and develop their culture, their languages, their traditions and arts so that these can become living elements in the diverse culture of Australian society.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>McMahon tried to bridge divisions in his Coalition by offering a Northern Territory Land Board that could grant 50-year leases to Indigenous groups that could prove a long and continuing connection with land, rather than the land rights Indigenous groups were demanding. The fallout was such that it sparked the establishment of the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/aboriginal-tent-embassy">Aboriginal Tent embassy</a> in 1972.</p>
<p>So it was that Gough Whitlam picked up the baton, making land rights a centrepiece of Labor policy. Among his initiatives were the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) expunging state laws restricting the rights of Indigenous people. He also established <a href="https://antar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Woodward-Royal-Commission-Factsheet-1.pdf">a royal commission</a> into land rights in the Northern Territory. The Whitlam government’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Bill (1975) was drawn from its recommendations.</p>
<h2>Fraser picks up where Whitlam left off</h2>
<p>However, it was Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser who, in 1976, passed the Land Rights legislation that Whitlam had developed, but had been unable to progress in the Senate before his 1975 dismissal. He also passed the Aboriginal Councils and Association Act, allowing Indigenous bodies to register as corporations for community purposes. </p>
<p>This was the foundation for hundreds of Indigenous corporations, a springboard for community development that stimulated the emergence of Indigenous social entrepreneurs. Once a staunch assimilationist, Fraser had visited remote communities, met with impressive Indigenous leaders such as Galarrway Yunupingu, and now Indigenous policy reform became part of his broader Human Rights Agenda.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552614/original/file-20231007-23-f71u4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=666&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser and Galarrwuy Yunupingu in Arnhem Land, 1978.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/malcolm-fraser/during-office">National Archives of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fraser established an Aboriginal Development Commission, directed by Charlie Perkins, and a National Aboriginal Conference, (NAC) chaired by Lowitja O’Donoghue. His Administrative Appeals Tribunal (1977) and Human Rights Commission (1981) provided additional avenues for Indigenous scrutiny and appeal against decisions affecting them.</p>
<p>All of these were opposed from within the Coalition parties themselves. Their carriage required resolute action. They were radical initiatives in conservative circles. Yet, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/malcolm-fraser-paperback-softback">reflecting later</a>, Fraser rued that he was too timid, that he should have acted on an idea raised by the NAC: to negotiate a treaty.</p>
<h2>Command and control rather than community engagement</h2>
<p>John Howard’s policy initiatives were the next significant Coalition incursion into Indigenous conditions. He provoked Indigenous leaders by refusing to apologise for the actions of past governments. He abolished Bob Hawke’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) – the first legislated attempt to combine consultation and program management under Indigenous leadership – announcing the “experiment” in self-determination had failed.</p>
<p>His legislative response to the <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/research_pub/wik-coexistance-pastrol-leases-mining-nati-vetitle-ten-point-plan_0_3.pdf">Wik High Court decision</a> enabled him to amend the Keating government’s landmark <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/about-native-title">Native Title Act</a>, itself a response to the High Court’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-the-mabo-decision-and-native-title-74147">Mabo decision</a>. </p>
<p>Finally, he endorsed the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), a remarkable attempt to address dysfunction and restore order in remote communities by mobilising army and police intervention where Indigenous responsibility had failed. Significantly, it was also Howard who first raised the prospect of Constitutional recognition.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ten-years-on-its-time-we-learned-the-lessons-from-the-failed-northern-territory-intervention-79198">Ten years on, it's time we learned the lessons from the failed Northern Territory Intervention</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Howard had a clear rationale for each of these steps. Apology, Howard argued, could only be offered by the perpetrator of wrongs. ATSIC, despite research now confirming <a href="https://www.nla.gov.au/stories/video/fellowship-presentation-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-commission-toward#:%7E:text=In%2520this%2520Fellowship%2520presentation%252C%2520Associate,its%2520achievements%2520and%2520its%2520legacies.">the extent of its achievement</a> under the indomitable Indigenous public servants Lowitja O’Donoghue and Pat Turner, had later fallen under heavy scrutiny before being abolished in 2005. It was also subject to incandescent <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/the-end-of-big-men-politics/">critique by Indigenous leaders</a> and lost the faith of the Labor Party which had created it. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Sc_-wVvzdQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The Wik decision, like Mabo, demanded legislative address. The NTER was a response to a <a href="https://www.indigenousjustice.gov.au/resources/ampe-akelyernemane-meke-mekarle-little-children-are-sacred-report-of-the-northern-territory-board-of-inquiry-into-the-protection-of-aboriginal-children-from-sexual-abuse/">devastating report of domestic violence and child abuse</a>, and had followed advice, and was supported, by influential Indigenous public intellectuals such as Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/many-claim-australias-longest-running-indigenous-body-failed-heres-why-thats-wrong-209511">Many claim Australia’s longest-running Indigenous body failed. Here’s why that’s wrong</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It was these Indigenous advisers, too, who persuaded Howard to support Constitutional recognition. Nonetheless, major initiatives proceeded hurriedly, without explanation or consultation with the Indigenous communities affected.</p>
<h2>The Coalition’s reconciliation agenda leads to Uluru</h2>
<p>It is striking, if one leaves aside the inadequacy of Tony Abbott’s <a href="https://www.indigenous.gov.au/indigenous-advancement-strategy">Indigenous Advancement Strategy</a> (which again ignored the necessity of community engagement), or the Coalition’s outsourcing or offloading to states of Closing the Gap arrangements, that the next significant initiative was fostered by a bipartisan meeting on advancing reconciliation between Abbott (with Bill Shorten) and Indigenous leaders. </p>
<p>There followed a Referendum Council established by Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, with a sub-committee of the same Indigenous leaders tasked with creating a dialogue on reconciliation with Indigenous communities nationwide. It led directly to the National Constitutional Convention that delivered the Uluru Statement in 2017. </p>
<p>The Uluru Statement then, responding to years of lobbying by those most closely engaged with Indigenous disadvantage, was developed by Indigenous representatives with the encouragement of successive Coalition administrations. </p>
<p>Yet it was Turnbull who declared that its proposal for a Voice referendum was not politically feasible. Turnbull has since <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/malcolm-turnbull-opens-up-on-his-changing-opinions-with-the-voice-referendum/video/86257acb8aaca03e967961d569277b8a">endorsed the current referendum</a>, arguing “a lot has changed since then […] the Indigenous community has backed this in for six years […] we should be listening to how they want to be recognised”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hsj0Yth5zew?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>A Coalition trapped by ‘settler liberalism’</h2>
<p>Some of these engaged politicians looked back with remorse and saw how they had been constrained by their own political frameworks (Hasluck), hobbled by their colleagues’ policy priorities (McMahon, Turnbull), or too cautious (Fraser). </p>
<p>Above all, they recognised that their failure lay in not having heard what Indigenous communities told them. One might have expected the cumulative knowledge of these policy leaders to have influenced their peers. Yet what they had learned was rarely understood by their successors.</p>
<p>Partly it was a symptom of endemic short-termism. More significant, however, was another strand, exemplified by Hasluck’s rueful recollection: a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/030437540102600201">“settler liberalism”</a> that takes its own commitment to a particular form of individualistic liberal freedom so much for granted that it is blind to collective forms of social relations, and to the structural and institutional consequences of colonisation. </p>
<p>Howard and Mal Brough, the minister who so energetically drove the NTER, were undoubtedly committed to better outcomes for remote communities. They were, unlike Hasluck and Fraser, not remorseful about <a href="https://theconversation.com/just-ask-us-come-and-see-us-aboriginal-young-people-in-the-northern-territory-must-be-listened-to-not-punished-199297">the trauma and dismay that is still evident</a> as a consequence of the intervention. Instead, they were frustrated that successors had not seen it fully developed to address dysfunction in the manner proposed. Their conviction is a manifestation of the persistence of settler liberalism, now so much embedded in the contemporary Coalition’s engagement in the Voice debate.</p>
<p>So here we are, cycling back decades while the remorse of Liberal innovators about the limitations on what they could achieve is forgotten. With it, settler liberalism is reincarnated as a salve that Hasluck, Fraser and others would have thought discredited in their day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214960/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Walter has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past for research on which this article is based. </span></em></p>Many Liberal politicians have been passionate about redressing Indigenous disadvantage, but have come unstuck by the pitfall of ‘settler liberalism’.James Walter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2129652023-09-06T04:49:15Z2023-09-06T04:49:15Z‘An extremely serious musical comedy’ about Whitlam? Yes. The Dismissal is great fun, witty and sharply observed<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546604/original/file-20230906-29-ehd2xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5078%2C3388&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Squabbalogic/David Hooley</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Whitlam government has a mythical status in the Australian popular imagination. While it lasted less than two full terms between December 1972 and November 1975, it has had an outsized cultural presence ever since. </p>
<p>This is not just because of Gough Whitlam’s transformative social democratic agenda, but because of the way his government ended: <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-gough-whitlams-dismissal-as-prime-minister-74148">the dismissal</a> remains one of the most shocking events in Australian political history. </p>
<p>Each year since, we have marked the anniversary with new stories, new angles, new details. The story has all the ingredients of high drama – indeed, the story was told in a rather ponderous television <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085006/">mini-series</a> in 1983. </p>
<p>So almost 50 years on, what to make of a comedic musical retelling of these tumultuous events? </p>
<p>The Dismissal’s talented creators (Jay James-Moody, Blake Erickson and Laura Murphy) are neither Boomers who watched the dismissal from ringside seats or dewy-eyed Gen-Xers, but younger still. </p>
<p>For their generation, forged in a neoliberal world much harsher than the one that lifted up their parents and grandparents, the Whitlam policy agenda of free education, free healthcare and social democracy for all might seem like a distant, unattainable dream. </p>
<p>Crucially, the authors also don’t see the dismissal as a unique event. In their program notes, they argue the show is</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the story of our political culture writ in bold, sung in harmony and danced in formation. Over, and over again. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>So this show is not just a dramatisation of the events of 1975, it is also an attempt to understand our maddening political culture.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-gough-whitlams-dismissal-as-prime-minister-74148">Australian politics explainer: Gough Whitlam's dismissal as prime minister</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Self-referential and extremely funny</h2>
<p>Norman Gunston (a superb Matthew Whittet) guides the audience through the story and sets the tone for the show. We begin with the famous moment on the Parliament House steps. Playing Gough, Justin Smith both sounds and looks like him – no mean feat. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546600/original/file-20230906-23-tdebva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Matthew Whittet is superb as Norman Gunston.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Squabbalogic/David Hooley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Dismissal is least effective when it is striving for sincerity: the early number Maintain your Rage left me concerned the show might be too earnest to be genuinely funny. </p>
<p>However, my anxieties were assuaged by a very clever romp through the post-war years of Liberal rule (from Menzies to Holt to Gorton to McMahon), sung by suburban housewives and their lawn-mowing husbands. It is self-referential and extremely funny and sets a high bar for the rest of the show. Murphy’s lyrics are wonderful throughout, but they are especially brilliant here. </p>
<p>After Whitlam’s election, his policy achievements are dealt with in a rapid-fire slideshow, which moves things along but lowers the stakes in what follows. The real subject of the drama is the unravelling of the Whitlam government from within, thanks to the shenanigans of Jim Cairns, Rex Connor and <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/how-the-loans-scandal-became-an-affair-to-remember-20050101-gdzadn.html">the loans affair</a>, and the role played by Sir John Kerr, Malcolm Fraser and Sir Garfield Barwick in undermining him from the outside.</p>
<p>The cast are uniformly excellent. Peter Carroll is uproarious as a Mephistophelian Sir Garfield Barwick. Octavia Barron Martin manages to invest Sir John Kerr with a touch of pathos. Monique Sallé is a showstopping Tirath Khemlani, a befuddled Billy Snedden and her Queen Elizabeth II has more than a touch of Rocky Horror about her. Joe Kosky’s Jim Cairns is both pompous and ponderous, with brilliant comic timing. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546602/original/file-20230906-27-a4o8yh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Octavia Barron Martin invests Sir John Kerr with a touch of pathos and Peter Carroll is uproarious as Sir Garfield Barwick.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Squabbalogic/David Hooley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Andrew Cutcliffe’s Malcolm Fraser is stiletto-sharp and a little bit kinky. His Private School Boys is a bump-and-grind showstopper that recalls Alexander Downer’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CjCE0IsNWw">Freaky</a> from Casey Benetto’s 2005 musical Keating! </p>
<p>The song is reprised later by Lady Anne Kerr, whose purring refrain that “you’re not a match for private school girls” is a reminder that this is a story of class, mobility and social striving. </p>
<h2>Sharp, funny and astute</h2>
<p>The show’s gender-inclusive casting draws our attention to the almost all-male world of politics in the 1970s and gives many of the female performers the opportunity to behave disgracefully (Georgie Bolton as Rex Connor is spectacularly, hilariously crude). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546601/original/file-20230906-19-uzltpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Georgie Bolton as Rex Connor is spectacularly, hilariously crude.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Squabbalogic/David Hooley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Margaret Whitlam (Brittanie Shipway) and Junie Morosi (Shannen Alyce Quan) are voices of reason and resolve. While both are terrific, their roles in the narrative constrain their range: Margaret’s number Crash Through or Crash is an example of the ways the sincere songs don’t have the power to hold an audience in the ways that the satirical numbers do. Stacey Thomsett has much more fun with the role of Lady Kerr, who she depicts as Lady Macbeth in a Carla Zampatti suit.</p>
<p>It’s all great fun, witty and sharply observed. Yet perhaps the weakest part of the show is the ending. While we all know how this story ended, the creators didn’t seem to know how to draw their story to a close. </p>
<p>But overall, The Dismissal is sharp, funny and astute. It’s also a rare thing: an accomplished new Australian musical. I think Gough himself, with his love of Australian arts and culture, would have quite enjoyed it. </p>
<p><em>The Dismissal: An Extremely Serious Musical Comedy is at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, until October 21.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/where-are-the-new-australian-musicals-waiting-in-the-wings-79831">Where are the new Australian musicals? Waiting in the wings</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212965/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Arrow receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is currently a Fellow at the Whitlam Institute.</span></em></p>This new comedic musical is not just a dramatisation of the events of 1975, it is also an attempt to understand our maddening political culture.Michelle Arrow, Professor of History, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2041962023-04-27T02:01:46Z2023-04-27T02:01:46ZHell hath no fury like a former PM – but it wasn’t always so<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523109/original/file-20230427-28-2212o2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5iCzCtPkxQ&t=269s">television interview</a> with Phillip Adams in 1999, Paul Keating remarked that he retained much influence on the international stage.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I still have most of the access […] throughout the world, in Asia in particular, that I had as prime minister.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This was a calm and contented Keating, barely three years out of office but comfortable in the knowledge his voice continued to be heard in the right quarters.</p>
<p>His <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2lQvFTmMxU">recent appearance</a> at the National Press Club to talk about the AUKUS pact between Australia, Britain and the United States (under the auspices of which Australia is purchasing up to five nuclear-powered submarines for the princely sum of $368 billion) was mostly devoid of that quality. </p>
<p>Keating called it the “worst deal in all history” and lampooned Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as the only “payer” of the pact. He was especially critical of Foreign Minister Penny Wong: “Running around the Pacific with a lei around your neck, handing out money, which is what Penny does, is not foreign policy”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z2lQvFTmMxU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>There were important and sage policy points on offer, but there was something a little unseemly about the polemic, and even more so about his complaint the prime minister’s office <a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-keating-lashes-albanese-government-over-aukus-calling-it-labors-biggest-failure-since-ww1-201866">hadn’t heeded his advice</a>. Those cognisant of Labor’s history might have been reminded of former NSW Premier Jack Lang, at whose feet Keating learned much of his politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose trenchant criticism of the party earned him many enemies over the decades.</p>
<p>It is easy to assume this kind of intervention is the natural corollary of losing power, egotism and what former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans called “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-16/barnes-relevance-deprivation-syndrome-has-struck-politics/7250046">relevance deprivation syndrome</a>”. In fact, the spectre of a disgruntled former prime minister speaking out against their own party is a relatively recent one, a product of Australia’s modern, personalised political culture.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-keating-lashes-albanese-government-over-aukus-calling-it-labors-biggest-failure-since-ww1-201866">Paul Keating lashes Albanese government over AUKUS, calling it Labor's biggest failure since WW1</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Death and duty</h2>
<p>In the 20th century, several of Australia’s leaders died before they could enjoy any kind of retirement in which to disrupt their successors. Alfred Deakin’s health declined rapidly in the years after he left office, preventing him from making significant contributions to public life in the years afterwards. Joe Lyons and John Curtin both died in office, as did Ben Chifley, while serving as opposition leader. Harold Holt disappeared at Cheviot Beach in December 1967.</p>
<p>The survivors, it has to be said, were put to <a href="https://theconversation.com/even-in-the-political-afterlife-morrison-departs-from-the-norm-187346">good public use</a> after leaving office. Edmund Barton served the remainder of his days on the High Court, while George Reid and Andrew Fisher both went to London to serve as Australian High Commissioner. The former even took a seat in the British House of Commons in the final years of his life.</p>
<p>Stanley Melbourne Bruce, who lost government and his own seat at the 1929 federal election, was returned to parliament in 1931 and served as a minister in Joe Lyons’ government, before emulating Reid and Fisher by serving as High Commissioner in London and going to the House of Lords. Depression-era prime minister James Scullin remained an MP for a further 18 years after losing power in 1931, reputedly offering much wise counsel to Curtin and Chifley throughout the 1940s.</p>
<p>Former prime ministers were once a little more reticent about sparring with their successors in public, especially when it came to sensitive policy matters. Fisher despaired when his successor, Billy Hughes, campaigned for military conscription in 1916. But the former prime minister used his office as High Commissioner to abstain from commenting on the referendum, which failed.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gsecEddMnis?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Robert Menzies was so disappointed with his Liberal successors, according to <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/8040279">biographer Troy Bramston</a>, that he may not have even voted for the Liberal Party in 1972, preferring the Democratic Labor Party. </p>
<p>But he would never have admitted this publicly. Instead, he used his post-prime ministerial public appearances to wax lyrical about the British Commonwealth and bemoan its declining relevance. </p>
<p>Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser consulted Menzies periodically during the party elder’s final years.</p>
<h2>Statesmen on the loose?</h2>
<p>There is a longer history, though, of former prime ministerial interventions in debates about Australia’s strategic and defence policy. These were, after all, vital questions in the 20th century. </p>
<p>When Bruce proposed in 1924 to build two new Commonwealth naval cruisers in Britain rather than Australia, his Nationalist predecessor Hughes was irate, and said so from the backbench. “Are we such spineless anaemic creatures”, he asked, “as to be incapable of bearing the great responsibilities which free government imposes upon us?”</p>
<p>Hughes would play the role of provocateur again. In 1934, he published a short book called <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/1825072">The Price of Peace</a>, in which he called for a more urgent approach to preparation for conflict in the Pacific. An updated version was reissued the following year under the title Australia and the War Today, but it was highly controversial. Hughes was now a minister in a government whose foreign policy toward aggressors depended on economic sanctions, which he had described in the book as “<a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/william-hughes/after-office">either an empty gesture or war</a>”. His resignation promptly followed.</p>
<p>More recent interventions have taken defence policy and strategic complacency as their concern, too. A year before his death, Malcolm Fraser published a polemical book called Dangerous Allies (2014), in which he argued against Australia’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-dangerous-allies-by-malcolm-fraser-25995">bipartisan “strategic dependence”</a> on the United States.</p>
<p>Speaking on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sGk68dzsPU&t=15s">daytime television</a>, he warned that Australia’s partnership with the US could see it implicated in “major conflict” in the Pacific. He was, in this respect, equally critical of both major parties for what he perceived as subservience to American strategic interests.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-dangerous-allies-by-malcolm-fraser-25995">Book review: Dangerous Allies by Malcolm Fraser</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The AUKUS pact, in its short life, has served as the launching pad for ex-leaders other than Keating to launch powerful attacks on successors. When Scott Morrison announced the initial agreement in 2021, his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull used a <a href="https://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/address-to-the-national-press-club-september-2021">press club broadcast</a> to argue Morrison had “not acted in good faith” in reneging on the existing submarine deal with France that he, Turnbull, had signed in 2016.</p>
<p>Morrison, Turnbull fulminated, had “deceived” France. Australian voters saw the French president and their own prime minister’s immediate predecessor calling the incumbent a liar.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1612192170349592577"}"></div></p>
<h2>Fights, feuds and frustrated men</h2>
<p>In recent decades, Australians have become inured to bitter and emotional feuds between their former leaders. There are several reasons for this trend, including the increasingly personalised nature of politics since the 1970s, high rates of leadership attrition, and the thirst of media providers for easy news stories that hinge on personal animosity and Shakespearean intrigue. </p>
<p>A former leader criticising their own party is deemed the height of newsworthiness. John Howard and Julia Gillard have uniquely resisted the temptation. Howard had some <a href="https://theconversation.com/john-howard-calls-for-a-sense-of-balance-but-can-he-help-the-liberal-party-find-it-189059">stern words for his Liberal successors</a> last year in a book called A Sense of Balance, but the book appeared after the Morrison government had been defeated. Gillard, for her part, has been almost unfailingly measured and dignified in her public pronouncements since 2013. </p>
<p>For those who did return to the fray of policy combat, the personal and the political were inseparable. For much of the 1980s, Gough Whitlam was anguished by the way Hawke government ministers treated his legacy. As Jenny Hocking has shown in her <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gough_Whitlam.html?id=QhuSmQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">biography of Whitlam</a>, Hawke and Whitlam clashed repeatedly as the Labor Party walked away from big 1970s initiatives such as free tertiary education, an ambitious Aboriginal land rights agenda and much else. When treasurer Keating joked about the “chasm” between Whitlam’s policy aspirations and his actual achievements, Whitlam returned serve by calling him a “<a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/122414425?searchTerm=Whitlam%20Hawke%20Keating">smart-arse</a>”.</p>
<p>Where race relations and national identity have been concerned, the fall-outs between Australian ex-PMs have been that much more embittered. A great defender of refugees and asylum seekers, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/fraser-lambasts-howard-government-20040508-gdxt5o.html">Fraser spoke publicly</a> about his abhorrence of the Howard government’s approach to border protection and mandatory offshore detention. When Tony Abbott took the leadership of the Liberal Party in December 2009 promising to “stop the boats”, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-26/fraser-quits-liberal-party/841616">Fraser resigned his life membership</a> in protest.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/523120/original/file-20230427-20-62qetl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was a trenchant critic of the Howard and Abbott governments’ immigration policies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Joel Carrett/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Keating’s attack on the Labor Party is not unprecedented for a former prime minister, but it isn’t historically commonplace either. There is no doubt his criticisms have been heard, but their influence remains to be seen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204196/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Black does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Paul Keating’s recent savage criticism of the Albanese government over the AUKUS deal is a reminder that former leaders have not always publicly disparaged their own parties.Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1664082021-08-22T20:07:18Z2021-08-22T20:07:18ZWe can’t compare Australia’s intake of Afghan refugees with the post-Vietnam War era. Here’s why<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417155/original/file-20210820-15-1elrjg6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=49%2C4%2C551%2C356&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AMES Australia/Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>With the fall of Kabul this week, many commentators have noted the parallels with the fall of Saigon 46 years ago. </p>
<p>The rapid advance of the Taliban insurgents and seizing of the capital left the US humiliated once again. Dramatic images of frantic evacuations by helicopters from the US embassy triggered memories of similar scenes in Saigon in April 1975. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402208267/remembering-the-doomed-first-flight-of-operation-babylift">Like then</a>, civilians fearing enemy retribution were desperate to escape, risking – and in some cases losing – their lives in the process.</p>
<p>Historical analogies help us make sense of a rapidly changing world. In connecting a current crisis with one past, they offer comfort in the implicit promise that we have been through this before. Despite these psychic benefits, historical analogies are more often than not inaccurate and simplistic. </p>
<p>I have written <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/no-the-fraser-era-was-not-a-golden-age-for-asylum-seekers-20120201-1qtce.html">elsewhere</a> that the Fraser government was no golden era for refugees. Far from welcoming Vietnamese refugees with open arms, the Whitlam and Fraser governments were ambivalent about these new arrivals. </p>
<p>Despite this indifference, Australian politicians in the 1970s were open to policy reform and, as good global citizens, were committed to international cooperation to address mass displacement. Between 1975 and 1991, Australia resettled over <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/1011/SeekingAsylum#_ftn11">130,000 Indochinese refugees</a>.</p>
<p>We should not expect the Australian government to accept a similar number of Afghan refugees. Since the 1970s, the Australian policy landscape has changed irrevocably, meaning Kabul can never be “another Saigon” from a refugee standpoint. </p>
<p>There are four main differences between then and now that help explain this.</p>
<h2>1. Australia had no refugee policy</h2>
<p>First, when Saigon fell to the communists in 1975, the Australian government had no formal refugee policy. Australian immigration officials benefited from a blank slate. They were able to craft a refugee policy that responded directly to the Vietnamese refugee crisis. </p>
<p>Today, both major political parties have invested political capital in refusing to resettle asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Our politicians have been cornered into finding a solution for the emerging Afghan crisis within a preexisting, politically motivated refugee policy.</p>
<p>For instance, last week immigration minister Alex Hawke <a href="https://minister.homeaffairs.gov.au/AlexHawke/Pages/3000-humanitarian-places-for-afghanistan.aspx">reasserted</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>while the Australian government operates a generous humanitarian program, our approach to combating people smuggling remains unchanged. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1427956953527902210"}"></div></p>
<h2>2. Politics were fundamentally different</h2>
<p>In April 1975, the Whitlam Labor government was in its last seven months of power. Initially, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was reluctant to admit anticommunist Vietnamese refugees, fearing that once they naturalised, they <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8497.2012.01651.x">would vote for conservatives</a>.</p>
<p>After the Whitlam dismissal in November 1975, the incoming Fraser government was dominated by the “wet”, small “l” liberals who were socially progressive and reform-minded. </p>
<p>Back then, immigration ministers Michael MacKellar (1975-9) and Ian MacPhee (1979-82) were attuned to conversations about migrant rights and emerging multiculturalism. They adopted recommendations from the <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1474121432/view?partId=nla.obj-1475574660">1978 Galbally Report</a>, which called for expanding services to help newly arrived refugees settle in Australia.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1427195609262424064"}"></div></p>
<p>Although <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Immigration-Policy-from-1970-to-the-Present/Stevens/p/book/9781138187764">polls</a> in the late 1970s showed two-thirds of respondents opposed the resettlement of Vietnamese asylum seekers, what mattered was politicians did not succumb to public anxieties. The government implemented policies — such as the telephone interpreter service and SBS television — that made resettlement in a foreign land a little easier than before.</p>
<p>The “dry” revolution of the Liberal Party in the 1980s and ‘90s resulted in a focus on the economic utility of migrants at the expense of humanitarian considerations. </p>
<p>Of course, a humanitarian stream still exists in our immigration program. But, as a proportion of the population, the numbers of refugee admissions have fallen. </p>
<p>For the most part, refugee admissions have remained around 13,000 visas per year since 1979. This is despite the Australian population increasing by 11 million people during that time.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/afghan-refugees-can-no-longer-wait-australia-must-offer-permanent-protection-now-166180">Afghan refugees can no longer wait — Australia must offer permanent protection now</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>3. Family visas were much more common</h2>
<p>Not only have politics changed since the 1970s, the composition of the migration intake bares little similarity to today. It’s important to note that when Vietnamese refugees sought Australian visas, they had two viable channels: the humanitarian visa and family reunification visa. </p>
<p>These family visas became particularly important in the late 1980s and early '90s when refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong were cleared and unsuccessful refugee applicants faced <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/admin/hcspeeches/3ae68faf30/statement-mr-jean-pierre-hocke-united-nations-high-commissioner-refugees.html?query=indo%20china%20refugees">repatriation to Vietnam</a>. </p>
<p>The importance of the family reunification channel cannot be overstated, as it gave Vietnamese refugees a second chance at resettlement in Australia.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Vietnamese refugees on an Air Force helicopter" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417159/original/file-20210820-25-6l79gc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vietnamese refugees on an Air Force helicopter to safety near Saigon in 1966.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn2844463">1985-6</a>, 65% of Vietnamese arrivals came on refugee visas, while just 35% came under the family migration program. By <a href="http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_VOYAGER1035826">1991-2</a>, more than 80% of Vietnamese migrants came on family reunification visas, while just one in seven received refugee visas. </p>
<p>These historical data tell us two things. First, they show how refugee movements evolve over years, if not decades, after the dust of the revolution settles. </p>
<p>The current <a href="https://minister.homeaffairs.gov.au/AlexHawke/Pages/3000-humanitarian-places-for-afghanistan.aspx">proposal</a> announced by immigration minister Alex Hawke to evacuate 3,000 Afghans is shortsighted and will unlikely satisfy refugee demand for resettlement in the years ahead. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-the-compassion-quotient-in-morrisons-afghan-response-needs-a-boost-166435">Grattan on Friday: The compassion quotient in Morrison's Afghan response needs a boost</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>And second, since the Howard government, successive governments have reduced the size of the family migration program relative to the skilled migration program. </p>
<p>At its peak in 1984-5, 81% of visas were allocated to family migration, 18% to skilled migration. In 2019-20, the figures were 31% family migration and 68% skilled migration. </p>
<p>The government’s definition of a family member has also narrowed over the past 40 years. An expansive definition that once included adult siblings and elderly parents has made way for one restricted to a western-centric nuclear family. </p>
<p>Without a sizeable family migration program, one wonders what will happen to Afghan asylum seekers who don’t meet the strict eligibility for refugee status.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1428127499859365888"}"></div></p>
<h2>4. Third countries allowed for a more orderly departure</h2>
<p>In the 1970s and '80s, many countries united to share the responsibility of resettling refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. This included the countries where they were coming from, as well as the countries they transited through and their final destinations. </p>
<p>Most notably, the “<a href="https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/admin/hcspeeches/3ae68fcf0/opening-statement-mr-poul-hartling-united-nations-high-commissioner-refugees.html?query=indo%20china%20refugees">orderly departure program</a>” signed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Vietnam in 1979 provided a comprehensive response to the mass displacement of people. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-photographers-war-vietnam-through-a-lens-8759">The photographer’s war: Vietnam through a lens</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This included “in-country processing” of their applications for resettlement overseas. Though thousands still took to boats over the years, this “orderly departure program” saved many others from making the <a href="https://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/sites/kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/files/Policy_Brief_8_Protected_Entry.pdf">risky and clandestine journeys</a>. In Australia’s case, no asylum seekers arrived by boat from 1981–89. </p>
<p>But this program required cooperation and goodwill between nations, particularly among neighbouring countries in southeast Asia that agreed to keep their borders open to asylum seekers, and for resettlement nations to accept large numbers of refugees. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Vietnamese refugees en route to Israel" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/417157/original/file-20210820-21-m2g06t.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vietnamese family en route from the Philippines for resettlement in Israel in 1979.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, by contrast, may divide the international community. The Taliban has steadfast support from Pakistan and Iran; it is also likely to be recognised by Russia and China. Meanwhile, western states have recoiled at the Taliban’s human rights record and religious extremism. </p>
<p>When Afghan refugees cross into neighbouring Pakistan, Iran and other <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/19/afghanistans-ex-soviet-neighbours-panic-reject-refugees">central Asian countries</a>, it remains unclear what support they will receive or whether the UNHCR or another third party would be welcome to set up “in-country” processing for resettlement elsewhere.</p>
<p>The fall of Kabul is a seismic event that cannot be reduced to an ill-considered historical analogy. When it comes to the emerging refugee crisis, we should see this event in its full complexity. Only then can we hope to rise to the policy challenges ahead.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166408/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachel Stevens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Since the 1970s, Australian immigration policy has changed dramatically, meaning Afghan refugees face far greater hurdles than those who fled Saigon after the Vietnam War.Rachel Stevens, Research fellow, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1591952021-04-17T03:08:31Z2021-04-17T03:08:31ZRemembering Andrew Peacock, a Liberal leader of intelligence, wit and charm<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395551/original/file-20210417-13-1mas47d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Paul Miller</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Andrew Sharp Peacock, for so long “the coming man” of Australian politics, has died in the United States aged 82.</p>
<p>Born in 1939, he was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, acquired a law degree at the University of Melbourne, where he also met his first wife, Susan Rossiter, the daughter of Victorian Liberal politician Sir John Rossiter.</p>
<p>By the age of 26 he had been president of the Victorian Young Liberals and became president of the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party at a time when Victoria was the Liberals’ “jewel in the crown”.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1383039376058318859"}"></div></p>
<p>Liberal warhorses, of whom <a href="https://biography.senate.gov.au/cormack-magnus-cameron/">Senator Magnus Cormack</a> was one, saw Peacock as the future of the Liberal Party. Peacock also gained an impeccable contact with the past when, in 1966, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/andrew-peacock-dies-in-the-united-states-aged-82-20210416-p57jze.html">he succeeded Sir Robert Menzies</a> in the seat of Kooyong.</p>
<p>He immediately attracted attention when he arrived in Canberra, where in the Liberal Party Room he experienced the resentment of the envious and of the by-passed.</p>
<p>There was a minor setback when John Gorton in 1968 brought another Victorian, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lynch-sir-phillip-reginald-14391">Phillip Lynch</a>, into the ministry, overlooking Peacock who believed Gorton had promised him a promotion. Perhaps surprisingly, 35 years later Peacock was still expressing hurt at being overlooked.</p>
<p>In the parliamentary party, he joined the so-called <a href="https://www.moadoph.gov.au/blog/divisive-agents-of-the-prime-minister-or-an-innocent-supper-club/#">Mushroom Club</a> with other good friends like Jim Killen, Tom Hughes and Don Chipp, all of whom were expected to advance, and did so.</p>
<p>Gorton promoted Peacock after almost losing the supposedly the unlosable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Australian_federal_election">election of 1969</a>. As minister for the army, Peacock found it difficult working under Defence Minister Malcolm Fraser, and would again feel a lasting pain when “Bill” McMahon, with Fraser’s help, <a href="https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/australias-prime-ministers/william-mcmahon/during-office">displaced Gorton in March 1971</a>.</p>
<p>Peacock survived a McMahon cull of Gorton supporters, performed well as minister for external territories, and stayed on the front bench after Gough Whitlam won the 1972 election.</p>
<p>The “coming man” appeared closer to arrival when Fraser appointed Peacock foreign minister in 1975, a move that benefited Fraser by keeping a potential challenger out of the country.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/vale-bob-hawke-a-giant-of-australian-political-and-industrial-history-93719">Vale Bob Hawke, a giant of Australian political and industrial history</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The job meant Peacock could do what he always did so well: meeting and greeting the high-ranking and influential from around the world. His natural charm, good looks and genuine goodwill, combined with a sympathy for people and an understanding of different countries’ situations, enabled him to work with and alongside Asians and Africans, Europeans, Americans and Pacific Islanders.</p>
<p>Cormack wanted his “pupil” to challenge Fraser for the leadership. Peacock flopped badly when, having previously moved to the seemingly unsuitable portfolio of industrial relations, he did try for the leadership in 1982.</p>
<p>At least he was well placed to succeed Fraser after the Coalition lost the 1983 election to Bob Hawke’s Labor Party. Peacock proceeded to lose two of his own – in 1984 and 1990 – while doing better than expected in adverse circumstances in opposing Hawke.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NXQ5hAJodMQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Critically, however, Peacock exposed a weakness that offset the advantages of intelligence, charm, and apparent self-possession. Beyond proclaiming the shibboleths, it was never clear just what he believed in and what he stood for.</p>
<p>During Peacock’s supposed rivalry with Howard – beneath the surface it was really one between their supporters – one senior moderate Liberal explained his own dilemma:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>do I vote for Howard, whose views I dislike, or for Peacock, whose views remain a mystery?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A former federal president from the 1980s once described Peacock as a man who would denounce you in a “vile” manner and then walk through a door, see you, smile broadly and greet you warmly.</p>
<p>After losing in 1990, Peacock drifted towards the exit door of politics and looked more at ease as the Howard-appointed Ambassador to the United States. At the end of his tenure in 2000 he took various positions in business in America and Australia.</p>
<p>So, why did the “coming man” never arrive at the Lodge? Commentators usually scoffed at Peacock’s own explanation that he was never sure he really wanted the top job.</p>
<p>Yet, looking at how he went about his early career in the Liberal Party, where he was striving to advance himself and was not in a mood to accept setbacks, he was not the same man who reached for the party leadership three times in the 1980s.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/395554/original/file-20210417-19-1rk181i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Peacock with John Howard in 2000.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unlike Peacock, Fraser and Howard went for the leadership with agendas. They stood, most of the time, for identifiable and consistent positions and they were there for the long haul.</p>
<p>Peacock was probably at his best when he left that world behind him.</p>
<p>He married happily the third time, and through Penne Percy Korth gravitated to a world occupied by the more moderate Republicans. He also had a close relationship with his three daughters.</p>
<p>Beyond appearances, Peacock had the endearing quality of generating a natural warmth, charm and wit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Hancock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For so long the ‘coming man’ of Australian political life, Peacock’s many natural gifts always seemed better used beyond politics than within it.Ian Hancock, School visitor, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1303722020-01-23T19:02:23Z2020-01-23T19:02:23ZWhy we need strong ethical standards for ministers – and better ways of enforcing them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311518/original/file-20200123-162221-jjwu9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Prime Minister Scott Morrison has asked his department to probe whether Bridget McKenzie was in breach of ministerial standards in her handling of the sports grants program.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Prime Minister Scott Morrison has asked the head of his department to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-22/scott-morrison-seeks-bridget-mckenzie-sports-grants-probe/11890922">investigate whether Bridget McKenzie violated</a> <a href="https://www.pmc.gov.au/resource-centre/government/statement-ministerial-standards">ministerial standards</a> when she dispensed sports grants to clubs in marginal seats and those being targeted by the Coalition in last year’s election.</p>
<p>It is generally accepted by Australians that “public office is a public trust”. The nature and extent of that trust, however, is continuously being debated. </p>
<p>This is especially true in an age of virtually unlimited potential for scrutiny of governments, and unlimited scope for the court of public opinion to take submissions (and make judgements) about ministerial conduct – well-founded or otherwise. </p>
<p>The late (and much lamented) <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-10/john-clarke-dies-aged-68/8430174">John Clarke</a> once told me his main role as satirist-in-residence to the nation was to remind the Australian people how fragile their democratic institutions are. </p>
<p>Almost a decade later, we are told on good authority that a significant proportion of young Australians <a href="https://lowyinstitutepoll.lowyinstitute.org/themes/democracy/">do not trust “government”</a>, to the point where many might well prefer military rule.</p>
<p>This is one reason why codified and enforceable standards of ministerial ethics and conduct will remain relevant - and expected - in our country. </p>
<h2>Early steps toward enacting standards</h2>
<p>Australia hasn’t always had a set of ethical standards for ministers and government officials. It is a relatively recent phenomenon which came about during Prime Minister John Howard’s time in office in the 1990s. </p>
<p>The idea was first broached in 1978 when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser commissioned <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=CHAMBER;id=chamber/hansards/1994-10-10/0023;query=Id:%22chamber/hansards/1994-10-10/0035%22">Nigel Bowen</a> to conduct a review of conflict of interest matters involving officials. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/will-heads-roll-ministerial-standards-and-stuart-robert-54479">Will heads roll? Ministerial standards and Stuart Robert</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Instead of regulation, however, the committee sought to rely on the “court of public opinion” to deter unseemly conduct by MPs.</p>
<p>In the next few years, the culture of government in Australia began changing radically, and quickly.</p>
<p>When the Fraser government introduced both the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2017C00238/Html/Text">Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act</a> and the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Series/C2004A02562">Freedom of Information Act</a>, the opportunities for public scrutiny of ministerial decision-making – and conduct more generally – significantly affected public expectations about the way “the business of government” was done.</p>
<p>At a stroke, new standards of conduct by decision-makers at all levels were needed for the first time, for a new era of accountability and “speaking truth to power”.</p>
<h2>Standards put forth by Howard and Faulkner</h2>
<p>While the Hawke Labor government chose not to bring in new ministerial standards in 1983, Howard did so in 1996 - 20 years after Bowen. </p>
<p>After Howard introduced his <a href="https://australianpolitics.com/1996/04/13/howard-ministerial-code-of-conduct.html">ministerial code of conduct</a>, a significant number of ministers were forced to resign over various conflict of interest matters, and the code was amended to be less onerous.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-barnaby-joyce-affair-highlights-australias-weak-regulation-of-ministerial-staffers-91744">The Barnaby Joyce affair highlights Australia's weak regulation of ministerial staffers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Against this backdrop, Opposition Senator John Faulkner introduced draft ethics and integrity standards to the Labor shadow cabinet. It was adopted as party policy in 2001.</p>
<p>The Faulkner standards, which I co-authored with George Thompson on Faulkner’s staff, drew on public ethics principles, legal definitions and community norms regarding the integrity expected of public officials. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311520/original/file-20200123-162232-145d9rh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The standards introduced by John Faulkner have been endorsed by every government since 2007.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Porritt/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The standards recognised several challenges for parliament in policing its own members, chiefly that parliament had not enacted a code of conduct itself and had recently passed laws prohibiting it from expelling an MP for misconduct. </p>
<p>It therefore became the responsibility of the prime minister to enforce the standards. </p>
<p>The Rudd government endorsed these standards of ministerial ethics when it came into power in 2007. And each prime minister since then has endorsed a version of the standards, largely unchanged. </p>
<h2>Challenges of enforcing standards</h2>
<p>Every version of the standards has reminded ministers of their ethical and fiduciary duty to respect the trust placed in them by the public, and maintain public trust in parliament and our system of government.</p>
<p>Yet, challenges remain when it comes to interpreting and enforcing the standards. Notably, the standards impose a “waiting period” for former ministers and their staff to take up certain forms of employment after leaving office. </p>
<p>Yet, no government has sought to introduce statutory bans on specific jobs for former officials. There is also a lack of specific information about what forms of employment conduct are, and are not, permissible. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/many-professions-have-codes-of-ethics-so-why-not-politics-113731">Many professions have codes of ethics - so why not politics?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This lack of specifics emerged as a notable problem in the recent cases involving <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-christopher-pyne-and-julie-bishop-fail-the-pub-test-with-their-new-jobs-119875">Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/oct/31/andrew-robb-did-not-tell-prime-minister-about-role-with-chinese-company">Andrew Robb</a> after they took up new roles that raised questions after leaving office. </p>
<p>There were similar problems in earlier cases involving former Labor ministers who left office. This requires immediate remedy.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1220087626100690944"}"></div></p>
<p>In the two decades since the Howard code, new ways of thinking about integrity in public office – and ministerial conduct, in particular – have also emerged. </p>
<p>The common law offence of “misconduct in public office” has become extensively used in North America in cases involving unethical and prohibited conduct by government officials, such as abuse of office, bribe-taking, vote-buying, unlawful lobbying and conflicts of interest. </p>
<p>There has also been a major revival in the prosecution of this offence in the UK, Hong Kong and Australia in recent years, generally for corruption cases. </p>
<p>The offence now ranks as the charge of choice for anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors in a host of jurisdictions, yet it has been the subject of relatively little academic research or recent commentary.</p>
<h2>Personal responsibility for conduct</h2>
<p>But ethics standards can only do so much – MPs and former ministers, in particular, must also take responsibility for their own conduct, irrespective of any formal sanctions which might apply.</p>
<p>It is always the minister’s personal responsibility to uphold the letter and the spirit of the oath of office, because of what that oath represents.</p>
<p>As former US Senator Alan Simpson once said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130372/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Howard Whitton is a Director of The Ethicos Group, and was one of the two co-authors (with George Thompson, then of Senator Faulkner's staff) of the original version of the 'Standards of Ministerial Ethics'. </span></em></p>Our government has grappled for years to devise ethical standards for ministers and other officials. But codes are only part of the answer – MPs must also take responsibility for their own conduct.Howard Whitton, Visiting Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/889732017-12-14T09:21:53Z2017-12-14T09:21:53ZAustralia’s snub to Nobel Peace win is major break from ambiguous nukes policies of past<p>The Australian government under Malcolm Turnbull has been less than ecstatic about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/malcolm-turnbull-wont-congratulate-australias-first-nobel-peace-laureate-because-he-supports-nukes-20171010-gyxwdg.html">failure</a> to congratulate Melbourne-based ICAN has come under <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-10/nobel-peace-prize-australian-government-accused-of-shame-job/9244194">much criticism</a> from anti-nuclear activists. </p>
<p>Following the country’s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nobel-peace-prize-ican-nuclear-weapons-donald-trump-labour-un-a8100986.html">NATO allies</a> and <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-10/nobel-peace-prize-australian-government-accused-of-shame-job/9244194">behaving as if</a> the whole episode never happened is in line with recent policy utterances, however. Canberra’s latest <a href="https://foreignminister.gov.au/releases/Pages/2017/jb_mr_171123.aspx">Foreign Policy White Paper</a>, released in November, says the country’s 60-year alliance with the US is “a choice we make how best to pursue our security interests” and “is central to our shared objective of shaping the regional order”. </p>
<p>There has not always been such a black-and-white split between activists and Australian politicians. Successive governments have waxed and waned considerably. At a time when nuclear tensions are running particularly high between the US and North Korea, the difference with the current administration is striking. </p>
<h2>Atomic Australia</h2>
<p>When the UK and US <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/Quebec.shtml">agreed to</a> collaborate on atomic weapons in 1943 through the Manhattan Project, Australia and other British dominions were explicitly cut out. The Americans wanted to control nuclear knowledge for exploitation after the war, and wanted the research to proceed with the utmost secrecy. </p>
<p>When Washington decided <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/co-operation-competition-testing.htm">to go it alone</a> in 1946, it gave Australia an opening. The British proceeded in the early 1950s to develop their own bomb, and decided to concentrate the effort in Australia because of its uranium and apparently wide empty spaces. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sir Mark Oliphant.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.epa.eu/human-interest-photos/people-photos/nobel-peace-prize-2017-concert-photos-53952960">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This had much to do with celebrated Australian physicist <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/7033">Mark Oliphant</a>. As a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham in the UK, it was he who had first told <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/j-robert-oppenheimer">J Robert Oppenheimer</a>, leader of America’s Manhattan Project, that it was possible to make an atomic bomb from only a few pounds, not tons, of uranium. </p>
<p>When Britain and America began collaborating in 1943, Oliphant moved to California as a leading contributor. He saw at first hand the US’s desire to monopolise nuclear know-how, <a href="http://dado.msk.ru/rlib/utf8/494471.html">writing privately</a> about how Britain had been “sold down the river”. </p>
<p>When British-Australian testing was getting underway in 1950, Oliphant returned to his homeland to take a senior physics post at the new Australian National University in Canberra. He was quoted in the press saying his department would focus on nuclear energy rather than weapons and would not do secret work “within the laboratory itself” unless it became necessary.</p>
<p>The 1950s saw Anglo-Australian tests for nuclear ballistic missiles at Woomera in South Australia, in parallel with atomic tests elsewhere in the country in preparation for a British hydrogen bomb. Yet the effort was short-lived: after the joint project <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ws7w90">successfully detonated</a> a hydrogen bomb in the central Pacific in 1957, Britain was soon <a href="http://www.nti.org/media/pdfs/56_4.pdf?_=1316627913">brought back</a> into the nuclear fold by the US. </p>
<p>Australia was relegated to supplying uranium and hosting listening posts to Asia for the Americans, in exchange for promises of nuclear protection. It has performed the same role ever since. </p>
<h2>View from Canberra</h2>
<p>In the intervening years, Canberra has never strayed from this overarching alliance. When you look at the details, however, the Australian view is far from straightforward. I’ll look at some former prime ministers in a moment. First a few words on Oliphant from research I expect to be published next year. He seems to almost personify these conflicting feelings. </p>
<p>During his time in Canberra, Oliphant came to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1349058/Professor-Sir-Mark-Oliphant.html">describe himself</a> as a “belligerent pacifist”. He is quoted in several press reports from the early 1950s calling for a world government to avert the need for nuclear weapons. He <a href="http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.1387592">joined</a> the Pugwash movement of leading scientists against nuclear weapons in 1957. This is quite a contrast to comments he made to the London Recorder in 1949:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The United States and United Kingdom are developing weapons designed for their own defence. They may not suit Australia’s needs if she has to defend herself. We must develop our own methods of defence and build for ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oliphant maintained some involvement in the Commonwealth nuclear project despite his focus on energy. An archived letter shows him suggesting to a colleague that he visit Woomera to view the testing in 1953, for example, although he himself was <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403921017">excluded</a> from the atom bomb tests at nearby Maralinga. He was quoted in the Australian press in 1951 expressing fears that Canberra might be considered “expendable” in its partnership with Britain if push came to shove. </p>
<p>In 1955, a government report refers to him telling government officers that atomic power plants built for energy could be converted to bombs manufacture within hours. “Australia could best be defended by nuclear weapons and that conventional forces and armaments could be cut”, he is quoted as saying. </p>
<p>Was he developing a pacifist public face while also trying to persuade Canberra to develop its own bomb? It certainly feels like it. Some Australian cabinet ministers also wanted an independent Australian nuclear deterrent in the late 1950s, though then Prime Minister Robert Menzies <a href="https://nautilus.org/apsnet/0623a-broinowski-html/">disagreed</a>. </p>
<p>Oliphant’s ambivalence is echoed in certain Australian administrations. In 1971, the Liberal prime minister, William McMahon <a href="https://nautilus.org/apsnet/0623a-broinwski-html/">scrapped plans</a> to build a nuclear reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. His Labor successor Gough Whitlam then ratified the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/npt">Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968</a>, overturning previous Liberal <a href="https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/46413/78806_1.pdf?sequence=1">reluctance</a>. </p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser, another Liberal prime minister, introduced a <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/UraniumPolicy">safeguards regime</a> for exporting uranium in 1978 that included only selling it to countries that were parties to the 1968 treaty – including the Americans, of course. Fraser later became involved in founding ICAN, and <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/hawke-fraser-join-anti-nuclear-campaign-group/news-story/dd832b27726b6a7633bd016d4b910cc7">campaigned</a> against nuclear weapons alongside his successor as prime minister, Bob Hawke.</p>
<p>The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to ICAN comes at a time when the pros and antis have rarely been more polarised or the choices more difficult. When the Nobel ICAN award first made news in October, Turnbull’s office made a <a href="http://www.theage.com/victoria/nobel-peace-prize-winners-thought-it-was-a-hoax">statement</a> acknowledging the campaign group’s commitment. </p>
<p>But it concluded: “So long as the threat of nuclear attack exists, US extended deterrence will serve Australia’s fundamental national security interests.” With a rogue nuclear power nearby, in other words, this is no time for contradictory policies from Australia. It raises difficult questions about where the country goes from here.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88973/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sue Rabbitt Roff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Canberra’s attitude to nuclear weapons has always been riddled with contradictions. Homegrown nuclear campaigners winning the Nobel prize have put the cat among the pigeons.Sue Rabbitt Roff, Researcher, Social History/Tutor in Medical Education, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/741482017-04-19T03:56:34Z2017-04-19T03:56:34ZAustralian politics explainer: Gough Whitlam’s dismissal as prime minister<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162603/original/image-20170327-3301-l9p1bm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gough Whitlam speaks to reporters after being dismissed as prime minister.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/PhotoSearchItemDetail.asp?M=0&B=11304802&SE=1">National Archives of Australia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Conversation is running a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/australian-politics-explainer-37192">series of explainers</a> on key moments in Australian political history, looking at what happened, its impact then, and its relevance to politics today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The dismissal of the Whitlam government provided one of the biggest political shocks in Australian history. It put on open display vice-regal powers that most did not know existed, and tested Australians’ understanding of their own Constitution and political system.</p>
<h2>What happened?</h2>
<p>On October 16, 1975, the Senate resolved that it would <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/10/15/withers-moves-deferral-of-supply.html">not pass supply</a> until the Whitlam government agreed to call a general election. This meant the Commonwealth would soon run out of money to pay public servants, provide pensions, pay its contractors, and provide services. The Whitlam government decided to tough it out in the hope the Coalition opposition would collapse. </p>
<p>Because the Christmas holidays were approaching, the last day to initiate a pre-Christmas election was November 13, 1975. If that deadline was missed, there would potentially be months of economic chaos with no money to run the government and pay salaries or pensions until February. </p>
<p>On the morning of November 11, Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser told Gough Whitlam the Opposition would pass supply if Whitlam agreed to hold an election for both houses in May or June 1976. Whitlam refused. </p>
<p>Instead, Whitlam went to the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, to seek a half-Senate election in December. This would not have been likely to resolve the impasse, and would have been particularly problematic if supply was not granted to cover the election period.</p>
<p>When Whitlam declined to request a general election, Kerr exercised his reserve powers by <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/11/11/kerr-letter-of-dismissal.html">dismissing Whitlam</a> and his government from office. He then appointed Fraser as prime minister on the condition that he secure the passage of supply, advise the dissolution of both houses of parliament, and call an election in December. </p>
<p>Kerr also stipulated that Fraser’s government must only be a <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/11/11/fraser-caretaker-commission.html">caretaker government</a> that would not make any major appointments or undertake any inquiries or investigations into the Whitlam government. The Senate passed the supply bills and once assent was given to them, both Houses were <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/11/11/kerrs-proclamation-dissolving-parliament.html">immediately dissolved</a>. </p>
<p>It was then left to voters in the election to decide who should govern. The former Whitlam government was comprehensively defeated, and the Fraser government was elected to office.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SXq056TJhU4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Footage from the day of the Dismissal.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What was its impact?</h2>
<p>The reaction was relief for some, and outrage for others. The public and the media, being unfamiliar with constitutional history and the role and powers of vice-regal representatives, saw the Dismissal as unprecedented and shocking. </p>
<p>A martyrdom narrative was constructed – that it was only ever Labor leaders who were dismissed (Whitlam and former NSW premier Jack Lang in 1932), and it was always done by the conservative establishment through undemocratic upper houses. Conspiracy theories flourished, with fingers being pointed at the CIA, the Queen, and the banks, amongst others. </p>
<p>That Kerr had <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/11/10/barwick-advice-to-kerr.html">sought advice</a> from the High Court’s chief justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, albeit after Kerr had already made up his mind to dismiss Whitlam, was seen as adding to a conspiracy, because Barwick had previously been a Liberal minister. </p>
<p>Collective amnesia was applied to the fact that such things had happened before. Chief justices had <a href="https://theconversation.com/masons-role-in-the-1975-dismissal-unprecedented-hardly-9174">advised governors-general</a> and governors on almost every constitutional controversy since Federation. </p>
<p>Labor had <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2730396">blocked supply</a> in state upper houses before, resulting in the governor, after consulting the chief justice, requiring the resignation of the conservative premier – even when he held a majority in the lower house. It had long been the case that if supply could not be obtained, the only options were resignation, an election, or dismissal (sometimes disguised as a forced resignation).</p>
<p>In 1975, the Speaker <a href="http://vrroom.naa.gov.au/print/?ID=19584">asked the Queen</a> to intervene and restore the Whitlam government. In response, the Queen’s private secretary pointed out that the power to appoint and remove the prime minister and dissolve parliament was <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1975/11/17/letter-from-queens-private-secretary.html">held by the governor-general</a>, so she could not act. </p>
<p>Many people were influenced by the events of 1975 to support a republic, due to their objection to an unelected representative of the Queen dismissing an elected government that had majority support in the lower house. </p>
<p>Others saw 1975 as revealing the importance of the Senate’s power to block supply, and the need for the reserve powers of the governor-general to resolve a crisis. </p>
<p>All the major participants in the 1975 dismissal were damaged by it. Whitlam was never able to form a government again. Kerr was publicly vilified and led much of his later life outside Australia.</p>
<p>Although he became prime minister, Fraser found his government’s legitimacy undermined by the way it had obtained office, resulting in it being more timid and ineffective than it might otherwise have been.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162593/original/image-20170327-3279-1auodh5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A lunchtime rally outside Parliament House protests the dismissal of the Whitlam government.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/PhotoSearchItemDetail.asp?M=0&B=11180886&SE=1">National Archive of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What are its contemporary implications?</h2>
<p>One salutary consequence has been that both governments and oppositions have been more wary about taking matters to extremes, preferring to let conflicts be resolved in the ordinary course by elections. </p>
<p>The Dismissal soured politicians’ taste for brinkmanship. It revealed the likely consequence of a loss of political legitimacy.</p>
<p>Another somewhat ironic consequence is that while the Dismissal fuelled the republican movement, it has also undermined it. The republican model with most public support in Australia is that of a head of state directly elected by the people. </p>
<p>To avert the prospect of a directly elected head of state undermining the indirectly elected prime minister and destabilising the system of government, many consider it would be necessary to remove or codify the powers of the head of state. Yet the ghosts of 1975 have stymied attempts to do so, frustrating any consensus towards a republic. </p>
<p>Harking back to Whitlam’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpJD0nSxN94">famous words</a> on the steps of Parliament House, nothing might have saved the governor-general – but the Dismissal appears to have saved the Queen, at least for now.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74148/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anne Twomey has received funding from the ARC in the past and occasionally does consultancy work for governments and inter-governmental bodies.</span></em></p>The Dismissal soured politicians’ taste for brinkmanship. It revealed the likely consequence of a loss of political legitimacy.Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/693692016-11-24T10:08:40Z2016-11-24T10:08:40ZGrattan on Friday: The government is compromising Malcolm Turnbull’s commitment to inclusion<p>Imagine Tony Abbott was still prime minister and Malcolm Turnbull remained his restless ministerial servant.</p>
<p>Abbott, having earlier abandoned his attempt to revise Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, decides – under the combined pressure from conservative colleagues and a couple of unfortunate and much-publicised cases – to put it back on the table.</p>
<p>Then, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton targets the Fraser government for its “mistakes” in bringing in Lebanese Muslims, some of whose descendants have been charged with terrorism offences.</p>
<p>What would Turnbull be saying?</p>
<p>Probably, despite having in the past expressed support for changing the section, he’d be warning that resurrecting the 18C debate would risk another ethnic backlash which would divert attention from key economic messages.</p>
<p>And he’d be arguing – albeit sotto voce – that Dutton, in visiting the sins of the grandchildren on the grandparents and the government which helped them, was dog-whistling as well as creating a distraction.</p>
<p>But Turnbull is no longer aspiring to the prime ministership but occupying it, and everything is different.</p>
<p>So although 18C was recently not on his agenda he has now referred it to a parliamentary committee. And he has heaped bountiful praise on Dutton for his general handling of his portfolio while trying to avoid the flypaper of his specific comments, which have stirred anger among the Muslim Lebanese and prompted death threats to parliament’s first Muslim woman MP Anne Aly, though she is not Lebanese.</p>
<p>Turnbull still talks inclusion but his government’s words and actions are compromising its commitment to it. Issues of race were an unfortunate and ugly theme through this penultimate parliamentary week.</p>
<p>The Dutton attack started last week when the minister was speaking to Andrew Bolt about a crime wave in Melbourne and the involvement of Sudanese people. Bolt referred to Fraser getting “wrong” the Lebanese intake, which was a humanitarian response to that country’s civil war and a matter of internal debate within the government at the time.</p>
<p>Dutton said it was the second or third generation who became foreign fighters. “The reality is that Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in, in the 1970s – we’re seeing that today and we need to be honest in having that discussion.”</p>
<p>In parliament this week, Dutton defended his remark with a single statistic: of the last 33 people charged with terrorism-related offences, 22 were from second- and third-generation Lebanese Muslim backgrounds.</p>
<p>Liberal sources report that Dutton’s comments have won a lot of support on his own side but also have been polarising within the Coalition.</p>
<p>There were signs of the latter at Tuesday’s Liberal Party and Coalition meetings, when moderate Liberal Trent Zimmerman, who is from Sydney, stressed the importance of maintaining the goodwill of ethnic communities and noted the progress the Liberals had made with the Chinese, Indians and Lebanese Muslims. Targeting a group was unhelpful, Zimmerman said.</p>
<p>Zimmerman and others worry about the impact of Dutton’s line in NSW Coalition-held seats with big ethnic communities. Quite apart from the substance of the issue, Bill Shorten – who flayed Dutton – would be alive to the potential fallout in western Sydney.</p>
<p>In the partyroom Zimmerman was slapped down by Victorian conservative Michael Sukkar, of Lebanese Maronite Christian background, who strongly supported Dutton.</p>
<p>It was deliberate that no-one rose to back Zimmerman. There was an informal agreement to let him run alone. The critics of Dutton wanted to lay down a marker, rather than trigger a brawl that would be damaging for Turnbull.</p>
<p>Colleagues believe one motive driving Dutton, a Queenslander, is a desire to shore up the defences against One Nation. He is said to be alarmed about the impact of the Hansonites in his home state. </p>
<p>It’s a view shared by others in the Liberal National Party: Attorney-General George Brandis was caught on an open mic warning about One Nation’s strength. Dutton’s own seat is volatile – his majority took a haircut in July.</p>
<p>As Dutton digs in against widespread criticism, the parliamentary joint committee on human rights is starting work on the 18C inquiry. It’s on a tight deadline, reporting by February 28. Submissions have opened and the committee will have a fortnight of public hearings in January covering three capital cities in each week, and also take evidence in Canberra.</p>
<p>The inquiry will be a sharp test of conservative versus moderate thinking in the Liberal Party. The government members of the committee, all Liberals, include senators Linda Reynolds and James Paterson, both of whom take a tough line against 18C, as well as lower house members Russell Broadbent and Julian Leeser, who oppose changing the section while favouring a better administrative process. The committee is chaired by Ian Goodenough, a supporter of putting different words into the act.</p>
<p>In accommodating the Liberal conservatives with the inquiry Turnbull has created a challenge for this minority of Liberal moderates on the committee. How they handle it remains to be seen.</p>
<p>The more that race issues are elevated and ethnic communities’ fears are fanned, as has happened in the Dutton controversy, the harder it could become to change 18C – already very difficult because of the Senate.</p>
<iframe src="https://www.podbean.com/media/player/3xwmd-64e74a?from=yiiadmin" data-link="https://www.podbean.com/media/player/3xwmd-64e74a?from=yiiadmin" height="100" width="100%" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" data-name="pb-iframe-player"></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69369/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Imagine Tony Abbott was still prime minister and Malcolm Turnbull remained his restless ministerial servant.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/686482016-11-23T01:12:51Z2016-11-23T01:12:51ZDutton’s attack on Fraser shows how low our politicians are willing to go on refugees<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147102/original/image-20161123-19676-bex8h2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Lukas Coch</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Read between the lines. I am deliberately adding fuel to the anti-immigration, anti-refugee “movement”.</p>
<p>How else can you interpret Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/dutton-hits-back-at-criticism-of-his-attack-on-fraser-refugee-policy-69173">recent sustained attacks</a> on Malcolm Fraser’s immigration policies? </p>
<p>How else can you explain the timing, so soon after Donald Trump’s anti-establishment victory, on the heels of the rebirth of Pauline Hanson, and as Bill Shorten was seeking to capitalise on this sentiment by attacking the 457-visa program.</p>
<p>Dutton initially claimed Fraser “did make mistakes in bringing some people in” as part of his government’s immigration policies in the 1970s. When pressed on those comments in parliament this week, Dutton singled out people of Lebanese-Muslim background. He said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The advice I have is that out of the last 33 people who have been charged with terrorist-related offences in this country, 22 of those people are from second and third generation Lebanese-Muslim background.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is as if the assessment processes in the 1970s, thorough as they were, could possibly have anticipated the likely roles of future generations to be born of those immigrants, long before anyone contemplated September 11, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, the advent of Islamic State, and so on. </p>
<p>The attempt to “blame” Fraser is both farcical and grossly irresponsible – simply a cheap political shot.</p>
<p>Surely, subsequent governments ran a similar, indeterminate risk – as is the Turnbull government, even despite the thoroughness of its due diligence. The only logical conclusion of Dutton’s position is that he wishes to close our borders completely.</p>
<p>How low can our political leaders go in what has become a national disgrace, this appalling race to the bottom, scoring short-term political points on each other, as to who can be the toughest, who can be the most inhumane, to those who are globally among the most desperate, fleeing persecution, imprisonment, and even death?</p>
<p>But, in all this, the hypocrisy is also breathtaking, gloatingly claiming credit for our record in refugee resettlement over many decades while implicitly suggesting that our borders should be closed.</p>
<p>Importantly, while the government has recognised the desperate need to rely on the co-operation of the Islamic communities to out potential terrorists as an essential element of its national security and anti-terrorism strategy, Dutton has sought to name and shame a particular segment of that community: Lebanese-Muslims.</p>
<p>This could prove to be very costly and counterproductive. Similarly, whatever may be the merits of slightly different wording in Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, this is not the time to be fiddling around on this issue. It runs the risk of a very divisive public debate.</p>
<p>Government today should not be seen merely as an extension of university politics. This issue is not just another opportunity to score cheap political points on opponents. It goes to the very heart of what we stand for, and believe in, as a nation – and how we wish to be seen by the rest of the world.</p>
<p>We are, after all, now mostly a nation of immigrants. Not wishing, in any way, to downplay the significance of our Indigenous heritage, nor to underestimate the magnitude and significance of the reconciliation challenges that remain, our greatest national achievement since the second world war is our tolerant and sensitive, multiracial, multireligious, multicultural society.</p>
<p>While it is already the envy of the world, it remains a work in progress – the further development of which calls for commitment, understanding, and sensitivity.</p>
<p>Malcolm Turnbull has missed another opportunity to show real leadership. While he didn’t directly endorse Dutton’s specific remarks, his attempt to defend Dutton as an “outstanding” immigration minister, a “thoughtful and committed and passionate” Minister, should leave everyone cold.</p>
<p>History will judge Fraser’s attitudes, values and policies toward immigration and refugees, both in and beyond government, to have dwarfed anything that Dutton might even aspire to achieve.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68648/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Hewson is chair of the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, and was federal leader of the Liberal Party from 1990 to 1994.</span></em></p>Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Read between the lines. I am deliberately adding fuel to the anti-immigration, anti-refugee “movement”. How else can you interpret Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s recent sustained…John Hewson, Professor and Chair, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/389792015-03-24T19:15:18Z2015-03-24T19:15:18ZHeed Fraser’s warning on Australian media concentration – it’s getting worse<p>The passing of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser last Friday prompted me to recall his warning about the state of Australian media ownership <a href="http://electionwatch.edu.au/australia-2013/election-rewind/malcolm-fraser-contemporary-media-and-politics">in an interview</a> I did with him during the last federal election.</p>
<p>He said: “In my term, there were seven print proprietors. Now there is one and a bit. We have the most concentrated media in any democratic country, anywhere in the entire damn world. That is dangerous.”</p>
<hr>
<p>Malcolm Fraser for The Conversation: <a href="https://theconversation.com/malcolm-fraser-does-it-matter-who-owns-our-papers-yes-it-does-7738">Does it matter who owns our papers? Yes it does</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Malcolm Fraser’s warning is one we should take seriously. As Fairfax Media finalises union talks this week to cut 80 local jobs across its regional newspapers, and federal communications minister Malcolm Turnbull is again flagging relaxing media ownership laws, local news is particularly under threat in the global media environment where large audience reach matters.</p>
<h2>More regional cuts</h2>
<p>In Victoria, to remain competitive in this environment, Fairfax has proposed cutting 62 editorial jobs among the 80 full-time positions earmarked for redundancy across 13 regional mastheads including Albury Wondonga’s Border Mail, The Ballarat Courier, Bendigo Advertiser and The Warrnambool Standard. </p>
<p>Local MPs and city councillors in these regions have spoken out against the cuts with independent MP Cathy McGowan telling the <a href="http://www.bordermail.com.au/story/2955199/cathy-mcgowan-stands-up-for-the-border-mail/">Federal Parliament last week</a> that regional newspapers such as the Border Mail play an important role providing local news and any job cuts could impact on this service.</p>
<p>The union representing local reporters, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, will meet Fairfax in Sydney today to discuss the cuts. It is understood that the Border Mail will lose up to 23 staff, the Wimmera Mail will lose 40% of its workforce, the Ballarat Courier will lose some reporting staff and its news director, and most of the newspapers will lose some photographers and sub-editors.</p>
<h2>Diversity being squeezed</h2>
<p>Fairfax’s regional publishing business Australian Community Media (ACM) is also proposing a common newspaper template with opportunities for content sharing. Journalists spared from the sackings will be required to do more with less including taking photographs, sub-editing their stories and uploading them online. </p>
<p>The implications of these changes are concerning for the diversity of local reporting, its accuracy and future print circulation figures, which until now have remained buoyant compared to their city cousins. A well-functioning democracy requires an informed citizenry and, to do this, journalists find and verify information in the public interest, rather than just selecting information from press releases. Citizen journalists can fulfil some of this local news gathering role, but subject coverage can be patchy and lacking editorial authority.</p>
<p>The all-too-soon forgotten <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/1205_finkelstein.pdf">Finkelstein media inquiry in 2012</a> reminds us that some local communities are already the poorer for losing local news outlets. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is some evidence that both regional radio and television stations and newspapers have cut back substantially on their news gathering, leaving some communities poorly served for local news. This may require particular support in the immediate future, and I recommend that this issue be investigated by the government as a matter of some urgency.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Changes mooted for media laws</h2>
<p>Yet, Malcolm Turnbull, photographed last year standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the nation’s media executives and flagging changes to media laws, has this month again raised the prospect of such reforms in a submission to the Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Turnbull’s argument essentially is that the internet has lowered the barriers to entry and enabled greater competition and more media diversity. At face value this sounds promising. Yet, such changes would make possible further media mergers and acquisitions and what such reforms would mean for local news reporting requires careful consideration.</p>
<p>Veteran journalists can readily recall the days when Canadian Conrad Black divested his stake in Fairfax because foreign ownership laws in 1996 prevented his company owning more than a 25% share of an Australian media outlet. </p>
<p>Today, among Australia’s top 10 news websites, all are digital iterations of traditional media outlets. The only new entrants to this list are not new Australian start-ups but large, foreign-owned companies such as Britain’s Daily Mail (fourth) and the Australian version of the British-owned Guardian (sixth).</p>
<h2>Foreign arrivals</h2>
<p>Foreign-owned media companies are reaching out to Australian shores as never before — not only do we have Australian versions of the Guardian and Daily Mail, but BuzzFeed, and very soon the Huffington Post (in a 51-49 partnership with Fairfax). In the broadcast media sphere US-owned Netflix announced it will undercut local competitors — Presto, jointly owned by Foxtel and Seven West Media; and Stan, a Fairfax and Nice Entertainment Co. partnership — to stream video content to Australian subscribers for $8.99 a month.</p>
<p>The arrival of foreign-owned media is interesting in the context that we once had specific laws to guard against it in the name of protecting Australian news content and its democratic function. Oddly, in 2015 when local newspapers are experiencing financial duress, there is little examination about what these offshore arrivals mean for Australian audiences and Australian news content, particularly in terms of local news. </p>
<h2>Start-ups struggling to survive</h2>
<p>Perhaps, the important question arising out of this global media environment is not how to limit competition and potential sources of news diversity; but rather, what can be done to encourage growth in Australian news media start-ups? The current environment makes it very difficult for them to succeed long-term, as Wendy Harmer identified yesterday when announcing her online outlet <a href="http://thehoopla.com.au/">The Hoopla</a> will close. In the US, start-up news reporting entities are tax-exempt non-profits recognised by the IRS under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code.</p>
<p>Australia’s Finkelstein media review also included suggestions for tax breaks for non-profit news outlets. Another idea was to allocate a proportion of Australia’s multi-million dollar government advertising and public notices expenditure for new news ventures.</p>
<p>Of course, the ABC plays a unique role delivering local Australian news across the nation’s states, but it too has suffered recent substantial funding cuts and journalism job losses.</p>
<p>The right formula to preserve the diversity of Australian local reporting might lie elsewhere, but shouldn’t we at least engage in the conversation?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38979/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Carson is part of a research team based at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism that is investigating the civic impact of journalism and local news reporting.</span></em></p>if anything, media concentration is worsening and diversity won’t be improved by changing Australia’s media ownership laws.Andrea Carson, Lecturer, Media and Politics; Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism , The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391822015-03-23T19:11:12Z2015-03-23T19:11:12ZFraser paved the way for a national environment policy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75639/original/image-20150323-17680-1wvnzo5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Franklin River which would prove to be Fraser's environmental undoing. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/annavsculture/6643582401">anna/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following the defeat of Malcolm Fraser’s government in 1983, the Hawke government’s first move was to pass the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/whpca1983427/">World Heritage Properties Conservation Act</a>, giving itself the legal power to stop the World Heritage-listed Franklin River in Tasmania from being dammed. </p>
<p>Symbolically and practically, Labor rewarded the environment movement which had campaigned for its victory. Malcolm Fraser had refused to intervene because of his support for “States’ rights” and was left stranded on the wrong side of history.</p>
<p>Public awareness of Fraser’s environmental contribution often goes no further than his failure to save the Franklin. Yet his record ultimately shows him to have had a strong and progressive commitment to environmental protection overall.</p>
<h2>Maintaining Labor’s advances</h2>
<p>With the Constitution almost silent on who should take responsibility for the environment, during the 1970s and ‘80s this policy domain was increasingly dominated by tensions and conflicts between State and successive federal governments.</p>
<p>These tensions came to a head in 1974, when the Whitlam government failed to intervene to stop the flooding of Lake Pedder by the Tasmanian Hydro Electricity Commission. Later, despite his government having nominated the Franklin for World Heritage protection, a similar failure would cost Fraser dearly. </p>
<p>In 1975 the incoming Fraser government inherited the results of a flurry of institutional innovations by the Whitlam Labor government. Driven by Environment Minister, Moss Cass, Labor had begun to shape the Commonwealth into a significant player in national environmental affairs.</p>
<p>Labor created a stand-alone environment department, the Australian Heritage Commission (now the <a href="http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/organisations/australian-heritage-council">Council</a>) which advises on world and <a href="http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national-heritage-list">national heritage</a> such as the Great Barrier Reef, and a national parks advisory body. It legislated to create national powers for environmental impact assessment and also, critically, recognised land rights. </p>
<p>Fraser maintained these advances – although some were at times threatened and their budgets cut - and this in itself stands in powerful contrast to the destructive approach taken by the Abbott government to its predecessor’s policy initiatives to combat climate change.</p>
<h2>More steps forward</h2>
<p>Then, under the Fraser government, Australia signed the <a href="http://www.ramsar.org/">Ramsar Convention</a> on wetlands (sites listed under the Fraser Government include Stage 1 of Kakadu National Park, and the Barmah Forest in Victoria), the <a href="http://www.cites.org/">Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species</a> (which prevents trade in such species or their 'products’, such as ivory), the <a href="http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/about_antarctica/geopolitical/treaty/update_1972.php">Convention for Conservation of Antarctic Seals</a>, and the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1981/6.html">Japan Australia Migratory Birds Agreement</a>. </p>
<p>The Fraser government also instituted the inquiry which led to Australia’s ban on whaling. It achieved World Heritage listing for <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/630">Fraser Island</a> and stopped sand mining there in the face of trenchant opposition from the Queensland government under Joh Bjelke Petersen. It also achieved World Heritage listing for Kakadu, the Wilandra Lakes, Tasmanian Wilderness, and the Great Barrier Reef, and established the <a href="http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/">Great Barrier Reef Marine Park</a>, protecting it from oil drilling. Each was a major environmental achievement.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75641/original/image-20150323-17678-2h1kfi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fraser created the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bbialek905/4121806150">Boris Bialek/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More controversially, the Fraser government also enabled uranium mining - which posed a significant threat to the environment of the Kakadu region - to proceed in the Northern Territory, then under Commonwealth control, despite public and Indigenous opposition and bitter protests by the anti-uranium and environment movements. (Fraser himself supported uranium mining as a measure of balanced progress – as had most of Labor under Whitlam.)</p>
<h2>A national environment strategy</h2>
<p>Fraser’s environmental commitment was personal, not just political. He was a founding member of the <a href="http://www.acfonline.org.au/">Australian Conservation Foundation</a> in 1965. Later, having lost patience with a radicalised ACF, he invited the international organisation World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to establish itself in Australia as its counterbalance. </p>
<p>As early as 1969 Fraser, as minister for education and science, suggested - in highly qualified terms - his desire to advance a national environmental policy and, specifically, to defend the then recently confirmed Commonwealth power over the States in its areas of territorial responsibility (for instance, to protect the Great Barrier Reef). </p>
<p>However Fraser’s support for co-operative federalism and the pre-eminent role of the states in resource and environmental management, and his reluctance to use the Commonwealth’s external affairs powers, prevailed throughout his time in office. This was most obvious in the case of the case of the Franklin Dam. </p>
<p>In 1980 Fraser launched the World Conservation Strategy in Australia and, using this as a template, announced plans for a National Conservation Strategy of Australia (NCSA). This strategy was Australia’s first attempt to formulate a nationally integrated strategic approach to environment policy rather than an attempt at conflict resolution or to regain national control of the environmental agenda, as the Hawke government would try to do with its National Ecologically Sustainable Development Strategy process a decade later. </p>
<h2>The battle for the Franklin</h2>
<p>In environmental terms, the last year of his Prime Ministership was overshadowed by the battle for the Franklin. Fraser comments, in his memoir, that he saw it as a “straight out conflict”. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We had signed the (World Heritage) convention and forwarded the nomination. I had made sure it was forwarded, despite (then Tasmanian Premier Robin) Gray not wanting me to do it. We had international duties. But I have always been against the use of the external affairs power to override the states.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fraser and his cabinet were advised that the Commonwealth had the power to stop the dam but, as his biographer, Margaret Simons notes, he did not then want that power tested. </p>
<p>However later, reflecting in his memoirs on the outcome, his view shifted. It was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a mistake to argue points of constitutional law when the majority of the population clearly wants the federal government to act, and I accept that was the case with the Franklin. I think if I had my time again, I would use the federal power, just accepting the politics of it, the will of the majority.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With the Franklin River, Fraser had the misfortune to be a conservative caught in the slow lane on the wrong side of national politics. He was out of step at a moment when environmental issues were being increasingly understood to be global, with responsibilities and consequences running beyond the bounds of rapacious states, and accompanied by the rapid growth of international environmental treaties transforming the notion of national sovereignty. </p>
<p>Issues like ozone depletion and climate change would emerge only a few years later, demanding national coordination to achieve meaningful contributions to counter these global threats. </p>
<p>Fraser’s concerns about another global issue, the threat of nuclear war and nuclear proliferation, grew ever stronger over time. This shift suggests that, given his environmental commitment and his reconsideration of his position on the Franklin, it is likely that - had he been in office at that later time - Fraser most likely would have provided the deep foundation in conservative politics for strong environmental action of the sort that Australia has yet to achieve.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39182/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Christoff is a Board member and former Vice President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser may be remembered for his failure to intervene in the Franklin Dam campaign, but he otherwise led a government distinguished for its environmental action.Peter Christoff, Associate Professor, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391972015-03-23T12:45:47Z2015-03-23T12:45:47ZAbbott gets poll relief as Coalition narrows the gap<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75663/original/image-20150323-17716-dt8bpm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Foreign Minister Julie Bishop made headlines face palming and rolling her eyes during a speech by Treasurer Joe Hockey.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">YouTube</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Coalition has had a substantial lift in the <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/politics-news/newspoll-coalition-support-rises-tony-abbott-gets-vital-boost/story-fn59nqld-1227275547176">latest Newspoll</a>, now trailing Labor in two-party terms 49-51% compared with 45-55% a fortnight ago.</p>
<p>This is its best two-party result since September.</p>
<p>The Coalition’s primary vote has risen three points to 41%, the first time it has been above 40% since September, in the poll in Tuesday’s Australian.</p>
<p>With parliament in its last sitting week before going into recess ahead of the May budget, the Newspoll gives some encouragement to Abbott as he tries to rebuild, and is likely to lift the spirits of a depressed backbench.</p>
<p>But the federal Liberals are also waiting nervously for the results in next Saturday’s NSW election. The Baird government is widely expected – on the basis of polling – to win. But it has had a struggle with the privatisation issue and there has been a negative Abbott factor.</p>
<p>On Monday, tensions at senior levels of the federal government were on display when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop reacted sharply to a <a href="http://www.afr.com/news/politics/julie-bishop-issues-please-explain-to-joe-hockey-on-aid-cuts-20150323-1m59gl">newspaper claim</a> that foreign aid was likely to “suffer a further small cut” in the budget. She then very conspicuously rolled her eyes when Treasurer Joe Hockey referred in parliament to the expenditure review committee.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ft_TokD2l9o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>After her public displeasure, Bishop got an assurance from Hockey that her budget is safe.</p>
<p>In Newspoll, Labor’s primary vote is down two points to 37%; the Greens have fallen one point to 11%.</p>
<p>Abbott has reduced Bill Shorten’s lead as better prime minister to trail by five points. This compares with 18 points six weeks ago. A fortnight ago, Shorten had a 44-33% lead – his support fell three points to 41% and Abbott’s rose three points to 36%.</p>
<p>Abbott’s satisfaction level increased for the third time running, up one point to 29%; his dissatisfaction rating fell two points to 61%.</p>
<p>Shorten’s satisfaction rating is down three points to 36%; dissatisfaction with him rose five points to 47%.</p>
<p>The polls come as Abbott has been pulling out all stops to try to improve the government’s ratings, including again assuring the public that the budget won’t be one that hits households. But he has also been under considerable criticism in the last week, including for mixing the government’s economic messages.</p>
<p>Bishop said the first she had heard of any new threat to foreign aid was when she saw a reference in Monday’s Australian.</p>
<p>Asked if she would be aware if her budget was going to be cut again, Bishop said tartly: “Well you’d hope I would be wouldn’t you? So I will certainly be taking it up with the treasurer to find out the source of that story.”</p>
<p>Bishop later received an assurance from Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann that the aid budget would survive intact.</p>
<p>Foreign aid has suffered a total cut of some A$11.3 billion, including in the budget last year and then in the mid-year budget review.</p>
<p>Cormann told Sky TV the story had come as a surprise to him. “I think that probably gives you as much as you need to know about that particular proposition,” he said. “I think we have done as much as we can,” Cormann added, pointing to the “significant effort” already made.</p>
<p>During the parliamentary condolences for former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, Bishop rolled her eyes and put her face in her hand when Hockey praised Fraser setting up the expenditure review committee – the so-called razor gang.</p>
<p>Hockey said: “He was the great initiator – and we will be forever thankful – he was the great initiator of the expenditure review committee. And that committee has endured, much to the chagrin of my colleagues but it has endured, and it is one of his many lasting legacies.”</p>
<p>Bishop late on Monday welcomed the assurances that foreign aid was safe. “We have a significant challenge in front of us to ensure our aid budget is delivered effectively and efficiently, so I am pleased that there will not be any uncertainty surrounding that.”</p>
<p>Bishop has made it clear she would contest any leadership ballot, and she is keeping her profile very high.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39197/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The Coalition has had a substantial lift in the latest Newspoll, now trailing Labor in two-party terms 49-51% compared with 45-55% a fortnight ago. This is its best two-party result since September. The…Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391792015-03-23T05:26:10Z2015-03-23T05:26:10ZFrom murky beginnings, Fraser became a friend of diverse media<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75619/original/image-20150323-14639-1l0itlv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C1009%2C3874%2C2656&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser appeared more comfortable in the media gaze out of politics than in it.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/NAA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Soon after The Dismissal came the strike. On December 8, 1975, News Limited journalists walked off the job in protest at “bias and dishonesty” in the company’s coverage of the federal election. Earlier newspaper stoppages had been over matters industrial. This one, still seared in the memories of veteran journalists and political observers, was the first in Australia over editorial coverage.</p>
<p>As a youthful army minister in the late 1960s, Fraser had engaged enthusiastically in “background briefings”. He earned a reputation for leaking material, particularly to Sir Frank Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press. </p>
<p>When Fraser replaced Billy Snedden as opposition leader in March 1975, he had the Fairfax group’s support. As the relationship between Rupert Murdoch and then-prime minister Gough Whitlam <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/murdoch-editors-told-to-kill-whitlam-in-1975-20140627-zson7.html">deteriorated</a>, News Limited was soon also in the Fraser camp.</p>
<p>Fraser’s press secretary, David Barnett, made his notoriously aloof boss accessible to senior media figures, including Graham Perkin at The Age. During boardroom lunches at Fairfax and News, Fraser made it clear that the extraordinary circumstances needed for him to force an election would not be signalled until all major metropolitan newspapers called for an election.</p>
<p>The events of late 1975, in which Murdoch exercised his political clout, are the stuff of legend. The means by which Fraser came to office soured relations with journalists, many of whom sympathised with Whitlam. </p>
<p>While his chief of staff, Tony Eggleton, persuaded Fraser to make himself available to leading journalists and dine with editors at the Lodge, he seldom granted press conferences. He instead preferred gutter-stop interviews that prevented rigorous questioning. Print journalists complained about his privileging of the electronic media to get his message across.</p>
<p>The Fraser government’s record on media policy was mixed, and occasionally contradictory. One of its earliest actions, in December 1975, was to abolish the Department of the Media, a controversial creation of the previous government. After tumultuous reforms in media policy as elsewhere under Whitlam, the Fraser government in 1976 initiated an overdue inquiry into the entire industry. </p>
<p>The government replaced the beleaguered Australian Broadcasting Control Board with the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT). The aim was to separate broadcasting from political pressures in part through open licence hearings. Under Fraser, the local content requirement resented by broadcasters was also maintained.</p>
<p>The Coalition also continued the Whitlam government’s work in developing the modern community radio sector. Temporary licences remained in place until the sector was enshrined in formal legislation in 1978.</p>
<p>The commercial radio industry was surprised to find the Coalition wary of letting commercial interests penetrate the FM band. This changed in 1976 when the ABT paved the way for up to two FM licences in each of the capital cities. Commercial FM radio commenced in 1980.</p>
<p>At the same time, the Fraser government accused ABC programs of “bias” and slashed the broadcaster’s budget. This delayed the launch of a national Triple J youth network for years. Its treatment of the ABC inspired the formation of the Friends of the ABC (now <a href="http://www.abcfriends.org.au/">ABC Friends</a>) lobby group.</p>
<p>There was another, more important, media legacy. In November 1977 the government created the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) as a statutory authority. Initially, the radio service was based on the two ethnic stations created by the Labor government, 2EA and 3EA. </p>
<p>In his campaign launch in December, Fraser promised to extend the service to television. This was partly to reclaim from Labor some of the “ethnic vote” of 1972. There was some speculation that he also thought SBS Television could be used for propaganda by the government of the day.</p>
<p>In 1978, Fraser was criticised for not using ABC staff and facilities to make his Australia Day address. Instead, he had assigned the task to an independent production company, Enterprise Production Video, which embarrassed him in January 1979 by mistakenly sending out his 1978 recording. </p>
<p>Enterprise Production Video went on to win a large contract for the production of experimental ethnic programs in 1979, ostensibly co-produced by SBS and the ABC, in the lead-up to the launch of SBS Television in 1980. Fraser appeared twice and then-immigration minister Michael MacKellar once, without any opportunity for equal time for the ALP.</p>
<p>In his long retirement, Fraser became known to new generations of Australians for his insistent advocacy of human rights and racial equality. Perhaps his views on the media changed, along with his views on the media – or perhaps they didn’t. </p>
<p>News Limited’s extraordinary support in 1975, from which he had undoubtedly benefited and to some extent courted, had developed in the furnace of a political crisis. <a href="https://theconversation.com/malcolm-fraser-does-it-matter-who-owns-our-papers-yes-it-does-7738">Protesting</a> with his old nemesis Whitlam in 1991 in support of Fairfax’s editorial independence, and against foreign ownership and the further concentration of media ownership, befitted a true liberal.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75621/original/image-20150323-14627-1rsjbav.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fraser joined forces with Gough Whitlam to support Fairfax newspapers’ editorial independence in 1991.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">maintainyourage.org</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fraser appeared more comfortable in the media gaze out of politics than in it, perhaps finally convinced how imperative the media was to disseminating his views on political and social issues. He appeared in, and wrote for, a multitude of publications, from <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/malcolm-fraser-7654/articles">The Conversation</a> to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/malcolm-fraser">Guardian Australia</a> to <a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/malcolm-fraser/2015/27/2015/1424997628/playing-blame-game">The Monthly</a>. </p>
<p>Fraser even embraced <a href="https://twitter.com/malcolmfraser12">social media</a>. By the time of his last tweet, just three days before his death, he’d accumulated 10,294 tweets and 44,652 followers.</p>
<p>Over 50 years, Fraser’s relationship with the Australian media waxed and waned, from enthusiasm, pragmatism and caution to something, in the end, approaching mutual respect and perhaps even affection.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39179/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bridget Griffen-Foley receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser’s relationship with the Australian media waxed and waned, from enthusiasm, pragmatism and caution to something, in the end, approaching mutual respect and perhaps even affection.Bridget Griffen-Foley, Director of the Centre for Media History, Macquarie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391752015-03-23T01:42:16Z2015-03-23T01:42:16ZThe evolution of Malcolm Fraser was a wonderful thing to behold<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75611/original/image-20150323-14630-nox863.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lunch with Gough and Malcolm, as guests of Barry Jones in 2008. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brian Dawe</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What I came to admire, even love, in Malcolm Fraser was that as he aged, he became more open, more radical, more attracted to the universal, more outraged by opportunism, and more courageous. At 84 he was better than he had been at 64, and far superior to the 44-year-old prime minister. That evolution was a wonderful quality in him.</p>
<p>Born in Toorak, brought up in the Riverina, Fraser was educated at Melbourne Grammar and Magdalen College, Oxford, where his lecturers included Isaiah Berlin and A. J. P. Taylor.</p>
<p>Elected as MP for Wannon in December 1955, aged 25, he was the youngest future prime minister to enter federal parliament. Paul Keating, a few months older, came next.</p>
<p>Fraser’s style and associations were patrician, something that the Melbourne-educated Robert Menzies aspired to, and the Oxford-educated John Gorton rejected. Gough Whitlam was patrician in style but not background, and John Howard was determinedly populist.</p>
<p>Going directly to Oxford from Melbourne Grammar was probably a mistake, isolating him from Melbourne contemporaries and contributing to his rather awkward manner. Fraser’s marriage to Tamie (Tamara) Beggs in 1956 humanised him, and his children, in later decades, encouraged him to enlarge his range of issues.</p>
<p>He was always, as Bob Hawke <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-20/malcolm-fraser-dies-after-short-illness/6334620">said</a>, impeccable on race. But in his early years in politics he was seen as hard right, influenced by the novels of Ayn Rand, with their heavy emphasis on individual freedom and opposition to state intervention, and – like Tony Abbott – attracted to the ideology of B.A. Santamaria.</p>
<p>These factors may have influenced Menzies to choose Billy Snedden and Peter Howson as ministers but not Fraser – a decision he came to regret.</p>
<p>During the Vietnam War, as army minister, Fraser began as a zealot, then became a sceptic, determined to resist Australian forces being subject to strategic deployment by the United States and doubtful that a victory by Hanoi would endanger Australian security in any way.</p>
<p>In 1992, he invited me to join the board of CARE Australia. We worked together closely for the next eight years. He drove himself and he drove the board, and he was increasingly appalled by contemporary horrors, especially Rwanda.</p>
<p>Despite the “late unpleasantness” of The Dismissal in November 1975, Whitlam and Fraser took common cause on many issues and developed a mutual affection in their last decades.</p>
<p>Gough told me that he allocated responsibility for the dismissal as 70% John Kerr, 30% Fraser.</p>
<p>In May 2008, I organised a lunch for Gough attended by Malcolm, John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, Race Mathews, Graham Freudenberg and Julian Burnside. The rapport between Malcolm and Gough was obvious.</p>
<p>Fraser used to argue that he had not changed his political position, but everyone else had, with both the Liberals and the ALP moving from the centre to the right. He was deluding himself there. He had changed, very significantly.</p>
<p>He had become Liberal leader in March 1975 as a paladin of the right, defeating the moderate but ineffectual Billy Snedden.</p>
<p>He used to take conservative attitudes. He voted against the abolition of the death penalty (September 1973), abstained on Gorton’s motion to decriminalise homosexual acts (October 1973) and voted with Howard and Ruddock on the Lusher motion proscribing medical benefits for abortion (March 1979). </p>
<p>He made a serious error of judgement in adding a new division, Knight (AK) and Dame (AD), to the Order of Australia in June 1976. Because these awards went mostly to people who were already knighted, including Menzies, Burnet, Kerr, Cowen, Stephen, Barwick, Cutler, and Syme, this aroused less controversy than Abbott’s exhumation of the honour in 2014.</p>
<p>Strikingly, when he spoke at the Melbourne launch of my autobiography, A Thinking Reed, in 2008, he read with deep emotion from my chapter on the death penalty.</p>
<p>As prime minister from 1975 to 1983, he maintained much of the Whitlam “platform”, including free universities, and was an ardent promoter of multiculturalism. He was a strong supporter of the “Yes” case in the failed 1999 referendum on a republic and became a patron of the Dying With Dignity organisation.</p>
<p>With Burnside, he was the outstanding advocate for reversing the cruel and dehumanising – but apparently electorally popular – policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers. He was strong on Indigenous issues.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75610/original/image-20150323-14614-1shr1wb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"><em>Carefree Wonder</em> (2007) – Malcolm Fraser.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Malcolm was a gifted photographer and I bought one of his pieces for my collection by donating to CARE.</p>
<p>During the 2007 election he would telephone me and say, “How are we going?” I would always reply, “Who is this ‘we’ to whom you refer? Is it the party that you used to lead?” And he would say – it was a kind of game – “Get stuffed”.</p>
<p>He became an enthusiastic tweeter and accused me of not keeping up with the times. On most issues, population excepted, we took a common view and he was certainly further to the left than anyone on the opposition frontbench in Canberra.</p>
<p>Malcolm was an extraordinary, often lonely, figure, and I shall miss him. The loss for Tamie, his family, his office staff, old friends will be profound and I send them my love.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39175/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barry Jones is an uneasy member of the ALP.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser used to argue that he had not changed his political position, but he had in significant ways. This personal evolution was a wonderful quality in the former prime minister.Barry Jones, Professorial Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391342015-03-20T08:43:35Z2015-03-20T08:43:35ZMalcolm Fraser: a man of many sides who never vacated the political debate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75493/original/image-20150320-26364-1lcazgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In his later years, Malcolm Fraser became a strident critic of Liberal Party policy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Astrid Volzke</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Malcolm Fraser – as opposition leader, prime minister and in retirement – was always a polarising figure, a characteristic coming through in some of the assessment of his legacy.</p>
<p>His steely determination in blocking supply in 1975, with all that followed including Gough Whitlam’s equally determined reaction, produced one of the most bitterly divisive periods in federal political history. In his later years, Fraser became a strident critic of Liberal policy (he was never one to put discretion ahead of frankness), quit the party and alienated some former political friends.</p>
<p>Fraser was a complex political figure in office and then he went through a major later-life transformation, making his story even harder to get your head around. His argument that it was the Liberals who had changed rather than him didn’t really hold – they had, but he had changed more.</p>
<p>In this, Fraser was quite different from Whitlam, whose political views and their trajectory into his old age were very consistent.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75492/original/image-20150320-26388-1iwts6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser as prime minister.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Archives</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Fraser government’s record was mixed. With two massive election victories, in 1975 and 1977, he could claim sweeping mandates (regardless of doubts some cast on his “legitimacy”). But as economic rationalists gained ascendancy in the Liberal Party, they looked back at the Fraser years as a “missed opportunity”. Missed for various reasons, but particularly because Fraser himself was fundamentally an economic conservative.</p>
<p>Fraser’s government left important achievements in Indigenous affairs, multiculturalism, the environment, and the acceptance of Vietnamese refugees, and Fraser made a significant footprint internationally. </p>
<p>With a passion for Africa, Fraser helped broker the agreement for majority rule in the new Zimbabwe (he was reticent about it but the disaster that eventually unfolded there had to be a devastating disappointment). The fight against racism anywhere and everywhere was one of his defining issues, although it took observers a while to realise just how central this was for him.</p>
<p>Despite the passions of the time, those on the left no longer focus on 1975 when assessing Fraser. Paying his tribute, Bob Hawke said “we shouldn’t dwell on that”, because Gough and Malcolm had reconciled. Rather, they look to his stand on asylum seekers and human rights, including his recent attack on Tony Abbott for “bully boy” behaviour towards Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs. However the one-time Cold War warrior’s strong warning against the American alliance, spelled out in Dangerous Allies, was a step too radical for Labor.</p>
<p>In retrospect, the day-to-day turbulence of a government long past can be forgotten. There was a fair share of chaos in Fraser’s style and in events of those years. Cabinet sat endlessly; his colleagues were exhausted. Fraser had his hands on everything – his department was omnipresent, ministers were often second-guessed. His years had scandals in which ministers lost their jobs amid drama, anger and political embarrassment. Andrew Peacock stalked him; Fraser brought on a leadership vote and won.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75491/original/image-20150320-26357-1d3dsdy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser at Oxford in 1951.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In light of the present restless backbench, it’s worth recalling that Fraser’s backbenchers could be very bolshie, criticising measures and even crossing the floor. In 1976, Liberal senators defeated a plan to remove funeral benefits for pensioners.</p>
<p>Fraser had the advantage of a policy-strong office, which was influential with him. His staff included David Kemp, who later went on to be a senior minister in the Howard government, and Petro Georgiou, also subsequently an MP, who had a vital role in shaping multiculturalism, including the establishment of SBS.</p>
<p>In personal terms, “aloof” was a favoured description of Fraser, with pop psychology explanations ranging from it being a product of his height, his isolated childhood or his patrician background. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Bowers’ description of his “Easter Island” face stuck.</p>
<p>Relations with the media in his government’s early days were influenced by the hangover of 1975; later, it’s fair to say, his prime ministership grew on those reporting it (which didn’t preclude sharp criticisms from them).</p>
<p>In Fraser’s time, reporters had rather more of a bird’s-eye view of a PM. Figuratively speaking, there had not been so many bollards erected, the chance for informal contact was greater. Journalists travelled overseas on the prime minister’s plane, and sometimes domestically too, with the prime minister spending a while chatting with them down the back. And they were on the plane for the duration of an election campaign.</p>
<p>Fraser always liked to be in touch and kept up to date. He would ring colleagues at any hour; when abroad he never knew (or chose not to know) the time at home. Then-Liberal director Tony Eggleton recalls being stopped by a policeman when driving through a town on his way from Canberra to Sydney. The cop asked him to come to the station – the prime minister was on the line.</p>
<p>Fraser PM in the mobile phone era would have been a nightmare. No wonder he embraced Twitter with all his usual vigour, his last tweet coming this week.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39134/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser – as opposition leader, prime minister and in retirement – was always a polarising figure, a characteristic coming through in some of the assessment of his legacy.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391322015-03-20T07:40:21Z2015-03-20T07:40:21ZFraser’s economic medicine was everything in moderation<p>Much will be written in the coming days about the turbulent political times in which Malcolm Fraser ascended to the prime ministership. But it is worth remembering that they were terribly turbulent economic times as well. A simple chronology will note that Fraser’s prime ministership was wedged between the chaos of the Whitlam years and the seismic reforms of the Hawke-Keating era. But there’s more to Fraser’s economic legacy than that.</p>
<p>Fraser came to power amid a shocking economic occurrence: stagflation. Until the early 1970s it was thought by economists that high inflation and high unemployment could not occur at the same time. This belief came from the prevailing Keynesian models of the era which posited a stable trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Rev the economy a bit faster and you got more employment and output but stoked inflation. Take the foot off the pedal and the opposite occurred.</p>
<p>But from 1973 onward this all changed. In 1975 inflation hit <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1370.0%7E2010%7EChapter%7ELong%20term%20inflation%20trends%20%285.6.2.1%29">an alarming peak of 16%</a>. In the decade that followed, Australia’s unemployment grew five-fold, spiking in 1982 as high as 10%. At the same time, wages shot up, putting pressure on prices, which in turn put pressure on wages. This so-called wage-price-spiral was hard to break.</p>
<p>The Fraser government took a pragmatic, if not principled approach. Serious downward pressure was put on wages, but the spiral was never broken until the prices and income accord in the subsequent government. The “razor gang” cut back on Commonwealth spending in a serious way — spending that was completely out of control under Whitlam. The <a href="http://fsi.gov.au/publications/">Campbell report</a> on financial reform — a watershed in Australian economic history — was commissioned, though not implemented.</p>
<p>Yet he didn’t go nearly as far as many members of his own government wanted in cutting back the role of the state and advancing free enterprise. The “dries” of the Liberal Party wanted a much more Thatcherite approach to the problems facing the Australian economy. Yet Fraser resisted. He certainly pushed in a more free-market direction: government spending was cut, trade became more free, huge wage claims were curtailed. But he didn’t go all the way to Reagan’s “government is the problem” or Thatcher’s radical individualism.</p>
<p>In many ways Malcolm Fraser approached the economy like a wise family doctor advising on dieting and weight loss: enjoy a little of everything, in moderation.</p>
<p>When Fraser became prime minister, the economic theory that would replace radical Keynesianism — the rational expectations revolution — was still being formulated and refined by Robert Lucas at the University of Chicago, along with others. There was no clear path for what to do, and Fraser neatly steered a middle course. He did no harm to the patient, and laid the groundwork for the recovery to come.</p>
<p>In hindsight, could he have done better? Sure. His treasurer, John Howard intimated as much in his <a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/features/a/25060149/john-howard-i-lost-my-nerve/">recent interviews with News Corp columnist Janet Albrechtsen</a>. From my perspective we could have used a bit more Lucas and a lot less Keynes. More understanding of the virtues of competition and free trade. But Fraser lived economic events forward, without the benefit of hindsight, time to assess and reassess, and without the sophisticated number crunching that policy makers have today.</p>
<p>Of course, Fraser’s legacy was arguably chiefly outside the economic sphere. Others will no doubt point to a variety of principled moral stands: against apartheid, for Indigenous land rights, and in his post prime-ministerial years for a range of humanitarian causes. Malcolm Fraser was clearly a very decent human being.</p>
<p>But it would be wrong to think that he wasn’t also a good economic manager. In many ways he laid the groundwork for the Hawke-Keating years. He certainly wasn’t a visionary like Keating, nor did major reforms take place on his watch. But he did steady the Australian economic ship for long enough that Keating had something to work with.</p>
<p>Australia can be justifiably proud of an approach to economics that is squarely between Europe and the United States. The US, on the whole, champions free enterprise despite the social costs; Europe sees a much larger role for the state, even if that inhibits free enterprise. The Australia in which we live today is somewhere in between.</p>
<p>When Malcolm Fraser became prime minister that was all up for grabs. We could have become “old Euope” or veered onto a radically individualist path in response to the debacle that came before. Fraser helped us chart a middle course, and we should be very grateful for that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39132/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Holden is an ARC Future Fellow.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser’s economic style was pragmatic, but he resisted the ‘dries’ in his party.Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391172015-03-20T05:58:24Z2015-03-20T05:58:24ZKey events in the life of Malcolm Fraser<p><em>To navigate the timeline below, hover your mouse on the right (and on the left to move back).</em></p>
<hr>
<iframe src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline/latest/embed/index.html?source=1iDBM5GUgaO7pcDeejJ7gMBlf6_5T5kcgRM6J9lkpm5I&font=Bevan-PotanoSans&maptype=toner&lang=en&height=650" width="100%" height="650" frameborder="0"></iframe><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39117/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
From overseeing conscription during the Vietnam War to blocking government supply, Malcolm Fraser tread a rocky path.Charis Palmer, Deputy Editor/Chief of StaffEmil Jeyaratnam, Data + Interactives Editor, The ConversationDiana Hodgetts, EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391212015-03-20T04:27:25Z2015-03-20T04:27:25ZWe wore ‘Shame Fraser’ T-shirts – but his passing is a genuine shame<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75474/original/image-20150320-2167-12av5yv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fraser defended and spoke up for the core Australian social and political values of a 'fair go' for all.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Mick Tsikas</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On Tuesday November 11, 1975, I was teaching at Balmain High School on Terry Street, Balmain. At the time, Balmain was still a predominantly working-class suburb. Terry Street also happened to be where the serving Governor General and Whitlam Government appointee, Sir John Kerr, had once lived in a modest worker’s cottage. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1265&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1265&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75472/original/image-20150320-2184-1ls4l2x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1265&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Shame Fraser Shame’ badges worn at the 1975 protest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/djackmanson/232281628/in/photolist-qdDHZn-pD8ngu-eUKhLr-mwveE">David Jackmanson/Flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On what had begun as an unremarkable day, the news of the elected <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXq056TJhU4">Whitlam government’s dismissal</a> (which at the time we described as a “coup”) by the Governor General zapped through the school like an electric shock. What’s more, this foul deed had happened in cahoots, or so it seemed, with the then-Opposition Leader, Malcolm Fraser. </p>
<p>We were stunned and shocked, directing most of our anger towards those deemed to be the perpetrators, Fraser and Kerr. The latter was a Balmain boy, now branded as a “working class traitor”. Later, many young teachers and others like myself, sporting “Shame Fraser Shame” badges and T-shirts, went into the city to demonstrate in support of the sacked prime minister, The Hon. Gough Whitlam. </p>
<p>At the rally, Whitlam spoke brilliantly, oratorically urging us to “maintain the rage”. Our rage, we thought, could never end.</p>
<p>This morning, almost four decades later, on hearing of the death of Malcolm Fraser, I experienced comparable emotions. In feeling this way I am by no means alone in my generation. Why?</p>
<p>From this unpromising start, over time, Malcolm Fraser worked on and completed most of the work initiated by the Whitlam government, but which it was unable to implement properly. Fraser, derided at first as a “toff”, saw the passage though Parliament and implementation of the first Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights legislation in this country, the <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/alrta1976444/">Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act </a> in 1976. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75469/original/image-20150320-2184-1bpsvg4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=584&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thousands protested in support of Whitlam in Sydney, 1975.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/qu1j0t3/289536684/in/photolist-rzXaN-gmSvHy">Takver/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This returned vast tracts of “country” to Warlpiri people, with whom I would later work for many years on the collaborative project of implementing a successful bilingual program in Warlpiri and English. (Bilingual education was another Whitlam government initiative, which received continuing support from the Fraser government, although it was only ever very begrudgingly accepted by the Northern Territory Government).</p>
<p>Fraser also went on to champion multiculturalism. This encompassed taking a more liberal approach to immigration, including the acceptance of many Vietnamese refugees into Australia after the Vietnam War. In 1977 his government created a <a href="http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/sbs_3.pdf">Consultative Committee on Ethnic Broadcasting</a>, which eventually led to the establishment of the ethnic radio and television broadcaster, SBS. </p>
<p>In this regard, Fraser lent practical support to the twin ideals of multiculturalism and immigration, thereby promoting the acceptance of the ideal of a more inclusive Australia. Initiatives such as SBS enabled Indigenous and minority voices to circulate and be heard in the national sphere to a significantly greater extent than in the past.</p>
<p>Fraser’s approach to foreign policy was tough, but fair: he worked towards ending apartheid by applying sanctions to the Springbok rugby team in 1981, against a background of considerable public outrage at that time. In this, and his other words and deeds since then, Fraser led Australia out of what had been, in some respects, an ignoble past. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75471/original/image-20150320-2171-6phpss.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser applied sanction to the Springbok rugby team in 1981, pictured here in 2007.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/laertes_za/1797757535/in/photolist-3JRYFz-3zWrFb-afgt5n-3UQ8YQ-3UQbMh-3WsuQ-oqnwfo-aodykx-2eu7BE-549Kgi-6LhuC8-3UQ6do-6nyyty-5awnmN-acx2g1-5asbwV-anavs5-fELaz9-9DBvty-5avTX9-pZdgkC-amdMpK-5avWz1-dHtcDJ-dHnMuF-5zRtCf-3AEzWx-ffAuJx-dHpQGg">Vaughn Leiberum/Flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also completed the project – again initiated by the Whitlam government – of dismantling the remaining vestiges of the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/642125/White-Australia-Policy">White Australia Policy</a>, the popular name given to the Immigration Restriction Policy of 1901, the first major piece of legislation passed by the newly-federated “Australia”.</p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser led not from behind, not by accepting the status quo ante of Australia’s lowest common denominator, but by actually providing real leadership in word and deed. In doing so, he took most Australians with him – at least, eventually.</p>
<p>This took guts. Moreover, well into his old age Fraser continued to speak up on difficult issues affecting us all. In spite of the backlash from many in his own party and from the Labor Party, whose ground some regarded him as usurping, his courage afforded him a unique form of greatness. </p>
<p>Over time, Malcolm Fraser gradually morphed, before our sometimes-suspicious, sometimes-astonished eyes, into Australia’s only true elder statesman, in many ways acting as the nation’s conscience. As one of the few remaining liberals in a putatively “Liberal” party, by holding certain core values dear, and refusing to depart from them, Malcolm Fraser filled a political vacuum. </p>
<p>Fraser defended and spoke up for the core Australian social and political values of a “fair go” for all. That void isn’t going to be easy to fill.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39121/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christine Judith Nicholls does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In 1975, people wore Shame Fraser Shame badges and demonstrated in support of the sacked prime minister, Gough Whitlam. Today, those same protestors feel powerful emotions at the passing of Malcolm Fraser. Why?Christine Judith Nicholls, Senior Lecturer in Australian Studies, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391252015-03-20T04:13:16Z2015-03-20T04:13:16ZThe long and lonely political journey of Malcolm Fraser<p>It was the greatest political transformation of any major Australian public figure in modern times. Malcolm Fraser, “the <a href="http://static.moadoph.gov.au/ophgovau/media/images/apmc/docs/22-Fraser-Web.pdf">crazy grazier</a>” who in 1975 did whatever it took to “rescue” the nation from its first federal Labor government in almost a quarter of a century, moved progressively away from the party for whom he had once been a conquering hero.</p>
<p>The drift from the Liberal Party began as soon as Fraser exited the parliament in the wake of his government’s 1983 election defeat. And as the years rolled by, it picked up pace. </p>
<p>Having been granted <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/politics/malcolm-fraser-was-not-loved-by-everyone-in-the-liberal-party/story-fns0jze1-1227271307823">life membership</a> of the party in 2000, the honour came to mean little, if anything, to him. Following Tony Abbott’s ascension to the leadership in December 2009, Fraser <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-05-26/fraser-quits-liberal-party/841616">terminated that membership</a> because he believed the party to which he had devoted his best years had <a href="https://theconversation.com/malcolm-fraser-we-have-lost-our-way-3734">lost its right to call itself “liberal”</a> and had become “a party of fear”.</p>
<p>Fraser’s ideological shift continued even after that, as he moved into his 80s. By 2014, in his book <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-dangerous-allies-by-malcolm-fraser-25995">Dangerous Allies</a>, he argued for Australia to end its alliance with the United States – an alliance that is a fundamental and unshakable tenet of his old party’s comprehension of the nation’s place in the world. It had once also been a bedrock element of his own approach to world affairs.</p>
<p>By then, Fraser’s estrangement from the Liberals had itself become a fundamental feature of public debate. The rift had deepened with his long-running criticisms of the party’s approach to asylum seekers, multiculturalism, Asian immigration and a range of defence and foreign policy issues, especially its willingness to participate in the <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/08/1081326867110.html">2003 invasion of Iraq</a>.</p>
<h2>From party leader to exile</h2>
<p>The transition from hate figure for the Labor Party and its supporters to advocate for many policies that are to the left of the contemporary ALP will long be a subject for examination and discussion. Fraser argued that he hadn’t changed; it was the Liberal Party that had changed. A more credible assessment is that both had changed.</p>
<p>Fraser was a unique combination as a politician. He possessed a fierce will to power. To satisfy that, he devoted himself to mastering the nation’s formal political structures.</p>
<p>Essentially, in 1975 Fraser took over the Liberal Party on his second attempt to unseat Billy Snedden as leader and then forced the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, to bend the Constitution to conform to his ambition. In order to attain the power that he regarded as his party’s natural right over an unworthy and illegitimate Labor administration, he was willing to put at risk Australia’s social order.</p>
<p>Yet, throughout his prime ministership and his lifetime, Fraser’s chief public policy concerns were personal, ethical and social. The “hard” policy areas of financial, industrial, trade and labour relations reform – what might be regarded as the biggest pieces of machinery of government and the economy – did not animate him in the way that multiculturalism, migration, refugee resettlement, the environment and Indigenous affairs did.</p>
<p>Fraser was, despite the lengths he had gone to challenge political conventions on his path to power, so determined to appear to run a government that was above board that he was willing to ditch ministers and MPs at the faintest whiff of bad behaviour, often at his own political cost. This was of a piece with his great passion of trying to fight racism wherever he saw it – most notably and controversially in South Africa.</p>
<p>Over the years, Fraser and the Liberal Party grew less tolerant of each other. What made Fraser’s falling-out with the party he had led to three successive election victories so remarkable was that it was so unusual. Labor’s history is studded, right from its earliest days, with what its adherents refer to as “rats”: Joseph Cook, Chris Watson, Billy Hughes and a large segment of his cabinet, Joe Lyons.</p>
<p>But the return traffic has been thin.</p>
<p>Fraser could never be said to have thrown in his lot with the ALP, of course. Often, his specific policy criticisms were equally applicable to the Labor Party. But they carried extra weight in terms of providing a critique of the non-Labor side because of his storied career as a Liberal world-beater.</p>
<h2>Legacy poses a dilemma for Liberals</h2>
<p>Just how the next generation of Liberals come to regard Fraser – as a flawed, fallen hero or faithful, principled critic – will be fascinating to see.</p>
<p>What can’t be ruled out as an explanation for Fraser’s unique political journey is his own personality. The first thing that struck me when I was sent to Canberra to cover his government for the now-defunct Melbourne Herald in 1979 was how alone Fraser the prime minister was. </p>
<p>In every encounter I witnessed, he seemed … removed. This was often taken for aloofness but it looked to have deeper roots, a reflection of personality rather than attitude.</p>
<p>Fraser’s early childhood appears to have been a carefree, Huck Finn-style, if quite isolated, life on his family’s farm in the Riverina. But it introduced a sadness to him that was still evident in him in his advanced years.</p>
<p>In his 2010 <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/simons-and-fraser/malcolm-fraser-the-political-memoirs-9780522858099.aspx">autobiography</a>, Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs, co-authored with Margaret Simons, he recalls how he was sent away, aged 10, from his idyllic, self-absorbed life to board at Tudor House in the southern highlands of New South Wales. For the first time, he was surrounded by boys his own age, but by his own admission it was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… too late. The die was cast. I had been solitary for too long so I was still in part self-contained or reserved or whatever. I don’t think anything really was going to alter that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nothing did. Left to his own devices after he veered from the parliamentary track, that lonely, unreachable, idealistic boy took off yet again to tread his own path.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39125/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shaun Carney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser’s record in public life was remarkable, ensuring he’d be remembered not only for his role in The Dismissal, but for how far apart he and the party he once led came to be.Shaun Carney, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Social Sciences, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391112015-03-20T00:49:59Z2015-03-20T00:49:59ZMalcolm Fraser’s life and legacy: experts respond<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75467/original/image-20150320-2184-1wi6dgw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C956%2C3874%2C2551&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser has passed away at the age of 84.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/NAA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Malcolm Fraser, Liberal prime minister between 1975 and 1983, passed away on Friday morning at the age of 84 after a brief illness. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/political_alert/status/578713867318099969">statement</a>, Prime Minister Tony Abbott paid tribute to Fraser’s achievements in government, saying he:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… restored economically responsible government while recognising social change.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Fraser government came to office after the constitutional crisis of 1975 triggered by the sacking of the Whitlam Labor government. In his time in office, Fraser oversaw the acceptance of southeast Asian refugees and the emergence of a multicultural Australia, but environmental battles were a factor in his government’s defeat in 1983. He also led economic and social welfare reforms.</p>
<p>In his later years as an eminent public figure, Fraser grew distant from the Liberal Party, particularly over its asylum seeker policies. In 2010, he <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/a-matter-of-political-philosophy-not-politics-for-fraser-20100526-wcrc.html">resigned</a> his party membership, citing its shift to the right of politics.</p>
<p>The Conversation spoke to a number of experts to get a sense of Fraser’s achievements and legacies in key policy areas.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Multiculturalism and immigration</h2>
<p><strong>Andrew Jakubowicz, Professor of Sociology and Co-director of Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre at University of Technology, Sydney</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser brought to the whole area of immigration and cultural diversity a “small l” liberal approach to the world wrapped around a quite conservative concern for social order and social cohesion. It was the unique combination of these – as well as his personal history – that helped him reorient the way in which Australian society has come to think about this.</p>
<p>While multiculturalism had been in a sense kicked off by Al Grassby in the Labor period, it was really Fraser who became its product champion. There was a story that Gough Whitlam had been programmed to speak to a big Greek community rally in Melbourne in a park. But then Whitlam was out, Fraser was in, and Fraser turned up with a stack of notes from the department. Fraser just threw away the notes. </p>
<p>The Greek community was incredibly hostile – but Fraser had an adviser, Petro Georgiou, who helped steer him. Fraser just spoke to that audience about his commitment to their inclusion in the Australian narrative in ways that won them over not necessarily in terms of partisan voting, but in terms of their willingness to give him a go. </p>
<p>From that point on, Fraser was the first prime minister – and probably the last prime minister – who was a real product champion of multiculturalism. Fraser said and recognised that Australia’s future would depend on having everybody at the table, rather than a hierarchy of which his own patrician class would sit at the apex. Much of Fraser’s struggle was against neoliberals and the arch-conservatives in the Liberal Party. </p>
<p>It was Fraser, with a small group including Michael MacKellar and Ian Macphee, who put together an immigration program that was really quite innovative. He was also the person who forced the brokerage of the Indo-Chinese refugee story. There was total chaos; there were boat people; things were totally dreadful after the end of the Vietnam War. Fraser had been minister for army during the Vietnam War, so he was part of the cause of the problem. </p>
<p>Fraser was approached by a number of people to try and bring out more refugees. One of them, Robert Manne, said to me that they went to see Fraser and said we’d really like you to bring a couple of thousand people in under some sort of orderly scheme. Fraser basically said that we’re going to bring in 10,000 per year; we’re going to do this on a regional basis; we’re going to get everyone co-operating and even though a few years ago we were shooting at each other, we actually have to get the Vietnamese government onside. </p>
<p>And so, through a series of quite interesting strategic perspectives – looking at one decision after the next – Fraser managed to bring that together. He also, with MacKellar, tried to sort out the mess that was the consequence of the Lebanese civil war. He was quite actively involved in shaping the way in which Australia took refugees from Lebanon on a non-racial basis. </p>
<p>Some people, particularly in the right-wing Christian side of the Lebanese community, have been very critical of Fraser for that because they believe he let the Muslims in. But, in a sense, he set the ground rules in a most difficult situation where people would be admitted on the basis of need – not on the basis of creed. That was a sterling breakthrough in a period which was just after the end of the White Australia policy. It had barely been turned off by the Whitlam government and things could very easily have gone a very different sort of way.</p>
<p>Fraser was clearly the instigator of what became the Galbally report on post-settlement services for immigrants and their families. That’s the blueprint that we live with today: it has been amended and modified a bit, but that framework – which was again incredibly innovative – has shaped our capacity to respond to migration. It has made Australia’s settlement process probably the most successful one in the world.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Foreign affairs</h2>
<p><strong>Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics at University of Western Australia</strong> </p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser was a member of a small but growing club: political leaders who become far more radical in retirement than they ever were while in office. Fraser’s standard explanation for this was that the Liberal Party had left him rather than vice versa. While there’s something in this, it was a bit disingenuous and self-serving. The truth was actually more interesting.</p>
<p>To be sure, the Liberals – and the Labor Party, for that matter – moved to the right, but Fraser shifted too. While he may have been an early, prominent and consistent supporter of the rights of asylum seekers, his position on other key policy issues of his time in government underwent a profound shift. </p>
<p>Nowhere was this clearer than in the change in his thinking about relations with the US. It’s important to remember that Fraser actually oversaw much of Australia’s involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, during which he expressed no misgivings about close ties with the Americans. But as the title of his recent book Dangerous Allies makes clear, his views about security policy became decidedly unconventional in later life.</p>
<p>Despite mainstream strategic thinkers in Australia and elsewhere dismissing his ideas as being out of touch with geopolitical reality, I think it was entirely to his credit that he thought seriously about some of the most important foreign policy questions facing Australia at a time when such debates were characterised primarily by a remarkable uniformity of opinion.</p>
<p>True, it is always easier to have principles when they are unlikely to be tested by either actual events or – even more pertinently, perhaps – the constraints of party discipline. But leaders with principles of any sort, other than political survival and expediency, are a bit thin on the ground these days. </p>
<p>Fraser’s supporters might claim that even his role in The Dismissal was, in part at least, driven by principles as much as by political opportunism. While that will continue to be debated, what is less in doubt is that, for all his flaws, Fraser was a unique figure in Australian political life and one who arguably improved with age.</p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: you can read Mark Beeson’s review of Malcolm Fraser’s 2014 book Dangerous Allies <a href="https://theconversation.com/book-review-dangerous-allies-by-malcolm-fraser-25995">here</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>Personal reflections</h2>
<p><strong>David Penington, Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne</strong> </p>
<p>It is inevitably sad to suddenly lose a contemporary with whom one had some association, albeit intermittent, over many years. Malcolm and I arrived as “freshmen” at Magdalen College in the same week in October 1950. One thing I clearly recall was his great interest in Africa as a continent with huge potential. </p>
<p>Malcolm interested me in a monthly newsletter about Africa, which I read for several years. I learned about such developments as the multi-racial Makerere medical school in Kampala, Uganda. Several years later I even contemplated a career there, but by that time Uganda was falling apart.</p>
<p>Malcolm’s passion for Africa persisted throughout his political career, as a vocal opponent of apartheid. Later, after ceasing to be prime minister, he served as a member of the Eminent Persons Group to intervene in African disputes.</p>
<p>It is for others to comment on the events of 1975 and Malcolm’s term as prime minister. However, in recent years he has been outspoken as a critic of the political leadership of the Liberal Party as it has come to be progressively preoccupied with “interparty warfare” and fails to articulate a guiding view of reform and development fitting for a unified multicultural nation, which should be characterised by a principle of fairness to all. The disquiet culminated in his resignation from the party.</p>
<p>It was very much Malcolm’s vision that led to Australia accepting the flood of refugees in boats from Vietnam after the disastrous war there and ensuring that our immigration policies remained open to people of varied races, religions and colour of skin, including accepting refugees to be embraced as future citizens.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Higher education</h2>
<p><strong>Hannah Forsyth, Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University</strong> </p>
<p>After the Whitlam government’s dismissal, the incoming Coalition government of Malcolm Fraser sought a new set of reforms for tertiary education that would more firmly link university funding to economic goals. The education minister, John Carrick, commissioned a review conducted by University of Sydney vice-chancellor and academic economist Bruce Williams. </p>
<p>Williams took his time, not reporting until 1979. It was a report that aligned to the values of the Liberal Party. While it did not advocate radical change, the bulky, two-volume review was nevertheless influential for reinforcing much of the 1965 Martin report. </p>
<p>The Williams report marked a real change in the ways that the government was assessing the need for education. Before this, education was assumed to be a right possessed by the individual citizen, based on merit. Now it was a question of economic and demographic trends. </p>
<p>This tightening of the connection between higher education and the economy launched a new type of public debate about universities. Politicians began to argue that higher education had two primary purposes: workforce planning and economic growth. The older idea, held by Menzies, Beazley (senior) and Ian Clunies Ross, that universities were intended to uphold culture and civilisation, was being discarded.</p>
<p>At the same time as the connections between universities and economic growth were being conceptualised, investment in university education was offset by the desire to save money. From this perspective, some believed there were now too many universities. Griffith, Murdoch and Deakin universities should never have been established, they thought. Williams pointed out that there had been no way of knowing that, soon after they were built, both the economy and student demand would collapse. </p>
<p>Australia might have too many universities right now, Williams argued, but with projected growth in student participation in the 1980s and 1990s they would soon be required. </p>
<p>However, growth needed to be balanced against other issues. Williams was concerned that the combination of high unemployment and the growing number of university graduates was leading to “credentialism”: jobs that really did not need tertiary qualifications now required them. This contrasted with the alternative position that an influx of university graduates would modernise the global economy. </p>
<p>But with less public money on hand, such change now seemed wasteful. Free education should be made more sparingly available. Students, Williams argued, should receive only the education workplaces really needed, not the “surplus” education possible in times of affluence. Fraser’s strategy was to plan for constrained growth, using Menzies’ binary framework to this end.</p>
<p>The critical question, given the overall budget situation, was how to fund even small increases in enrolments. Fraser intended to offset that expansion, to the dismay of many members of the public, by reintroducing student fees and cutting funding. Reducing costs and adding student fees would allow for the modest expansion the Williams report predicted without tapping Treasury. </p>
<p>The government duly reduced recurrent funding and restructured the Colleges of Advanced Education, forcing many to amalgamate in the belief that a smaller number of larger institutions would be more efficient. </p>
<p><em>Editor’s note: this is an edited excerpt from Hannah Forsyth’s book, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/history-of-the-modern-australian-university/">A History of the Modern Australian University</a> published by NewSouth, republished with the author’s permission.</em></p>
<hr>
<h2>The economy</h2>
<p><strong>Simon Ville, Professor of Economic and Business History at University of Wollongong</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser’s economic perspectives were shaped by the personal experiences of his family’s pastoral properties and the intellectual influences of studying politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford. He was an economic realist who occupied a middle ground between the expansionism of the Whitlam government and the growing influence of “economic rationalism” within the Coalition. </p>
<p>Fraser’s government served during challenging economic times for many nations trapped by “stagflation” – stimulating the economy caused further inflation but putting the brakes on raised unemployment to high levels. His attempts to rein in the deficit, the so-called “razor gang”, succeeded but inflation and unemployment both remained unacceptably high at the end of his time in office.</p>
<p>Interposed between the reforming Labor governments of Whitlam and Hawke, Fraser’s administrations contributed to the deregulation and modernisation of the Australian economy and the social values underlying economic progress. The Campbell Commission set the groundwork for many of the subsequent reforms that freed up a highly regulated monetary system. His government reduced tariffs, eased into place with subsidies, and reformed competition law. </p>
<p>Fraser’s support for ending the White Australia policy was reflected in the large refugee influx after Vietnam and his subsequent opinion pieces. The labour market benefits of more open immigration remind us that economic progress and human justice can go hand-in-hand – a philosophy that Fraser appreciated.</p>
<p><strong>Alex Millmow, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Federation University Australia</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser’s economic record was patchy. He was a Keynesian in the closet but he never applied it in office.</p>
<p>The Treasury was very strong, while the Reserve Bank was weak – not having the power it has today to control and manipulate interest rates. The Treasury spooked his government. The mantra was that inflationary expectations had to be ground out of the country by a policy of austerity. That led to year-on-year, very tight budgets – even more than we have now under the Abbott government.</p>
<p>The 1970s was a miserable period in Australian economic history, and Fraser never embarked on any microeconomic reform. He recently said that was a missed opportunity. His government did commission the Campbell report (into financial services) but then never acted on it. The other prevalent policy was to reduce real wages, which was then seen as the prevailing cause of unemployment.</p>
<p>He lost office because there was a resources boom that never came to pass, wages went up, there was a drought, and the world economy was also a bit wonky. He left office with the country in recession. And when Hawke and Keating came into office, they discovered the deficit was much larger than they’d been told.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Arts and culture</h2>
<p><strong>Joanna Mendelssohn, Associate Professor, Art & Design at UNSW Australia</strong></p>
<p>As well as a great deal of hostility from the arts community who really admired Whitlam, when Fraser seized power there was an expectation that the new government would return to the bad old days of neglect.</p>
<p>The opening of the 1976 Biennale of Sydney took place on November 11 – an unfortunate anniversary, especially as Fraser was opening it. There were demonstrations outside and an ostentatious walk-out by artists and others when he stood to speak.</p>
<p>But life is never so simple. Arts policy in the Fraser years was less ostentatious than the Whitlam years. One great innovation was the creation of Artbank – based on Canada’s Artbank, but now completely transformed. It has evolved into one of the best cost-effective ways of both bringing art into everyday life and supporting artists – at no cost to government coffers. </p>
<p>The other innovation of the Fraser years, which from memory probably had a great deal to do with his wife Tamie, was the creation of the Australiana Fund to replace the furnishings and decoration of official residences with works by Australian artists, furniture makers and designers. </p>
<p>The Australian National Gallery (the NGA, as it then was) had been a victim of Liberal Party attacks in the Whitlam years, so there was considerable angst about its funding under Fraser. The main problem (and a legacy of the attacks on Whitlam) was the requirement that major purchases had to be cleared at a political level. This led to Australia losing Braque’s Grand Nu as it was deemed too expensive and controversial. </p>
<p>This also led to a concentration of purchases by the NGA in the Australian market. The presence of the National Gallery’s purchasing power led to a distortion of the Australian market as small galleries and private purchasers could not compete. Art dealers were happy, though.</p>
<p>Towards the end of Fraser’s career as prime minister there was the recession, and his last budgets hit the arts hard – along with everyone else. However, the “arm’s length” nature of the Australia Council funding was maintained, and the National Gallery was opened by the Queen with great pomp and ceremony.</p>
<p><strong>Jo Caust, Associate Professor, Cultural Policy and Arts Leadership at University of Melbourne</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser’s attitude to the arts was a little different to his predecessor Gough Whitlam. While Whitlam argued passionately for the role of the arts in the nation’s development and profile, Fraser wanted to ensure that the newly created Australia Council became more efficient in its practices and was less wasteful in its approach to administration and grant-making.</p>
<p>In addition, Fraser’s government argued for decentralisation and devolution of funding, implying a less pivotal role for the Australia Council as the sole national arbiter of arts taste and funding. Several actions of the Fraser government can be seen to support a less elitist and more accessible approach to arts funding as well as rejecting an industrial framing of the arts by government. </p>
<p>In 1976, the Australia Council Act was amended to give the council the formal role of the government’s advisory agency on all matters falling within its area of responsibility – that is, to advise the government on all matters related to the arts. This was a significant change from just being an arts funding body; this meant it also took on a formal advisory and policy-making role. </p>
<p>Under Fraser’s government, a major structural and in a sense philosophical change also occurred at the Australia Council with the establishment of the Community Arts Board in September 1977. This intervention in particular implied that arts practices could be seen as more accessible, challenging the notion of what was seen as “excellence” by many within the Australia Council. </p>
<p>Historically, there is enormous significance to the specific rejection of the following <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/library/pubs/bn/2008-09/artspolicy.pdf">recommendation</a> of the Industries Assistance Commission (IAC) inquiry into Assistance to the Performing Arts that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Adjustment assistance should be provided to the presently subsidised companies by maintaining assistance which contributes to their operating costs at approximately the level in 1976-77 for a period of three years, that level of assistance to be phased out over the following five years.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So while the government-appointed commission recommended that government funding for performing arts companies be gradually phased out, Fraser’s government rejected that notion and reaffirmed a commitment to ongoing subsidy of arts practice. Essentially this was a rejection also of an industrial framing of the arts at that time. </p>
<p>Two other major contributions of the Fraser government to the arts and cultural sector in 1981 were the establishment of the National Museum and the introduction of a Taxation Incentives for the Arts Scheme, both of which continue to exist today.</p>
<p><strong>Vincent O'Donnell, Honorary Research Associate of the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser had the misfortune of serving as prime minister in the umbra of the brief but eventful term of the Whitlam government – especially when it comes to Australian arts and culture.</p>
<p>To his credit, Fraser left in place – to the largest extent – the policy and ideological innovations in the arts of the Whitlam government, despite the tuneful sounds of his razor gang polishing their blades.</p>
<p>One Whitlam initiative largely forgotten now and continued under Fraser was a reference to the Industries Assistance Commission to report on:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whether assistance should be accorded the performing arts in Australia and if so what should be the nature and extent of such assistance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When commissioners Boyer and Robinson circulated a draft response in October 1976, media response was immediate: “Govt. urged to phase out opera, ballet aid” was the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald, while “Slash grants to arts says IAC” was The Australian’s take.</p>
<p>By October 13, the report was politically dead. </p>
<p>Fraser told federal parliament that the government would not be adopting the IAC’s recommendations, thus confirming political bipartisanship in the support of Australian arts and culture.</p>
<p>One might observe, too, that the term of the Fraser government saw the creation of all but one of our state film corporations. Make of that what you will.</p>
<p>In the field of public broadcasting, SBS radio, and then SBS television, emerged under Fraser’s prime ministership. This brought a more European face of public service broadcasting to the Australian mix of British and US broadcasting models.</p>
<p><strong>Liz Giuffre, Lecturer of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University</strong></p>
<p>Despite the doomsayers’ predictions, the arts were not killed after November 11, 1975, when Malcolm Fraser took office. Fraser was in government from 1975 to 1983 – more than enough time to “undo” reforms if that had been his aim. Instead cultural institutions established by Whitlam continued and more were developed.</p>
<p>Fraser was fundamental in developing SBS, the Special Broadcasting Service that remains internationally unique in its scope and output. The Australian media would be much poorer without the contributions that SBS makes in terms of new commissions and bringing international content to our market. </p>
<p>The specialist news and programming is important – and so are cultural events such as Eurovision. The European Broadcasting Union <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31380742">praised</a> the broadcaster repeatedly in its announcement that Australia had a spot at Eurovision. Jokes about taste, costumes and tunes aside, it is the decades of SBS coverage that has earned us this odd honour.</p>
<p>Fraser continued to champion SBS as distinct from the ABC, criticising challenges to its resources by appealing to those currently looking after its care. In 2014, he <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/merger-with-abc-means-death-of-sbs-warns-malcolm-fraser-20140530-399v2.html">said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These people [in current government] looking for efficiencies have no understanding that governments have to do things you can’t put a dollar on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That stuff you “can’t put a dollar on” is beautifully but necessarily vague – and also pioneering. Fraser continued to participate in the media and arts during and after his time in office. He played along with the ascension of institutions like Countdown – famously <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E7o50OvJh4">opening</a> the show in 1979, perhaps as the only man in a “straight” suit ever to appear on the program. </p>
<hr>
<h2>Social policy</h2>
<p><strong>Peter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University</strong></p>
<p>In 1976, the Fraser government abolished income tax concessions (rebates) and introduced the Family Allowance. This helped families with lower incomes who could not benefit from the tax concessions, as well as those on benefits. But these were then not regularly indexed. And in the 1982 budget a new payment – the Family Income Supplement – was introduced for families in low-paid work.</p>
<p>These two initiatives provide the basis for Australia’s current system of Family Tax Benefits, which is one of the most effective and efficient systems of family payments in the OECD in reducing child poverty. However, these were later significantly increased by the Hawke government in the late 1980s and early 1990s and by the Howard government after 1996.</p>
<p>In 1976, pension indexation became automatic for the first time (that is, in legislation) and also for unemployment payments. In 1977, the Supporting Parents Benefit replaced the Supporting Mothers Benefit. This extended assistance to men on the same basis as women bringing up children alone.</p>
<p>In 1976, the assets test on pensions was replaced by a test on income alone. Throughout the life of the Fraser government, there was significant tightening at different times of conditions for receiving the Unemployment Benefit. In 1978, the Maternity Allowance – like the baby bonus – which had existed since 1912, was abolished in Treasurer John Howard’s first budget.</p>
<p>At a number of times, there was a suspension or delay of indexation of pensions, benefits and family payments. Inflation was very high in this period – averaging <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/EconIndicators#_Toc366759300">nearly 10% per year</a> – with the result that real payments, particularly for the unemployed and pensioner families with children, fell significantly. This led to concerns about child poverty that needed to be addressed by subsequent governments.</p>
<p>In 1981, the Fraser government ended the Medibank scheme introduced by the Whitlam government. It became one of the few governments that abolished an existing universal health insurance.</p>
<p>Between 1982 and 1983 (the last year of the Fraser government), the unemployment rate rose from 6.7% to 9.9%, compared to 4.7% at the end of the Whitlam government. There was a particularly large increase in unemployment among families with children. This exacerbated the child poverty problem.</p>
<p>The combination of high unemployment and high inflation has been labelled as “stagflation”. This experience was common to many governments around the world at the time. Other contemporary leaders – Carter in the US, Heath and Wilson in the UK, Giscard D’Estaing and Mitterand in France – were also viewed very critically in terms of their economic credentials.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Health</h2>
<p><strong>Anne-marie Boxall, Senior Policy Adviser at the National Rural Health Alliance and Adjunct Lecturer at University of Sydney</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser’s legacy in health is not as strong as it is in other areas. During his term in government, Fraser made a series of major changes to health insurance policy that ultimately ended with the abolition of Medibank, Australia’s first universal health insurance scheme. While his critics – at the time and later – claim that he abolished universal health care for ideological reasons, there is very little evidence to support this claim. </p>
<p>As part of <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/the-making-of-medicare/">my research</a> I have conducted extensive analysis of government archives from the Fraser period and found no evidence that Fraser himself intended to get rid of Medibank after being elected in 1975. </p>
<p>There is evidence showing that some of Fraser’s cabinet colleagues, his staff and senior bureaucrats all wanted to abolish Medibank as soon as possible after being elected. They argued that it was too expensive and that restoring economic growth and dealing with the extremely challenging circumstances at the time were the highest-order priorities. They also argued that governments shouldn’t be involved to such an extent in financing health care and that individuals should take a greater responsibility for paying for their own health-care costs. </p>
<p>Fraser had been a long-time critic of Medibank during the Whitlam years and, along with his Liberal Party colleagues, objected to it on ideological grounds. But Fraser changed his mind about Medibank during the 1975 election campaign – not for ideological reasons but for pragmatic ones. </p>
<p>In an interview for a current affairs program in May 1976, Fraser explained why it was his intention to maintain Medibank. He <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/the-making-of-medicare/">said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Look, time marches on. Circumstances change and you deal with circumstances as they are. Medibank was introduced. Among many people it was plainly popular. It would have been destructive and unreasonable to attempt to break it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the years went on, Fraser struggled to find a way of keeping his promise to maintain Medibank and manage the economy effectively. The outworking of this struggle was a series of confusing and <a href="https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2010/192/9/reforming-australia-s-health-system-again">ill-thought-out changes</a> to health insurance between 1976 and 1981. </p>
<p>As far as health policy-making goes, the Fraser government is not a model to follow. As a person and a leader, however, there is much to admire about Fraser and the way he dealt with the challenge of Medibank.</p>
<p>Once he recognised how popular Medibank was, Fraser jettisoned his previous strongly held ideological position on it and he made a commitment to the electorate that he would keep it. He didn’t succeed, but this was largely because he was unable to find an economically sustainable way of financing a universal health insurance system, Medibank, alongside the pre-existing private health insurance system.</p>
<p>The solution Fraser ultimately chose – abolishing Medibank – was not a good one. But in fairness to Fraser, no government since has managed to find a long-term solution either.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Leeder, Emeritus Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine, Menzies Centre for Health Policy and School of Public Health at the University of Sydney</strong></p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser’s approach to Medibank was interesting, because whatever his personal ambivalence about it, he undertook to maintain it as an election promise. He did not yield to pressure from colleagues and factions in the medical profession to abolish it when elected to office. Instead, he sought – in the middle of serious economic downturn – to alter it in ways that he believed would sustain it.</p>
<p>Variations on the idea that Medibank should be seen only as a safety net, and not – as it was originally designed to be – a universal social benefit, manifested themselves in the series of reinventions that he created. The confusion in the community as to what Medibank covered or did not was not profound. It was hard for anyone, let alone consumers, to keep up. In the end, he gave up – and so did we.</p>
<p>Fraser, like Jimmy Carter, saved his best for when he was no longer prime minister (or president). When we saw Fraser Unleashed in his latter years, campaigning for human rights, caring, humane, global in his concern and commitment – what a wonder it was. A giant indeed and a source of refreshment to those who feared this country had entirely lost its soul.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39111/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Mendelssohn is Editor in Chief of the DAAO and receives funding from the ARC through a Linkage Project on the History of Exhibitions of Australian Art and a LIEF grant for Design and Art of Australia Online.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Whiteford receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alex Millmow, Andrew Jakubowicz, Anne-marie Boxall, David Penington, Hannah Forsyth, Jo Caust, Liz Giuffre, Mark Beeson, Simon Ville, Stephen Leeder, and Vincent O'Donnell do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his time in office, Malcolm Fraser oversaw the acceptance of southeast Asian refugees and led economic and social welfare reforms.Alex Millmow, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Federation University AustraliaAndrew Jakubowicz, Professor of Sociology, University of Technology SydneyAnne-marie Boxall, Senior Policy Adviser, National Rural Health Alliance; Adjunct Lecturer, University of SydneyDavid Penington, Emeritus Professor, The University of MelbourneHannah Forsyth, Lecturer in History, Australian Catholic UniversityJoanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Associate Professor, Art & Design: UNSW Australia. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, UNSW SydneyJo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), The University of MelbourneLiz Giuffre, Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Technology SydneyMark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, The University of Western AustraliaPeter Whiteford, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National UniversitySimon Ville, Senior Professor of Economic and Business History, University of WollongongStephen Leeder, Emeritus Professor, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of SydneyVincent O'Donnell, Honorary Research Associate of the School of Media and Communication, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391062015-03-20T00:40:37Z2015-03-20T00:40:37Z‘A giant of Australian public life’: tributes flow for Malcolm Fraser<p>Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has died at the age of 84. His office said in a statement that he had died in the early hours of Friday after a brief illness.</p>
<p>Fraser, prime minister between 1975 and 1983, came to power in highly controversial circumstances. He was installed as caretaker prime minister after the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, sacked Gough Whitlam.</p>
<p>In his later years, Fraser became a bitter critic of Liberal policies, especially on issues such as the treatment of asylum seekers, and relinquished his party membership. He also strongly warned of the dangers of Australia’s closeness to the United States, most notably in his book Dangerous Allies published last year. </p>
<p>Fraser and Whitlam became close in their retirements, finding common ground on a number of issues.</p>
<p>The former prime minister has attracted tributes from across the political spectrum.</p>
<p>Prime Minister Tony Abbott said: “The constitutional crisis of 1975 was one of the defining political events of our nation. Malcolm Fraser held true to the belief that his actions were in the best interests of Australia. He was determined to ‘turn on the lights’ and restore Australia’s economic fortunes.</p>
<p>"The friendship he built in later life with Gough Whitlam spoke volumes about the character of both men at the centre of the crisis: in their own different ways, they were both fierce Australian patriots.”</p>
<p>Petro Georgiou, who worked for him and later became a Liberal MP, said Fraser was “a giant, the likes of which we’re unlikely to see again”.</p>
<p>Former Fraser government minister Fred Chaney said: “Australia has lost one of its great moral compasses.”</p>
<p>NSW Premier Mike Baird said: “Malcolm had an extraordinary life and his contribution to this country was enormous.</p>
<p>"After leaving office Malcolm used his public profile to raise concerns about humanitarian issues. Malcolm was a giant of Australian public life.”</p>
<p>Opposition leader Bill Shorten said: “The sight of Fraser and Whitlam campaigning together for a republic and standing together at the national apology warmed our hearts and showed how far we had all travelled since the torrid acrimony of the dismissal.”</p>
<p>Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard said Fraser “in and beyond politics was a leader in the fight for racial equality. His brave stance against the evil of South Africa’s apartheid helped changed the world for the better.</p>
<p>"Malcolm will always be remembered kindly for his commitment to multiculturalism and his specific actions to resettle Vietnamese boat people in Australia.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"578695329463193602"}"></div></p>
<p>Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said he was “a politician of principle and leader of compassion. A true gentleman with a heart full of empathy. I am devastated.”</p>
<p>Fraser recently supported her re-election campaign. </p>
<p>Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy said Fraser was “a leader and statesman”. He “will always be of the Liberal Party”.</p>
<p>Fraser won two further elections after a swingeing victory in 1975. He was returned with another massive majority in 1977, again beating Whitlam, and won more narrowly in 1980. In 1983, he called an election on the day the Labor party dumped Bill Hayden for Bob Hawke, who defeated him.</p>
<p>Although Fraser came to power on tough economic rhetoric, his government was later much criticised for not doing enough in economic reform. It was left to the Hawke government to undertake the big structural reforms.</p>
<p>Fraser’s government had significant achievements on the social policy front, which included enacting land rights for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, in a continuation of the policy framed by the Whitlam government. </p>
<p>Fraser also promoted multiculturalism and established SBS; his government took major environmental initiatives including banning sand mining on Fraser Island and whaling in Australian waters.</p>
<p>In foreign affairs he was pivotal in the Rhodesian settlement that brought majority rule and independence to Zimbabwe. He was involved in the battle against South African apartheid during and after his prime ministership.</p>
<p>Seeking to heal the divisions of 1975, Fraser appointed Sir Zelman Cowen as governor-general to succeed Kerr.</p>
<p>Summing up his record some years ago, journalist and historian Paul Kelly wrote that he was a “both a conservative and a reformer”.</p>
<p>Kelly wrote that he was “the last prime minister before the age of globalisation forced Australia to break from its introspective economic past”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39106/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser has been lauded for his humanitarian work, including supporting asylum seekers and commitment to multiculturalism.Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of CanberraLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/391122015-03-20T00:05:49Z2015-03-20T00:05:49ZFormer prime minister Malcolm Fraser dies, aged 84<p>Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser has died.</p>
<p>His death was announced in a brief statement this morning. He was 84. </p>
<p>“It is with deep sadness that we inform you that after a brief illness John Malcolm Fraser died peacefully in the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2015.”</p>
<p>“We appreciate that this will be a shock to all who knew and loved him, but ask that the family be left in peace at this difficult time.”</p>
<p>Mr Fraser was prime minister of Australia and leader of the Liberal Party from 1975 to 1983. </p>
<p><strong>MORE TO COME</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/malcolm-fraser">Read Fraser on The Conversation</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39112/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Malcolm Fraser has died following “a short illness”, according to a statement.Helen Westerman, Business + Economy EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/326032014-10-09T00:14:59Z2014-10-09T00:14:59ZWhy would anyone want to be PM? Understanding what it takes<p>Why would anyone want to be prime minister? Why indeed?</p>
<p>It is a job that will almost certainly end in failure. Only one prime minister in the last 100 years has left office at the time of his own choosing: and <a href="http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/primeministers/menzies/">Robert Menzies</a> had been there for 16 years (and more than 18 years in all). </p>
<p>So my biography of Kevin Rudd had the same objective as my <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Malcolm-Fraser-PM-Study-Ministerial/dp/014012974X">study of Malcolm Fraser</a> 25 years ago: what does it take to be a prime minister? How do they meet the challenges, what are their strengths and weaknesses, how do they organise their time and set priorities to meet the multiple roles?</p>
<p>Consider the negatives. Everything you have ever said or done, <a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/making-tony-abbott-political-animal-admin-7881">back to student days</a> and beyond, will be uncovered, analysed and interpreted in as malign a way as possible. Every motive will be challenged and questioned.</p>
<p>Your enemies will seek to undermine you. The press will hound you. And then you have to deal with the Opposition.</p>
<p>Very few people have actually achieved the office. Australia has had 28 prime ministers, but <a href="http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/primeministers/role.aspx">three of them were caretakers</a>, in the position after a prime minister died while the party elected a new leader. Of the other 25, two won four terms, three had three terms and three had two terms. All the others had only the one. </p>
<p>They are remarkable just for getting there. Max Weber <a href="http://harpers.org/blog/2008/06/weber-on-the-political-vocation/">described politics</a> as “the strong and slow boring of hard boards”. So it is, for years. </p>
<p>Yet fortunately there are those who aspire and conspire to achieve that height. In every first-year politics class there will be someone, often more than one, who dreams of being PM. They want to make a difference; they see the potential in national leadership.</p>
<p>But few are prepared for the decades of effort. They must work through the party to build support to stand and win a seat. </p>
<p>Gaining party leadership means copping abuse, insinuations and accusations. After all that, <a href="http://www.peo.gov.au/learning/fact-sheets/leader-of-the-opposition.html">opposition leaders</a> in a time of strong government are unlikely to become prime minister. They must have good timing and luck. </p>
<p>Only then can they try to lead, to meet the inevitably high expectations they have set themselves and that their supporters have of them. Nothing can really prepare a person for the pressures of the job.</p>
<h2>Balancing the demands of power</h2>
<p>Once in office, the demands on prime ministers are diverse and constant. Almost all struggle in their first term, as they shift from the opposition target, to pressure to get a positive daily headline to the government requirement to meet real challenges. </p>
<p>As one senior minister noted, as soon as he got into office, everything he said was taken seriously. Their worlds had changed.</p>
<p>Consider the expectations. Prime ministers must play a wide range of roles, every one of which can turn out to be crucial to their survival. They must fulfil many expectations or face excoriation and expulsion. </p>
<p>They must lead their party in parliament and in the electorate. They have to understand and balance the ambitions, stroke the egos, listen to complaints and thus retain their support. They cannot be ignored for ever. A prime minister needs a united party. If that requires compromise, then compromise will follow.</p>
<p>Despite being forced to compromise they must act as the principal advocate of government in the face of a constant news cycle and a media looking for stories about errors, disagreements, inadequate understandings of ambiguous circumstances, and on any topic the media chooses to raise. Prime ministers cannot say they don’t know too often. They are meant to know. </p>
<p>In addition, they must front the government in parliament. Question time is a daily cross-examination of the prime minister who gets the lion’s share of opposition questions. It is true they seldom answer them, but they still need to know what will come up. That takes time and briefing too. </p>
<p>Prime ministers and ministers take parliament very seriously. Besides prime ministers also have to worry about how to deal with the Senate, another story altogether. How blessed are New Zealand prime minsters who have to manage but a single house of parliament.</p>
<p>Because they are held responsible, they must oversee all government policy, whether presiding over cabinet or by taking the lead themselves in areas of strategic importance. Government policy needs to be coherent, practical and effective; it also needs to be timely. All policies will face opposition, be it climate change, education, pensions or budget cuts. </p>
<p>Prime ministers must also represent the nation in moments of national grief: floods, bushfires, military funerals. They must grieve and give condolences on behalf of the nation and be seen to be sincere.</p>
<p>This is part of the duty to manage crises, whether economic catastrophe or national threat. Decisions must be made fast on the basis of available information. Sometimes governments cannot wait until they have all the information; they need to act quickly and have to trust their judgement. The criticisms come later. Only oppositions have the benefit of hindsight.</p>
<p>This representation also requires their involvement in international forums: the UN, G20, ASEAN, APEC. PMs face pressure to attend because they have the power to
commit their countries on the spot if they think it necessary.</p>
<p>Somewhere within this maelstrom, a few attempt a family life.</p>
<p>To write about a prime minister all these roles need to be kept in balance. It is a glorious challenge that tests them all; not all cope. That is no surprise. </p>
<p>Their struggles need not be a cause for sympathy; they fought desperately for the role. But we can try to understand what they must do. </p>
<p>Rudd never reached the heights of which he dreamed, nor was he as muddled as his assassins have ought to portray him. So the book tries be the story of the man and the exploration of the position to which he rose, not once, but twice.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The author spent several years observing and talking to Rudd and the people around him in preparation for writing the biography, Kevin Rudd: Twice Prime Minister, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/items/119437">published by MUP</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32603/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Weller is the author of the newly released biography, Kevin Rudd: Twice Prime Minister, published by MUP.</span></em></p>Why would anyone want to be prime minister? Why indeed? It is a job that will almost certainly end in failure. Only one prime minister in the last 100 years has left office at the time of his own choosing…Patrick Weller, Professor, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/259952014-05-30T20:40:36Z2014-05-30T20:40:36ZBook review: Dangerous Allies by Malcolm Fraser<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47200/original/gmkj4m7s-1398734852.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Malcolm Fraser's new book, Dangerous Allies, is one of the most original and timely contributions to Australia's foreign policy debate, which tends to be sterile and predictable.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Luis Enrique Ascui</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Malcolm Fraser occupies a rather unique place in Australia as someone who has, at different times, managed to incense both ends of the political spectrum. If nothing else this is indicative of someone who has a capacity to change his position over the course of a lifetime. Fraser’s new book, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/items/136891">Dangerous Allies</a>, seems certain to cement his place as an unexpected, late-blooming radical.</p>
<p>The content of Dangerous Allies will be familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in Fraser’s recent career as a polemicist and public intellectual. The principal focus of this book is Australia’s relationship with the United States, and what Fraser describes as the associated dangers of “strategic dependence”.</p>
<p>Simply put, this is a consequence of the belief that Australia’s security is best guaranteed by the cultivation of what former prime minister Robert Menzies famously described as “great and powerful friends”.</p>
<p>Fraser’s argument is that while strategic dependence may have been understandable and defensible during the early years of Australia’s post-colonial history and the Cold War, it is now a liability, and a potentially dangerous one at that. Whatever one thinks of Fraser’s arguments in favour of this position, the chapters devoted to these periods are impressively scholarly and – especially in the more recent periods – enlivened with anecdotes of the when-I-spoke-to the-president variety.</p>
<p>One of the reasons this book is likely to upset so many on the conservative side of politics is not simply because Fraser adopts such an iconoclastic attitude toward the centrepiece of Australian security policy for more than half a century, but because he’s scathing about the some of the icons of the Liberal Party, too. </p>
<p>Menzies suffered from a “great misunderstanding” about the importance of Britain, Fraser contends, while Howard further entrenched the culture of strategic dependence on the US to the detriment of our regional relations.</p>
<p>By contrast, Fraser gives some Labor luminaries such as Gough Whitlam and especially Doc Evatt great credit for attempting to carve out a more independent foreign policy. The current generation of Labor leaders, however, suffer from the same “bipartisan failure” that has circumscribed our capacity to make separate strategic decisions from the US. The net result, Fraser argues, is that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have significantly diminished our capacity to act as a separate sovereign nation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No doubt the present government – and opposition, for that matter – will dismiss such claims out of hand. So too will the great majority of strategists in Canberra, be they military or civilian. But Fraser is surely right to question the supposed benefits that have accrued to Australia from participation in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. </p>
<p>Significantly, Fraser is more equivocal about Vietnam (where he had ministerial responsibility), although much the same could have been said about that conflict too.</p>
<p>Although Fraser judges that America’s involvement in Vietnam was an “unmitigated failure”, he also concedes that it was a commitment he “fully supported”. His justification for what he now sees as a misjudgement was that the US was either “derelict in their duty to inform us of the true situation” or “deceitful”. He is even more scathing about America’s preparedness to “murder” former political allies when it suited them. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What faith can a nation have in an ally that believes it is within its right to remove the nation’s head of state?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s a good question, and one that might have been addressed to Australia’s own constitutional coup and the rumours that persisted about <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/boyce-still-believes-cia-dismissed-whitlam/story-fn59niix-1226829787106">CIA involvement</a> in Whitlam’s downfall. Of this possibility, however, there is notably no mention. Being in the thick of it, so to speak, is something else that exercises a constraining effect.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=885&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=885&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=885&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1112&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47201/original/38d896p3-1398734934.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1112&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MUP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If there is one thing that this book serves to demonstrate it is just how difficult exercising independent thought and action actually seems to be when in office – particularly as far as relations with the US are concerned. Although Fraser now admires New Zealand’s “far-sighted and correct” independent foreign policy, while inside the Canberra bubble he dutifully joined the chorus of condemnation. </p>
<p>While I am sympathetic to many of the arguments Fraser develops, I have no expectation that they will have the slightest impact in Canberra. I have been making a <a href="https://www.academia.edu/539145/Australias_relationship_with_the_United_States_the_case_for_greater_independence">similar argument</a> about the possible benefits of a more independent, less-aligned foreign policy for more than a decade now, with absolutely no discernible impact on the policy debate, much less on policy itself.</p>
<p>True, I’m not a former prime minister. Fraser’s book will at least be extensively reviewed and discussed. Whether it will it make any difference is another question.</p>
<p>It is possible to quibble with a number of aspects of the book, even if one is not overtly hostile to its core idea. Fraser’s faith in the diplomatic capacities of the ASEAN states, especially as far as China is concerned, looked overly optimistic even before the latter’s more <a href="https://theconversation.com/chinas-adiz-and-australias-commitment-to-americas-asian-order-20942">aggressive pursuit</a> of its territorial claims. </p>
<p>Similarly, Fraser’s suggestion that defence spending is likely to rise as the price of independence is both debatable and unlikely to win converts to the cause. New Zealand might still have lessons to offer in this context. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, this is one of the most original and timely contributions to a debate that, with a few honourable exceptions, tends to be sterile, predictable and unchanged since the end of World War Two. </p>
<p>As Fraser points out, the world has changed profoundly in the interim. It’s about time some of our thinking began to reflect the new realities, too, he suggests. An independent Australia could actually play a useful role in doing precisely that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25995/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Beeson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Malcolm Fraser occupies a rather unique place in Australia as someone who has, at different times, managed to incense both ends of the political spectrum. If nothing else this is indicative of someone…Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, Murdoch UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.