Malcolm Fraser was always an enigma to me. But that’s probably because I did not get to know him up close, all that well. With the departure of him and Gough Whitlam from the national stage in just five months, we are bereft of the leadership of elders who have known the highest elected office and who have lived long enough to share their wisdom immune from the partisanship of the day.
Through the rough and tumble of politics, Fraser helped the country find true north on issues relating to race and human rights. He had the courage to question fundamental national preconceptions like the US alliance and border protection which placed the claims of boat people out of sight and out of mind.
Fraser started his political life as an establishment toff in the Liberal Party from the Western District of Victoria via Oxford. He enjoyed the ministerial leather at a very young age serving under Prime Minister William McMahon. I well remember reading Peter Howson’s diaries which recount Howson’s many ministerial lunches at the Melbourne Club.
On 19 October 1971, Howson dined at the club with Fraser, recording: ‘I warned him that Coombs had been talking with the PM, and that we might have to revise our views on traditional land rights. Malcolm indicated very firmly that he would not change his mind or the views he expressed in Cabinet last week.’
Fraser was not for turning. Meanwhile Whitlam was pledging the Labor Party to national land rights. Within five years, Malcolm Fraser would be the prime minister trumpeting the passage of land rights legislation in the Northern Territory.
It is a tragedy that his prime ministership was permanently and irrevocably marred with the lack of legitimacy occasioned by the way he got there. Sir John Kerr did him no favour. No matter how many elections Fraser won, he could never cast off the tarnish which came from his complicity in a vice-regal initiative which required, if only for a moment, that the Leader of the Opposition be more privy to the mind of the Queen’s representative than the Prime Minister commissioned to advise him. No matter how many High Court judges gave it the nod, this just would not wash with the general public as a credible sustainable constitutional arrangement. We are yet to put it right.
I well remember Barrie Dexter, the Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, telling me: ‘Of