Malcolm Fraser

MALCOLM FRASER: The Political Memoirs

By MALCOLM FRASER and MARGARET SIMONS

The Miegunyah Press, 2010, 853 pages, $59.99 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The former Liberal Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, was once reviled as the self-proclaimed defender of democracy who engineered the sacking of the elected Whitlam Labor government in 1975 by the unelected representative of the British monarch. He was the wealthy grazier who slashed government spending and imposed wage freezes on workers whilst lecturing them on how “life wasn’t meant to be easy”. He was the Minister of Defence who spruiked ‘world peace and freedom’ whilst running the Australian military arm of the US-led slaughter in the Vietnam War.

Now, however, for his criticisms of refugee policy, the Iraq war and retreat on civil liberties under the previous Liberal Government of John Howard, Fraser is applauded by some who could once only utter his name with contempt. What has changed – the Liberal Party or Malcolm Fraser? Fraser’s political memoirs, written with Margaret Simons, offers some interesting clues, but also many continuing illusions in the political philosophy of liberalism.

Fraser’s privileged path took him from the rural squattocracy to Melbourne Grammar to Oxford University whilst his father, “enmeshed in the Victorian establishment”, was involved in clandestine anti-communist organisations. Hatred of socialism was a driving force in Fraser’s early politics from his 1955 election win in the Federal seat of Wannon.

Fraser’s liberalism placed ‘freedom of the individual’ at the political centre, opposed to collectivism, which he characterised as subjection to the state, from the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union to the ‘social democracy’ of the ALP and all variants of genuine socialism in between. This placed Fraser, the ‘Squire of Wannon’, well to the right politically.

He lived in fear that South-East Asia would ‘go communist’ and his target as Minister for Army and Minister for Defence in the 1960s was the Communist-led national independence struggle in Vietnam. He supported conscription (where was his vaunted concern for individual freedom, then?). He pushed for escalation when the war had become domestically unpopular (where was his huffing about democracy - the will of the majority – here?). He posed for photo-ops with Australian soldiers who had burned the village of Long Phuoc in the province of Phuoc Tuy which was being ‘pacified’ by Australian troops (where were the individual rights of the Vietnamese people there?).

Fraser’s ‘liberal idealism’ was tempered with anti-communist ‘pragmatism’ to justify his conservative politics. For example, Fraser shared Labor Prime Minister Whitlam’s fear that an independent East Timor should “not become a communist enclave in the underbelly of Indonesia” and after Whitlam had first given the diplomatic green light for Indonesia’s invasion in 1975, Fraser, as caretaker PM after the sacking of Whitlam, followed up with a secret message of support for the invasion to the Indonesian dictator, Suharto. This is what Cold War anti-communist liberalism gets you – complicity in massacre, the very opposite of peace, of freedom, of human rights.

‘Pragmatism’ also won out when, instead of celebrating Vietnam’s ousting of the detestable Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea in 1979, Fraser, true to his anti-communist fetish, condemned Vietnam and recognised the mass-murdering Pol Pot as the legitimate government.

Fraser heavily pressured the Australian Olympic Federation to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 but a majority of Australian athletes went, with former swimming Olympian, Dawn Fraser, one of many to criticise Fraser for hypocrisy in continuing ‘pragmatic’ and profitable trade relations with the Soviet Union.

Other individuals lost their rights under Fraser’s political calculus. The members of Ananda Marga in Australia, framed for the terrorist bombing of Sydney’s Hilton Hotel in 1978, were not deemed eligible for civil or legal rights (despite being later cleared, Fraser still shows no contrition for their wrongful jailing). The right of women to control their reproductive lives through abortion was also not to be tolerated by the great liberal.

‘Free enterprise is inseparable from other freedoms’, was the get-out clause from liberal principles for Fraser. As long as free enterprise won out, other freedoms were dispensable. Fraser saw himself as a moderate, striving for ‘balance’ – between economic development and environmental conservation, between market forces and government regulation, between ‘responsible’ unionism and ‘excessive’ wage claims – but the scales were heavily tilted to the right.

Fraser, for example, may have created Kakadu National Park, banned whaling in Australia and protected the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling during his term as Prime Minister from 1975 to 1983 but where the profits were higher, such as uranium mining and damming the Franklin River in Tasmania, the environment lost out.

In later years, however, a different Fraser has emerged. He has resigned from the Liberal Party, citing objections, on the basis of the erosion of personal freedom, to the former Howard government’s harsh policies on asylum-seekers (the ‘Pacific solution’, children behind barbed wire), anti-terrorism legislation, the Indigenous intervention in the Northern Territory, Liberal preferencing of the racist One Nation party. Fraser has opposed the Iraq war. He has found himself out-of-step with unfettered free markets and US neo-conservatives.

On the political right, what has come after Fraser has indeed been more reactionary. The Liberal Party, as Fraser argues, has changed – the ‘small-l liberals’ and economic ‘wets’ have virtually vanished and the hard right, racist, economic ‘drys’ have swamped the party. Fraser’s memoirs are an exercise in a liberal wrestling with his conscience, his anti-leftism locked in struggle with his ‘concern for justice and humanitarianism’. By contrast, the Liberals today have put a sleeper hold on conscience.

People of conscience should welcome, and exploit, the divisions within the Liberal Party. There is a tendency, however, to let the rosy glow of Fraser’s late dissent cast a benign aura over the early Fraser. This is quite pronounced in Fraser’s admiring co-author, Margaret Simons, and in other conservatives who find the Howard brand of politics a little too uncomfortable.

Simons’ book is devoted to showing that “the Fraser government is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented governments in our history”, that its critics are unfair, blinded by Fraser’s 1975 constitutional coup. This is not warranted. The contradictions of liberalism were clearly on display under the early Fraser when support of free enterprise meant hostility to peace, freedom, democracy and human rights - to save the village it had to be burned; to preserve freedom it had to be curbed; peace meant bombs; democracy meant coups; the road to equality meant wage freezes, union-bashing and cuts to public services for the working class. As this book on Fraser unwittingly proves, we still need to go beyond liberal rhetoric and its failures in action.