Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

'Nothing's changed,' I heard somebody say! That is a very harsh comment. Perhaps there are not quite as many men as there used to be, but there are nonetheless still—I think we would all agree—too many, relative to the women.

But that pair formed a bond. They were both young women, having their first babies together, both in this pretty tough environment.

Above all—and I know that Malcolm's family will recognise this—out of all of this, in the discussion of his great achievements, to which I will turn in a moment, is this House's, this parliament's, this nation's love to them, to the family, recognising their grief, their loss and, above all, honouring that great love story which was the foundation of Malcolm and Tamie's joint expedition into the public life of Australia and all the achievements that flowed from that.

I should say a little bit about Malcolm Fraser's demeanour. He was elected to parliament as the youngest member of parliament at the time, at 24, but he was also the tallest. He had always—partly, I think, because of his height—

Government members interjecting—

The member for Longman should not feel that as a backhanded compliment! Unlike the member for Longman, the then member for Wannon, the young member for Wannon, had a chilly demeanour. He was shy. I think a lot of people took that for a real personal coldness, which was not the case. Malcolm Fraser was a shy man, and in some cases that was really misinterpreted. And that, coupled with his height and a rather austere appearance—the farmer from the Western District—meant it was easy to paint a caricature, particularly contrary to the flamboyance of Gough Whitlam or indeed the extraordinary gregarious conviviality of Bob Hawke, who succeeded him. But he was always a very droll man. He had a very good sense of humour. I want to recall a letter that Malcolm Fraser wrote to the Melbourne Sun on 3 June 1954, after he had only just failed to win the seat of Wannon from the Labor Party. It was a Labor seat and he nearly won it. He lost by a few hundred votes and then of course won it at the next election and then built up his majority till it became a very safe seat. But he wrote this letter following the election:

Sir

In the course of the recent federal election campaign statements been made in the Melbourne press with respect to my football activities past and future. Three statements have been quoted as having been made by me. All are untrue. I did not say I played Australian Rules football for Melbourne Grammar or rugger for Oxford University. No local team in the Western District has ever approached me to play football. The only position that I would be qualified to fill on a football field would be that of goal post.

For a shy 24-year-old—honourable members can understand—he had a very good sense of humour.

Often governments and politicians and leaders get credit for doing things that would have happened anyway because the tenor of the times is such that certain reform was inevitably going to happen and the respective government or Prime Minister—or minister, for that matter—is johnny-on-the-spot who happens to be there to make the decision that had to be made. But the real mark of political achievement is when leaders actually change history, when they do things that are different, and Fraser had a very deep sense of this. After all, as the Treasurer—he is not here anymore; he has vanished; that is quite a feat! But, as the Treasurer was saying earlier, in Malcolm Fraser's Deakin lecture, where he used the line 'Life wasn't meant to be easy,' he was actually summarising Arnold Toynbee's 12 volumes—which was quite an achievement—which he had studied at Oxford. Toynbee's thesis really was that civilisations basically are not destroyed by external forces; they commit suicide; they give up. He made the point that we have to keep on fighting; we have to recognise that we have big challenges and keep on going at them. That is what he meant. It was not at all the smug remark that it was later represented to be.

When you look at what he did in respect of shaping the nature of Australia today, it is really quite remarkable. When you sum up Australia to a foreign friend, one of the first things you would say is, 'This is the most successful multicultural society in the world.' There is no country in the world that has a higher percentage of immigrants—that is to say, people who were born outside of Australia. Not one. No comparable country has as high a percentage. America, supposedly the melting pot, has half the percentage. And ours is so diverse.

How have we been able to do that so successfully? Well, this has been the work of generations and of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Australians. Ultimately, it comes from the good sense and big-heartedness of Australians. It has seen enormous leadership from those in this chamber. Of course, the member for Berowra, who I know will speak later, is one of the great architects of this. But Malcolm Fraser was so far ahead of his time. He was the first federal politician, as far as we know—certainly the first minister—ever to use the term 'multiculturalism' and talk about multiculturalism. He did so in a speech to the State Zionist Council of New South Wales in 1969. That is a full four years before Al Grassby, described as the father of multiculturalism, became a minister.

You can see here where impressions can be so misleading. Malcolm Fraser—tall, rather austere, suited, generally with a waistcoat, with stiff English shoes, looking very much the creation of the establishment—was undoubtedly a member, a scion, if you like, of the Protestant ascendency in the Victorian establishment. It is easy to put him into that conservative box. Al Grassby, of course, had his moustache, his purple suits and so forth—clearly a progressive and a radical. But there was Malcolm Fraser, four years before, in office, making those very points.

His views on this matter, I think, were in large part formed by sectarianism. As I said, he grew up in the days when sectarianism was much stronger. He went into politics at the time of the Labor split; he was very close to BA Santamaria. That is quite a tradition with Prime Ministers on our side, so it seems—that is a compliment.

Honourable members interjecting—

They will laugh at anything; they are easily amused, Prime Minister. Fraser deplored the way Billy Hughes, in the First World War, had set out to divide the nation on sectarian grounds. This really marked his thinking and, I believe, made a huge impact on his approach to multiculturalism and racism in the years ahead. He was, as we know, a great supporter of Aboriginal land rights, when in office as Prime Minister; views that were strongly reinforced when he toured the Northern Territory as education minister with Billy Wentworth, who was then the minister for Indigenous affairs or whatever the department was called at that time.

His treatment and welcoming of Vietnamese refugees was—and I say this without a tinge of partisanship—in contrast to that of the previous Labor government. In that respect, Fraser was very critical of the Whitlam government for not being generous enough to refugees from Vietnam. In government this so-called conservative, this stiff member of the establishment, had a much more generous approach than any of his predecessors. In that sense, as you can see with multiculturalism, with immigration and with antiracism, he was very, very much ahead of his time—ahead of his time whether it was on the Liberal side or the Labor side.

The establishment of the Special Broadcasting Service, which has been mentioned, was an extraordinary innovation—unique anywhere in the world, as far as I am aware. That was very much a creation of Malcolm Fraser, inspired, no doubt, by his adviser Petro Georgiou. When Petro retired from this House, he said very eloquently of Malcolm Fraser:

To those who have sought to denigrate Malcolm Fraser, I just want to say one thing: Malcolm’s fusion of political toughness with compassion and social conscience is simply beyond their comprehension.

He has been criticised for not doing enough in terms of microeconomic reform. That criticism is both inaccurate, up to a point, but also rather unfair. As John Howard and Peter Reith have both said in recent times, Malcolm Fraser, while he went into parliament as a young man, was very much there with the views and attitudes of the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, he was imbued with the attitudes of men and women a generation older than himself, because they were his peers. So you cannot look at the economic debate of 2015 and go back to 1975, all those years—40 years—and say, 'They got it wrong; they weren't progressive enough; they didn't understand it.' It was, in every respect, a very, very different world.

During the republic campaign, as the Prime Minister observed, Malcolm Fraser was deaf to the Prime Minister's eloquence and, thankfully, supported the 'yes' vote. He did so with someone who became his old friend—Gough Whitlam. I will say a little bit about that in conclusion, but just let me say this about the republic debate. Fraser made a remarkably energetic and thoughtful contribution to that debate. He was hyperactive: he gave speeches, he wrote articles and he tackled one of the very key constitutional points, which was whether, under the republican model being proposed—the scheme, as honourable members will recall, was that the Prime Minister could remove the president but not appoint the successor to the president. This was one of the safeguards built into it. The argument was put by the monarchist side that the Queen had no obligation to act on the advice of the Prime Minister to appoint or remove a Governor-General.

Fraser of course, having been a Prime Minister and having had real, firsthand experience of constitutional crises, was able to lend the authority of his office invoking actually Robert Menzies, who had commented on this same point, to lend some real authority and dignity to that debate. He made a very big contribution to the 'yes' campaign. Whenever we polled the ratings, the respect and approval of various political figures engaged in the campaign, he was at the very top. He was such a widely respected person.

So much else has been said about Malcolm Fraser's illustrious life. Can I just conclude on one lesson that I think he gives to all of us. People in our line of work tend to get consumed with bitterness and resentment. Often we have good cause to be or, at least, we think we do. Fraser, who had plenty of detractors and plenty of enemies, was, nonetheless, not a hater. It was a remarkable feature of his evolution. Remember that he ceased to be Prime Minister at age 52 or 53, so he was a young Prime Minister and a young ex-Prime-Minister. But, despite all of that tumult and all of the venom that had been expended at him, he did not look backwards; he was focused on the issues of today and tomorrow. His last tweet, we all recall, was tweeting an article about Chinese foreign policy. He was not interested in getting into his anecdotage, sitting back in the armchair and talking about what might have been or who was right or wrong in the sacking of Gorton or the sacking of Whitlam. He was focused on the future. But he did so in a thoroughly positive way and, in that respect, gave all of us an example that we should at every stage, like Fraser and like Whitlam did, drive the negativity and hatred and bitterness out of ourselves, fill it with love because that makes us stronger and makes our nation stronger.

Farewell Malcolm Fraser. The nation has lost one of its greats. We salute you. We pray for your family. They are in our prayers and we know that your role in Australian history will be forever recognised as one of the greatest, one of the architects of the extraordinary nation all of us are so honoured to represent in this chamber.

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