Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

When I was a newly elected member of this House some 22 years ago, Malcolm Fraser gave me the best political advice that I have ever received. He said that when a constituent is in contact with you as a local member of parliament, when they have gone to the trouble of being in touch, it is because the matter they raise is, for them at that time, the most important thing of all. For you, as a member of parliament, it may be one of very many things with which you need to be concerned. But for them it is uppermost, and so it is essential to respond as quickly and as well as you can to their issue. This, it seems to me, is great advice for a member of parliament. But it also reflects the fact that, no matter how high the office he held and how widely he was respected around the world in the years after his service in this House, Malcolm Fraser never lost sight of the high honour we have of serving our constituents and of the importance of each and every one. I was very grateful for this advice and I remain grateful to this day.

So, while the international community has lost a statesman, our nation has lost one of the great makers of modern Australia and his family has lost a husband, father and grandfather, I personally am deeply saddened at the loss of a mentor and a friend, someone who remained so until his unexpected death on Friday. Even after he left the Liberal Party, I remained a great admirer of him, valuing his contribution in the context of his times and sharing so many of the values for which he fought so hard over many decades. We continued to meet and talk, and I last met with him just a few weeks ago.

Of course, my personal sadness can be nothing as compared with the sadness of Malcolm's family. They are in our prayers and our thoughts, and our hearts go out to them in their grief. In concluding the acknowledgements to his most recent book Dangerous Allies, Malcolm wrote:

As always, Tamie has helped in innumerable ways and made it easier to bring the book to a conclusion. Thank you, Tamie.

Anyone who knew the Frasers personally or even watched them in their public life will never doubt that Tammie always 'helped in innumerable ways'. In extending our deepest sympathies to her and to her and Malcolm's family, we join with Malcolm in saying, 'Thank you, Tamie.' Thank you also to Tamie and Malcom's children for sharing their father with the nation, a price that all of us in this place who are parents will understand.

My political awareness really developed greatly under the influence of Malcolm Fraser. During the 1975 election campaign, when I was eight years old, I rather surprised the teachers when I wore a Liberal Turn on the Lights campaign badge to school. I joined the Young Liberals not long after Malcolm Fraser left office. As an undergraduate, I read Philip Ayres biography of him, with its forward by the former President of France, Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Giscard d'Estaing wrote that, in his first long discussion with Malcolm, when Malcolm was Prime Minister and Giscard d'Estaing was President, and during subsequent meetings:

Malcolm Fraser came across as a man of conviction. He is deeply attached to the values of human dignity and solidarity, and we have developed a true friendship.

Giscard d'Estaing continued, in 1987:

Together, we often called to mind the need to give a new impetus to the North-South dialogue. I am also very much aware of the action that he is carrying out in order to accelerate an end to apartheid.

Malcolm Fraser's fidelity to his principles does not prevent him from having a decidedly pragmatic approach to international problems. Giscard d'Estaing wrote:

In my opinion, as well as that of most of the Western leaders who know him, Malcolm Fraser is a remarkable mediator. In particular, I remember the important role that he played at the time of the independence of Zimbabwe.

It is just a little sidelight on the importance of Malcolm's international role that, as I was reading these words as an undergraduate in Adelaide, an African American Rhodes scholar in Oxford, then working on a doctoral thesis on Zimbabwe's independence, was also, in her words, enjoying the chapter in Malcolm's biography on Zimbabwe. She is Susan Rice, now the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. Of course, it was Malcolm's role in the so-called Eminent Persons Group, asked by the Commonwealth in the mid-1980s to help shape the way towards the end of apartheid, that earned him renewed international respect, including from Nelson Mandela with whom he first met in Pollsmoor prison in 1986.

I have already mentioned Malcolm's sage advice to me as a new member of parliament. Perhaps he took so benign and kind an interest in me because we both unexpectedly won preselection battles we had not particularly intended to enter at around the age of 24, and we both entered this House at the age of 25—no laughing from the member for Mayo—almost 40 years apart. Malcolm, of course, won a marginal seat and made it safe. I learnt from him some of what is needed of a marginal-seat holder. In more recent years, of course, while I have served as shadow minister and now as Minister for Education and Training, our bond has reflected the fact that Malcolm, an Oxford graduate and a university person to his death, twice served as Minister for Education and Science. As Prime Minister, he was so committed to education that he appointed the great Sir John Carrick as his education minister and then also as Leader of the Government in the Senate.

Malcolm, of course, studied philosophy, politics and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, under famous tutors. Even early in his parliamentary career, he, like Sir Robert Menzies, spoke of the importance of the humanities and, indeed, of the continued and perhaps increased importance of the humanities in a scientific age. In 1958, when the Western world was obsessed with the Soviet scientific challenge, reflected in the sputnik satellite, he told the House that he hoped:

… the study of the humanities … will be encouraged. I refer now to studies of the philosophies and of ways of living that can add richness to our lives. … The only … purpose of life is human happiness.

Malcolm continued this interest in ideas and the encouragement of the humanities, which, as I say, he shared with Menzies, in his time as Minister for Education and Science and beyond.

Even before he became a minister, Malcolm had also combined that interest with a strong encouragement of the development of colleges of advanced education—colleges which focused on more immediate vocational preparation than universities did. He supported the great expansion of higher education and of opportunity for students under the Menzies government. In 1968, when John Gorton became Prime Minister, Malcolm succeeded him as Minister for Education and Science. After a period as Minister for Defence under Gorton, and then some time back on the back bench, he again served as Minister for Education and Science for most of the McMahon government. As Minister for Education and Science, Malcolm continued the growth of government support for Catholic and independent schools, arguing that this was both fair and good economics. He expanded support for school libraries and for preschool teaching colleges. He promoted the study of Asian languages and culture, seeing Australia's future in Asia and also seeing the need for Australia to be a genuinely multicultural rather than a narrowly assimilationist society. He was a founding member of the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1965. Malcolm, as minister for science, promoted conservation, including, conspicuously, of the Great Barrier Reef.

Also, as Minister for Education and Science, Malcolm was a great friend of both universities and of CAEs. Like Menzies, he stressed the importance of the autonomy of universities, and he skilfully navigated challenges to this in the late sixties and seventies when student protests led some to want to see government interference in universities. He expanded scholarships, both for students to complete their secondary education and for them to go on to higher education. In 1972, as a minister who was expanding opportunity for students through Commonwealth scholarships, Malcolm opposed Gough Whitlam's policy of so-called free education, on equity grounds. He argued, on the same grounds later cited by prime ministers Hawke and Keating, that: 'This would result in the gigantic inequality of a wharf labourer paying taxes to subsidise a lawyer's education.' In the 1980s, Malcolm supported Prime Minister Hawke and education minister Dawkins in their reintroduction of university fees, at the time that HECS was created.

Malcolm's interest in ideas and in universities was reflected in his turning to leading scholars for ideas and specialist advice. In 1971, briefly again on the back bench, he invited professors from the Australian National University to help him think through how best to develop and expound the Liberal philosophy for the challenges of the times. He did this, for example, in an Alfred Deakin Lecture at the University of Melbourne, presided over by Sir Robert Menzies, as chancellor of the university. It was at this lecture that Menzies famously turned to Malcolm and said, not once but twice, 'Your day will come.' Later, as leader of the Liberal Party, choosing advisers such as David Kemp and Dennis White, with deep understanding of political science and philosophy, Malcolm frequently articulated the Liberal philosophy for which the party of Menzies stood, including its emphasis on equality of opportunity and the need to rebalance the relationship of the individual and the state. This, too, was something that he and I would later discuss.

Of his many formulations, one that I especially liked was in early 1975, when Malcolm said: 'The politician's task is not to subordinate the wishes of the people to the power and purpose of the state, but to maximise a person's capacity for making his or her own decisions.' Always at the heart of Malcolm's values was unstinting opposition, which I passionately share, to racism in any form, at home and abroad, be it indifference, or worse, towards Indigenous Australians, or racism in Africa, or anti-Semitism. His vigorous and path-breaking efforts against racism, in both national and international affairs, stands as a lasting legacy to him.

Like so many others, I admired and admire this, and his policy of welcoming to Australia tens of thousands of Vietnamese and other Indo-Chinese people, who, after communist victories throughout Indo-China, were seeking to escape those new and murderous tyrannies. He rightly argued that Australia should not turn away from those whose side we had fought on in Vietnam. The diverse face of modern Australia has also, of course, benefitted greatly from this welcome to those escaping danger, most of whom came here through orderly refugee resettlement processes in Asia.

In any tribute to Malcolm Fraser it is common to refer to the 1975 constitutional crisis, and to the subsequent friendship that developed between the great adversaries, Fraser and Whitlam. But I would like to refer to the choice that Prime Minister Fraser made in 1977, when Sir John Kerr decided to resign as Governor-General. Malcolm chose as his successor a vice-chancellor who had spoken much of the need to preserve the fragile consensus in a divided society, Sir Zelman Cowen. This inspired and brilliant choice of a Governor-General, who famously brought a touch of healing, was something of which Malcolm was rightly proud, as we would be justified, also, in pride in the selection of Sir Ninian Stephen to succeed Sir Zelman, as Governor-General.

If time, the ever-rolling stream, has borne away the great protagonists of the 1970s, who contributed much in the decades since, it has also borne away great and distinctive leaders who have profoundly influenced so many of us in this place, and fathers who leave unfillable holes in the families they loved and who loved them. This is most surely true of Malcolm Fraser. I give thanks for his life and treasure his memory.

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