Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on this condolence motion for the Hon. John Malcolm Fraser, a statesman of my party, a statesman of this country and our 22nd Prime Minister. To my regret, I did not know Malcolm Fraser well. During his life I met him in passing on a handful of occasions, but despite this I have never been under any illusions as to the enormity of his legacy and the contribution to the Liberal Party and to Australia.

As I said late last year in my condolence speech for Malcolm's great rival and ultimately his great friend the Hon Gough Whitlam—and I note that these two were the giants of Australian political life—I want to make special mention of Malcolm's wife, Tamie, their four children Phoebe, Mark, Angela and Hugh, and their grandchildren. I extended my deepest sympathy to them all. Our families are often the forgotten people in our political lives. They are asked to give up so much and they have so many intrusions into their lives, and often it is many more times than anyone has a right to ask of them or to expect. To Malcolm's family I want to say that your service has been no less distinguished. Thank you so much.

Malcolm Fraser is without doubt one of the major figures in Australia's political history. He was Prime Minister from November 1975 to March 1983, making him the third longest-serving Liberal PM after Robert Menzies and John Howard. He will also forever be known, along with Gough Whitlam and Sir John Kerr, as one of the three main figures of the Dismissal in 1975. But, like Gough, Malcolm Fraser's contribution to Australian political life extends far beyond the Dismissal.

He has been recognised for many achievements in his time as Prime Minister, and I want to highlight some of the most important—though not exclusive—achievements. He established the Human Rights Commission. He established freedom of information legislation. He created many of the bodies that work effectively today such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman. I pay tribute to him. He also did some groundbreaking work in many, many areas, including the banning of sand mining on Fraser Island and the banning of drilling on the Great Barrier Reef. Malcolm Fraser helped to set up the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and ensured that it was World Heritage listed, and we are forever grateful for that particular initiation.

He established the Special Broadcasting Service. He began large-scale Asian immigration to Australia, particularly of Vietnamese refugees fleeing communism. And they have been wonderful contributors to Australian life and have contributed enormously to the wonderful nation that we are today. I also want to pay tribute to Malcolm Fraser for his work in Indigenous equality.

For me, however, it was his enduring commitment to human rights that set him apart as a great statesman. He commissioned the 1978 Galbally report, which identified a need to provide special services and programs for all migrants, to ensure equal opportunity of access to government funded programs and services with a view to helping migrants become self-reliant. Many of the settlement programs and immigration policies that we have today are because of the great work that was done in that report—ensuring that the needs of migrants and refugees were taken into account. I consider these sentiments as being an extension of the Menzies philosophy that we need to be a nation of lifters not leaners. And when we look at the great success that multiculturalism has brought to Australia, I think we must all acknowledge that Malcolm Fraser was right.

I see Malcolm Fraser's role in Australian political history as that of transition. For the Liberal Party he was very much a transitional figure, emerging from the Menzies era into the mid-1980s where economic realities were changing. We were transitioning from being an insulated economy of tariff protections to confront the international realities of competition and the need for structural reform, less regulation and increased productivity.

In my mind his role as a transitional man never changed throughout his life. He remained active in political discourse to the end, often changing his views as his perspective on issues changed and expanded. It is a way of thinking that I feel can and should be accommodated in what John Howard referred to as the 'broad church of the Liberal Party'. His transition from being the political enemy of Gough Whitlam to becoming a close friend was a great credit to them both, and is a transformational lesson for all of us.

Malcolm spoke of his political philosophy as being based on the need for representative democracy, where it is incumbent on political figures to be properly informed, to exercise their own judgement, to learn about an issue and then to make up their own minds as to how best to represent their constituents. As such, he was not enamoured of focus group or poll driven politics, which I imagine he would have viewed as being the equivalent of having lock-jaw of the brain. He relished the challenge of debate, and that is something that as a party and a nation we should never be afraid of.

I pay tribute to the former member for Wannon, our 22nd Prime Minister. I would like to conclude by paraphrasing his own words when he left the parliament in 1983. I am confident that he did hand over an Australia 'in as good or better condition than any other Western country in the world'. Malcom Fraser, Australia is indeed a better place thanks to your lasting legacy.

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