Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

'Malcolm Fraser was the reason I joined the Labor Party and he was also the reason I joined the Greens.' They were the words of one of my staff members this morning, and they point to the very many different reflections and perspectives that we have heard here today. It is a legacy that I want to reflect on. I will not dwell too much on the different contributions that he made through his political career, but do want to mention a few.

The great multicultural nation that is modern Australia owes much to Malcolm Fraser. I stand here very much as a product of multicultural Australia. It is on the backs of families like mine and the many, many families from the many cultures around the world that the Australian nation has been built. We owe Malcolm Fraser a great debt for that.

He oversaw a huge change in Australia's cultural make up. As Prime Minister he was the steward of the wave of Asian migration, with many tens of thousands of people from South-East Asia, including 50,000 Vietnamese refugees, making Australia their home. Fraser granted entry to 2,059 Vietnamese boat people, who arrived without papers, without documents. He welcomed those people in. He established a whole range of resources: translator and English language services and so on. He set up the Human Rights Commission in 1981. He was a staunch opponent of South Africa's apartheid regime. He was a champion of Indigenous issues, setting up the Aboriginal land rights act of 1976. Unusually for a man of his vintage, he was absolutely colour blind.

He made an enormous contribution to the environment, as we heard earlier. It was the Fraser Liberal government that banned whaling. He signed a number of international conventions that protected endangered species. He made a big contribution in the Antarctic. He banned exploration and drilling for petroleum in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. He stopped sand mining on Fraser Island. Senator Abetz in his contribution, earlier, said, 'He did all that without a Green in sight.' That is absolutely true, because that was an era when standing up for the environment was a non-partisan project, when being a true conservative was to conserve, when being a conservationist was to preserve the natural order of things. It was a non-partisan project, and it was as much a conservative project, a Liberal project, as it was a Green project.

People of different ages have different memories of Malcolm Fraser. I spoke to someone on the weekend who said to me that he will never forgive Malcolm Fraser for the dismissal. My own personal reflections of him are very hazy. I was too young to remember the dismissal. I do not remember being particularly fond of him as Prime Minister, but I was only a young fellow. My wife, Lucy, worked with members of his family through his humanitarian work. His work at CARE is fondly remembered. His families' work and his own work in that space has been enormously welcomed. Later in life, there are people like my fellow senator Sarah Hanson-Young and the relationship they had.

The big question for me is: did he change or did the world around him change? I think the answer is both. He clearly changed his mind on some issues. He went from being a cold war warrior and being an advocate and supporter of the Vietnam War, who oversaw conscription and the so-called lottery of death, to somebody who became a trenchant critic of the US foreign policy. He argued, much like I do, for more independent, non-aligned foreign policy.

That does not explain everything. He was also right when he said that his politics had not changed but his party had. His actions in government and statements in later life were entirely consistent when it came to the issue of refugees and asylum seekers. He was a champion for Vietnamese refugees, just as he was a champion for the refugees currently being held in offshore detention. For many, many people, he articulated how they feel about that issue today. He gave them permission and he gave them validation to feel the way they feel today. It is very hard to imagine anyone today bringing in tens of thousands of immigrants—or refugees, specifically—from overseas in the face of fierce political and committee opposition. But he did that. He showed leadership on that front and he is to be congratulated for that.

I do want to thank him for both of those things. He showed that in a profession like politics, where having a closed mind is considered a virtue, it is okay to change your mind and that independence of thought is too important to sacrifice to the altar of party loyalty. You hear terms like backflips, cave-ins and flip-flopping. He made it clear that his first priority was to ensure that he looked to his own conscience before he looked to his party. That is a lesson that I think we can all learn from today. Most importantly, what I want to thank Malcolm Fraser for is for reminding us that some values are universal values, which transcend cultures and transcend political fashions. They are, indeed, universal. Care for human rights, protection for the vulnerable and looking for the environment will never be out of fashion, as they are universal values.

Many of us today are going to talk about Malcolm Fraser's life, myself included, and will reinforce our own political opinions and judgements by looking to those things that he did and by looking to those things that we support. We will use that as an opportunity to pay tribute to this man. But ultimately, they do not mean much. The public speeches, the commentary and the opinion pieces are not going to be the ultimate arbiter of Malcolm Fraser's life. Time is the only judge of that. I am very confident that time will be kind to Malcolm Fraser. Vale, Malcolm Fraser.