Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the Opposition to support the condolence motion moved by the Leader of the Government in the Senate on the death of Australia's 22nd Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser. I extend to Malcolm Fraser's family and friends our deepest sympathies. To Tamie Fraser, his wife of more than 58 years, and to Mark, Angela, Hugh and Phoebe, their children, I say how profoundly sorry we are for your loss.

John Malcolm Fraser was born in Melbourne on 21 May 1930. George V was on the throne. Jim Scullin was Prime Minister, battling both the Great Depression and a hostile Senate. Later that year, Phar Lap would win his first and only Melbourne Cup. Malcolm Fraser was the grandson of Simon Fraser, a member of both houses of the Victorian parliament, a delegate to the Australasian Federation Convention of 1897-98 and a senator for Victoria from 1901 to 1913. Simon Fraser moved the first Address-in-Reply in the Senate. Like his grandson, Malcolm, he was fiercely anti-socialist.

Malcolm grew up on pastoral properties, in the Riverina and then, famously, at 'Nareen' in Victoria's Western District, the property with which he is most closely associated. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar and then Oxford University, graduating in 1952. Just two years after that graduation, he contested the then Labor seat of Wannon for the Liberal Party, and lost by just 17 votes. A year later he won Wannon for the Liberal Party and found himself a member of the House of Representatives aged just 25, at that time the youngest member of the House. And, as Senator Abetz has said, he would serve the people of Wannon for the next 28 years.

Denied appointment to ministerial office under Prime Minister Menzies, Malcolm Fraser's first ministerial role came in 1966, when Prime Minister Holt appointed him Minister for the Army. He held this role from 1966 to 1968 and oversaw conscription for service in Vietnam. Having helped to engineer Senator John Gorton's election as leader in the wake of Holt's disappearance, Malcolm Fraser was appointed by Gorton to the cabinet post of Minister for Education and Science in 1968. He held this office until his promotion to Minister for Defence after the 1969 election. That appointment ended in 1971, when his relationship with Prime Minister Gorton deteriorated so badly that he resigned, an act that precipitated the resignation of Gorton himself. A few months after that, Gorton's successor, Prime Minister Billy McMahon, reappointed Malcolm Fraser to the ministry in his old role as Minister for Education and Science, a position he held until the defeat of the government in 1972.

In the first days of opposition, Malcolm Fraser stood unsuccessfully as leader and deputy leader, and he went on to serve as shadow minister for primary industries before challenging Billy Snedden for the Liberal leadership unsuccessfully in November 1974 and finally successfully in March 1975. It was in that role that Malcolm Fraser catapulted himself into political infamy. As opposition leader he was not content to let the recently re-elected Whitlam government govern. Anti-Labor numbers in the Senate had been bolstered through the unscrupulous actions of conservative premiers appointing non-Labor senators to fill Labor vacancies. The Fraser-led opposition used those numbers to block supply, a course of action that led Governor-General John Kerr to dismiss Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, commission Malcolm Fraser in his place and issue writs for a double dissolution. The nation went to the polls for the third time in three years and Labor suffered a heavy defeat. While Malcolm Fraser had achieved his objective, the manner in which he took office forever tainted his prime ministership, and the polarising events of 1975 earned him the enmity of many Australians. This fact of history makes his later reconciliation with Gough Whitlam all the more remarkable.

In electoral terms, Mr Fraser was one of the Liberal Party's most successful leaders, winning office in 1975 and retaining office at two subsequent elections. At the time he left office he was Australia's second-longest-serving Prime Minister. The coalition maintained the clear Senate majority that it won in the 1975 double dissolution election until July 1981. As Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser implemented some key elements of the Whitlam program, including legislating land rights in the Northern Territory, ending sandmining on Fraser Island and establishing the Family Court, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Commonwealth Ombudsman. And other key reforms, such as the abolition of university fees, were not undone. Malcolm Fraser promoted multiculturalism and established the Special Broadcasting Service. And his government welcomed tens of thousands of Indo-Chinese refugees to our shores—an act that has enriched both our nation and my home state of South Australia immeasurably.

Internationally, Prime Minister Fraser was a strong and effective opponent of apartheid in South Africa and a supporter of democratic rule in Rhodesia. In a statement marking the passing of Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating remarked that throughout his political and public life Malcolm had 'no truck with race or colour and no tolerance for whispered notions of exclusivity tinged by race'.

The Fraser government enacted our first freedom of information laws and established the Human Rights Commission. Malcolm Fraser was one of the few Prime Ministers to successfully initiate changes to our Constitution, succeeding with three of four proposals put to the Australian people on 21 May 1977, including an amendment on Senate casual vacancies requiring that departing senators be replaced by senators from the same party or group.

Malcolm Fraser and the government he led lost office on 5 March 1983. He had called an election on 3 February hoping to face Bill Hayden as opposition leader but instead found himself facing Bob Hawke. Hawke, of course, was magnificent, but the recession, the drought and the refusal to halt the Franklin Dam aided Labor's cause. Malcolm Fraser accepted responsibility for the election loss and resigned from parliament aged 55.

He brought the same resolute conviction he had shown in his political life to bear in his post-political life where he held key national and international roles. He was co-chair of the Commonwealth Group of Eminent Persons on South Africa from 1985–86. This body played a key role in the international effort to dismantle the apartheid system and ensure a peaceful transition to democratic rule in South Africa. In 1987 he founded the aid organisation Care Australia and later served as President of Care International from 1990 to 1995. In 2000 Malcolm Fraser was awarded the Human Rights Medal by the then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for his work advancing human rights in Australia and abroad.

Malcolm Fraser's death has ignited a discussion about whether Mr Fraser changed over his life or whether his party, or his nation, changed around him. In introducing him at a writers' festival, Laura Tingle observed that the Darth Vader of her youth had become the Obi-Wan Kenobi of her middle age. Of course, all of us in public life have our contradictions. Sometimes they spring from the suppression of personal opinions in the cause of party discipline and let loose once free of the party whip. At other times, it is because we grow to reject views we once held or because the world around us has changed so radically that our old world view is simply out of place.

There is no doubt that Malcolm Fraser's life was marked by contradiction: the shy, reserved man who felled two Liberal leaders and polarised a nation with his assault on constitutional norms; the Cold War warrior who later called for the end of Australia's military alliance with the United States; the lifelong Liberal who left the Liberal Party; and the right-winger known to a generation of his Twitter-followers as a champion of asylum seekers, reconciliation and an Australian Republic. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has observed that Malcolm Fraser's personal reconciliation with Gough Whitlam represented more than one man coming to terms with another—it was itself an act of national reconciliation.

Malcolm Fraser's passing has caused many of us to reflect on and reassess the contribution he made to his party and his nation over the course of his long public life. Today, as Labor Leader in the Senate, I recognise and thank him for that contribution.