George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I associate myself with the remarks of my leader, Senator Abetz. I also thank Senator Wong and Senator Milne for the gracious tributes that they have paid to the late Malcolm Fraser. In her contribution in particular, Senator Wong appropriately did not gloss over the intensity of the political dispute at which Mr Fraser was at the centre in 1975. Nor did she gloss over the enmity with which the Labor Party treated Malcolm Fraser in the course of that very bitter political conflict. It is appropriate, I think, if we assess Mr Fraser's life as a whole, as we should, that all elements of his career and all of the critical events in which he was an important participant should be acknowledged, and Senator Wong has done that—as, indeed, has Senator Milne. I will return to those events in a moment.

When Malcolm Fraser rose in the House of Representatives shortly after nine o'clock on 22 February 1956 to make his maiden speech, he was not long back from Oxford. In fact, I am wearing my Magdalen tie today in tribute to him. Although Mr Fraser was regarded as a dour and humourless politician for much of his life, his first words in the House of Representatives were actually a cheeky joke. He said:

As the youngest member of this House—in passing I should like to say that if I remain a member it will take me 33 years to reach the average age of members of the Cabinet—I appreciate the honour that the electors of Wannon have shown me by returning me as their representative.

It was a speech largely devoted to the issue of national development but, in the course of the speech, he did touch upon some broader themes which were to characterise his public life. He said, among other things:

We owe a duty to ourselves, to future generations of Australians, and to the rest of the free world to play our part in the maintenance of world freedom and peace; and any effective foreign policy directed towards that end must, quite obviously, envisage an effective defence force.

Before he was Prime Minister, he was involved primarily in defence related portfolios and, as other senators have pointed out, was a very strong proponent of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War. He finished his speech, rather movingly, with these words:

I was too young to fight in the last war, and I owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought in World War I, as well as in World War II. But I am not too young now to fight for my faith and belief in the future of this great nation, in which the individual is, and always shall remain, supreme.

Malcolm Fraser was, as Senator Wong has observed, a lifelong liberal. It is a matter of regret to those of us in the Liberal Party that he was not a lifelong member of the Liberal Party. He resigned from the Liberal Party some 4½ years ago. But in the span of a long life and in the span of a long career the most important contribution a person makes in public life is the contribution they make during the time they serve here in the parliament. Malcolm Fraser served in the parliament for 27½ years. I assume the average age of the cabinet fell during the course of those 27½ years. He was in fact a relatively young Prime Minister at the age of 45, an office he held for seven years and four months. So when we look at the totality of Malcolm Fraser's contribution of course we should consider the post-parliamentary years. They are relevant. In his post-parliamentary years, Mr Fraser did many very, very fine things. But the most important years were the years in which he led the nation. He was, as Senator Wong rightly said, in many ways marked by contradiction. But, much more importantly, he was consistently a liberal. He was consistently a person who subscribed to the great liberal philosophical tradition. It is to that that I want to direct my remarks in particular.

In the years before he became Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser gave two speeches that were of particular importance. The first of those was the 1971 Deakin lecture, given a few months after he brought down the Gorton government and established himself as very much a politician on the rise. Those were the days, by the way, in which Malcolm Fraser was seen as an ogre of the right by his critics. In the Deakin lecture, he said this:

Arnold Toynbee once wrote twelve volumes to demonstrate and analyse the cause of the rise and fall of nations. His thesis can be condensed to a sentence, and is simply stated: That through history nations are confronted by a series of challenges and whether they survive or whether they fall to the wayside, depends on the manner and character of their response. Simple, and perhaps one of the few things that is self evident. It involves a conclusion about the past that life has not been easy for people or for nations, and an assumption for the future that that condition will not alter. There is within me some part of the metaphysic, and thus I would add that life is not meant to be easy.

That is the genesis of the remark often associated with him. But, in fact, as he pointed out in later years, he was channelling George Bernard Shaw, who in his play Back to Methuselah gave the full quote:

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.

There is something of a robust, Theodore Roosevelt air about the 1971 Deakin lecture. It is a peon to the vigorous life, in a very Theodore Rooseveltian way. He went on to say:

We need a rugged society, but our new generations have seen only affluence. If a man has not known adversity, if in his lifetime his country has not been subject to attack, it is harder for him to understand that there are some things for which we must always struggle. Thus people or leaders can be trapped to take the easy path. This is the high road to national disaster. There are many strands to the maintenance of will—a society that encourages individual strength and initiative, an understanding of events, ability to bear sacrifices, an understanding that there are obligations that precede rights and a belief that work is still desirable.

The great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change. We must be particularly aware of the great weaknesses of man's idealism which is to forget the frailty of the human race, to believe that man is something that he is not and so construct a view of society that can only exist in the mind. We can only draw reality from our idealism when we can accept that while we strive for perfection, we will not reach it in this world nor our sons after us. Recognition of this truth should soften the radical, bring tolerance to the fanatic, temper the extremes of love and hate. But it will not make our vigilance or struggle any the less necessary.

There you have, in a few sentences, the approach of Malcolm Fraser that characterised his entire public life: a belief that great causes are something that have to be struggled for. That ruggedness, that purposeful, the rugged individualism, characterised Mr Fraser through all the twists and turns of a long life. It certainly characterised his prime ministership.

When, in 1975, he took the decision to block supply, he made himself the object of the most intense hatred that I have ever seen directed at an Australian public figure. The venom and hatred directed at John Howard when he was Prime Minister and the venom and hatred directed at Mr Abbott today are mild by comparison to the vile and venom and hatred directed at Malcolm Fraser by the Labor Party and those on the Left in politics in those remarkable summer days of October, November and December 1975.

Today it is regarded as almost a capital political offence, certainly in the worst possible taste, to invoke Nazi metaphors. Yet routinely in 1975, Mr Fraser was depicted on Labor Party placards with a Hitler fringe and a Hitler moustache. Routinely the letter 'S' in the middle of his surname was replaced by a swastika. Never in my lifetime has a figure being more reviled and anathematised by the Left than was Malcolm Fraser in 1975.

I mentioned earlier that, before he became the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser gave two speeches of particular importance, and I have quoted from the first, the Deakin lecture. But, at the height of those days—in fact, it was on 25 September 1975, a matter of days before the Senate first deferred the supply bills—Malcolm Fraser gave a speech in Perth, the Sir Robert Menzies lecture, which in those days was held under the auspices of the Western Australian division of the Liberal Party. It is, I think, the most important speech he ever gave, because he set out in an articulate and compelling way the philosophical argument for the difference between my side of politics and the Labor side of politics. I seek the indulgence of the Senate to quote some passages from that speech, because I maintain that Malcolm Fraser never became a figure of the Left. Certainly he was disillusioned with the Liberal Party in his last years; there is no doubt about that. But the values that he articulated, in particular in the Sir Robert Menzies lecture, never left him. He said this:

Some people appear to believe that the differences between governments of the Liberal and Labor persuasion on the issue of government intervention is merely a matter of degree. On this view, Liberal Governments make merely a pretense at resisting governmental growth, while Labor governments actually foster government growth. Superficially, the record bears this out. There has been a continuing growth in the size of government over the last few decades.

He went on to say:

Underlying the different rates of expansion of government, are two fundamentally opposed attitudes to the role of government and its proper relation to the people of Australia.

One attitude, the Liberal attitude, is that there are serious limitations on the ability of the government to produce the better life, that while government may encourage and assist people, basically, a better life will be built by Australians themselves, through their own efforts, by their own decisions, on their own volition.

The other attitude, the Labor attitude, believes that a government growing in size and powers and concentrated in Canberra, is the road to a better life for the average Australian.

The Liberal view is that the goals of Australians should be set by Australians themselves in the course of their lives. Government is the focus of common but limited goals. It does not, and should not set, detailed goals for individuals. Government has the job of aiding people in pursuit of their diverse objectives and of minimizing the imposition of uniformity and conformity.

The Labor view on the other hand views government as embodying some higher wisdom, as the authentic voice of the community, as distinct from the individuals who make up the community. In this view, it is bad that individuals differ, that they want different things. Since there is a common interest known to the governments, its wishes prevail over individual desires. In this view that fewer choices in important matters that individuals have, the better, because the greater the latitude that individuals have the more likely they are to deviate from the government's line.

The means of implementing this philosophy is through gaining control over an ever-increasing proportion of the earnings of the individual. It gains this control through the tax system.

Having exposed, I think, in a particularly clear and articulate way the fundamental differences in approach between those who sit on my side of the aisle and the Labor Party, Mr Fraser went on to critique the Labor approach. He said:

The notion of an all-embracing community will and over-riding community interest represented by a ruling group which claims to have the insight to discover what the com-munity really wants, has been the basic rationale for totalitarian movements which suppressed people in the interests of a myth. Government is not the embodiment of the community. It is a set of institutions within a wider society. A community composed of groups and individuals who have both co-operative and conflicting interests.

The significance of undertaking an increasing number of activities through governmental decision can only be appreciated if the character of governmental institutions is properly understood. Government is bureaucratic. It is not the only bureaucracy in society, but it is the most powerful. Government places decisions in the hands of a few. In the provision of services, it tends to be monopolistic. It largely relies on the acquisition of resources by compulsion from other sections of the community. In allocating resources, governments rely on authority and coercion. These are simple facts.

They do not mean government cannot be used for very worthwhile ends, in a dynamic and creative way. In fact, it is fundamental to Liberal beliefs that the power of government ought to be used to establish the circumstances in which people can act according to their own wishes and to assist those in need, who would not otherwise obtain assistance. One of the great strengths of the Liberal tradition of political thought is that it has always had a much more accurate view of the role and nature of government than those influenced by socialist philosophy.

Lastly, he went on to say:

This is the reason why Liberals have always sought to keep government limited. Liberals have recognised that that government, in common with all monopolies, is a threat both to individuals and to the community's constituent groups. It inevitably means a massive growth of monopoly power, the power to dictate. Government may have both a constructive and destructive role in relation to the constituent groups of community. Ill-conceived government action effectively destroys co-operation between members of the community.

That is, I think and if I may say so, a very eloquent and accurate description of the philosophical underpinnings of the liberal tradition.

Although in the years after he left parliament, and in particular in the last years of his life, Malcolm Fraser may have had very strong differences from the Liberal governments of the day, whether the Howard government or the Abbott government on individual policy issues—most notably refugee policy—nothing that Malcolm Fraser said in that Robert Menzies lecture of 1975 40 years ago had abated until the day he died. Not one word of it, which is why I stand in this chamber today proud to claim Malcolm Fraser is a great liberal. It is sad that in the last four or five years of his life he was estranged from my party, but nevertheless confident in the knowledge that the philosophical tradition that he represented and the philosophical tradition that I and my colleagues represent are one and the same. I give thanks for the memory of the great Australian.