Part 1
On Sunday morning two weeks ago (22 March 2015), I wandered into the town square of Cabramatta in western Sydney, a 10 minute walk from the home of my step-daughter and her Thai/Vietnamese family. There I encountered a big Vietnamese festival going on – a large tent enclosing a band, microphones, several MCs and seating for about 100 people. Parading around the tent in a slow march was a succession of women’s groups, dressed immaculately in multi-coloured fabrics. They were mainly middle-aged groups with banners that declared they were from, among others, the Vietnamese Women’s Association, the Vietnamese Aged Care Services Group and the Gia Long Association and, a younger group, the Canley Vale 1st Scout Troupe.
Looking back at the tent, I saw a big sign that gave the clue to the festival: it was to honour the two Trung Sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, who, in their late 20s, organised a resistance movement between AD 40 and AD 43 against the Chinese armies of the Han Dynasty which had occupied northern Vietnam since 111 BC. This movement was composed mainly of women. It was eventually overwhelmed by the superior occupying forces and the two sisters committed suicide by drowning in the Dac River. The Chinese proceeded to occupy Vietnam for another thousand years.
One of the female MCs explained this history in both Vietnamese and English to the large crowd in the town centre, diplomatically referring to the occupiers as “the armies from the north” (a large number of mixed Chinese/Vietnamese are among Cabramatta’s emigre community). She upheld the Trung Sisters as examples for Vietnamese women of independence, courage, devotion to family and country and pursuing their hopes and dreams. At the formal opening of the event, the whole crowd sang the Australian and Vietnamese national anthems with equal verve and gusto.
What struck me about these groups, apart from their poise and calm, was the fact they looked equally at home in their adopted Australian skin as they did in their Vietnamese cultural skin.
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The personal reflections on Gough Whitlam which I wrote on 02 November 2014 also began in Cabramatta, Whitlam’s place of residence for 15 years (1957-72). In that case, it was to strip Whitlam of any credit for the suburb’s example as a thriving Asian immigrant community which had integrated into the Australian domain. This was because of Whitlam’s vicious antipathy towards Vietnamese refugees who were then, in May 1975, beginning to seek asylum in foreign countries after the collapse of the former South Vietnam.
In contrast, the spectacle I observed on 22 March is very much the legacy of Malcolm Fraser who had died two days before. During his prime ministership (1975-83), over 55,000 Vietnamese and other Indochinese refugees were resettled here, the largest single movement of non-European migrants into Australia in such a short time. This initial influx has resulted in an ethnic Vietnamese population of some 350,00 today.
This accomplishment will be included in the following reflections on Fraser, which are every bit as riddled with contradictions as those on Whitlam almost five months ago.
Part 2
This is a repeat of Part 4 of Gough Whitlam: Personal Reflections (02 November 2014).
QUOTE
1975
The Liberal and Country Party Coalition was responsible for the political upheavals of 1973-5 that ultimately led to Gough Whitlam’s dismissal by the governor-general in November 1975.
It did not take long for the Coalition to start contemplating the undermining of the first Labor government in 23 years. A ‘born to rule’ mentality existed in large parts of the coalition parties. They had a majority in the Senate after the 1972 elections. Running this majority was Senator Reg Withers, a ruthless political operator nick-named ‘The Toe-Cutter’. He made it very clear that he would use his position to exact maximum political damage on the new government.
It only took 16 months for this ambition to become apparent. In April 1974, Liberal leader Billy Snedden threatened to block the supply bills unless Whitlam called an election. Whitlam did so and was re-elected in May 1974 with a slightly reduced majority. Snedden wrote himself into the history of caricature by claiming that he did not lose the election – he just didn’t win enough seats to win. The Coalition maintained its majority in the Senate.
Enter The Terminator. Malcolm Fraser, a former minister for the Army and Defence, had already showed form by white-anting and destroying the prime ministership of John Gorton in 1971. In a party coup in March 1975, he replaced the ineffectual Snedden as opposition leader. Barely seven months later, he repeated the Snedden supply-denial threat with the able assistance of ‘The Toe-Cutter’. With Whitlam this time refusing to bow to the threat by calling a general election, a volcanic political crisis evolved which led to Whitlam’s dismissal as prime minister by Governor-General John Kerr on 11 November 1975, his replacement as acting prime minister by Fraser and an ensuing federal election which saw a massive rejection of Labor and a huge majority for the Coalition.
By the middle of 1975, Whitlam had been on the nose: colossal economic mismanagement, high inflation, high unemployment, huge scandals (the loans affair in particular) and a general air of chaos in the ranks. Fraser used the loans affair as his trigger for engineering the crisis, secure in the knowledge that Whitlam’s popularity was at rock bottom and he would be massacred at the polls.
After Fraser threw down the gauntlet, I went to a political rally in October 1975 at the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, addressed by Fraser and his three Country Party allies (Doug Anthony, Ian Sinclair and Peter Nixon). Fraser’s anti-Whitlam address was out of a training manual in political demagoguery: savage, personal, bilious, raucous – and a sure testament that this course of action had been on his agenda from the day he became leader.
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Last week, my stomach turned when watching Malcolm Fraser mouthing his sweet encomiums about Whitlam. I have no doubt that he, Fraser, was the ultimate political violator and wrecking ball who manipulated a weak and flawed governor-general into the course of action he took. The Fraser/Kerr coup was neither unconstitutional nor illegal. But it represented a massive rupture of the political fabric and created a convention that was an awesome threat to future governments. Nothing the Whitlam government did, and its sins were massive, can possibly justify such an assault. A written constitution is only as good as the respect its practitioners accord to both its letter and its spirit. Fraser, with his unbridled ambition, violated that spirit to assuage that ambition. Stupid man: he only had to wait another 12-18 months when he would probably have won the election in a perfectly orthodox manner without the damage that flowed from 1975.
I suspect that Fraser moved when he did because Whitlam’s government had reached rock bottom and by October 1975 was beginning to come up for air. Whitlam had got rid of his crazier ministers (Lionel Murphy, Jim Cairns, Clyde Cameron, Rex Connor). He had appointed a sane and economic realist in Bill Hayden as treasurer who brought down a sensible budget in August 1975 aimed at redressing the financial madness of the previous couple of years. With another 18 months of the normal period of government, Whitlam might have emerged as a serious political contender again. Fraser would not allow that to happen.
Malcolm Fraser has never expressed regret or doubt about his actions. It is therefore mystifying to me how he has joined the pantheon of Labor’s latter-day heroes: warmly embraced by the progressive left as a convert, never criticised for his past, welcomed by the Greens (he campaigned for Sarah Hanson-Young’s re-election in 2013). I have always suspected that Fraser’s so-called conversion was either an attempt to assuage his guilt over 1975 or a bid to remain politically relevant and taken note of.
Not for me. I have maintained the rage.
UNQUOTE
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Let that reflection stand. I would not change a word.
Part 3
Indochinese Refugees
Part 4
Malcolm Fraser was prime minister for seven years and three months (1975-83). His government was that of a standard Liberal leader: competent, cautious, generally conservative. He mostly continued Whitlam’s social, environmental and political programs; ran the economy in a traditionally protectionist manner; and was a vocal and constant supporter of the US alliance in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies and global minions. His working modus operandi was that of the micro-manager, exhibiting a manic, ruddite obsession with every last nook and cranny of administration, driving senior public officials and staff to distraction.
After his electoral defeat in 1983, Fraser dedicated himself to two high-profile, significant and praiseworthy international causes: the ending of apartheid in South Africa and combatting international poverty through his founding and chairmanship of Care Australia and Care International. His undertaking of these causes was consistent with his record on Indochinese refugees in all respects.
But the public persona of Malcolm Fraser which gradually emerged in the 1990s and 2000s was virtually unrecognisable when compared with the one he exhibited from about the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s. We started to witness a political profile which illustrated that a mighty change equivalent to a political conversion had taken place. A rough sketch of these changes is as follows.
Rumblings of a New Political Movement
In 1992, Fraser was one of a group contemplating a new political movement which he would lead. This movement would stand in opposition to economic rationalism, globalisation and all the changes that were introduced into the Australian economy since 1983 by the Hawke/Keating Labor governments and supported by the Liberal/National Party opposition: especially the privatisation of such commercial icons as the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas . Prominent in this group were Bob Santamaria, president of the National Civic Council (the engine room of the Democratic Labor Party from the 1950s to the 1970s); Professor Robert Manne of La Trobe University and editor of the conservative magazine ‘Quadrant’; Professor John Carroll, also of La Trobe University; and Philip Ayres, an academic who would eventually be Fraser’s biographer.
This informal movement, largely the brainchild of Santamaria designed to create a new ‘third force’ in Australian politics, never saw the light of day. But it did illustrate the edging away of Fraser from his Liberal Party moorings.
(Note: absent from the writings about Fraser since his death has been any reference to his long association with Santamaria, from the late 1960s to Santamaria’s death in 1998. Santamaria was a critical behind-the-scenes adviser to Fraser in the months leading up to the dismissal of Whitlam in 1975).
The Howard Government
One might have expected Fraser to provide elder statesman-type support and quiet critical advice to a government led by the very man he appointed as Treasurer in his own government in 1977. Instead, Fraser constantly and publicly white-anted John Howard throughout his almost 12 years in government on just about every issue, with never a solitary word in public support or praise on any issue where one might have expected it (e.g. gun control after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996; the engineering of East Timor out of Indonesian occupation and into nationhood; the maintenance of close, pragmatic and productive relationships with Japan, China, Indonesia and South Korea and the beginnings of such a one with India).
Asylum-Seekers
Nowhere was Fraser’s voice heard more loudly in criticism than in the Howard government’s handling of asylum seekers from the Middle East and west Asia who were arriving in ever greater numbers by boat in the early 2000s. This was an immensely more complicated issue than the Vietnamese refugees challenge of the 1970s and 1980s, of whom only just over 2000 arrived in Australia directly by boat. The government was faced with a well-oiled multi-million dollar people-smuggling racket. How this matter was handled by Howard was indeed highly controversial. But the Keating Labor government had no such doubts when it introduced mandatory detention for boat arrivals in 1992. And no word was heard from Fraser at that time. But during Howard’s period in office, Fraser’s advocacy became ever more simplistic and strident, with not a single word of advice on how this new situation might be handled in a practical policy sense. Fraser adopted a tone of high moral superiority, that of the human rights guru of the nation. One might have thought that with his background and experience, he might have offered to negotiate off-shore processing in the S E Asian region based on his successful diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s. Such an offer might have been extended to the Rudd/Gillard governments which would have avoided the collapse of their hastily contrived but ineffectual Malaysian and East Timor solutions. But no – Fraser preferred to issue jeremiads of condemnation of Howard’s actions, especially of the Pacific solution which effectively ended the people-trafficking for several years.
Moral vanity is one of the great deadly sins of our age. It was disappointing, given Fraser’s outstanding record in relation to Indochinese refugees, to see him succumbing to this vanity in his advancing years. Consequently, his influence on policy amounted to nothing.
The Americans and the Russians
As minister during the 1960s and early 1970s and as prime minister from 1975 to 1983, Fraser was an unequivocal and articulate supporter of the US alliance and of the US’s containment of the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War. Examples abound – from his support for the American/Australian military involvement in Vietnam to the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Fast forward to the last months of his life when Fraser published a book “Dangerous Allies” calling for the end of the ANZUS treaty and the removal of US security installations from Australian soil. Central to this volte face, a mammoth one for an Australian ex-prime minister, was Fraser’s view that the US was squeezing Australia into a coordinated plan of “containment” of China through its “pivot to Asia” and would thus inexorably involve Australia in a major war with its biggest trading partner. Allied with this thesis was his frequently stated view over the course of 2014/15 that American provocation was the primary cause of Russian reoccupation of Crimea and attempted dismemberment of the Ukraine through its proxies.
A key event in this conversion appears to have been the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which, when it all went sour, saw Fraser publicly condemn the operation as illegal and destructive. Within the past year, he has described western condemnation of Russian actions in the Ukraine as hypocritical given the equivalence of western behaviour in Iraq.
Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge
During his own prime ministership, nowhere was Fraser’s obeisance to American policy so graphically demonstrated as in his unconscionable decision to join the US and China in maintaining the Khmer Rouge regime as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the United Nations – after that regime had been overthrown militarily by the Vietnamese at the beginning of 1979. This regime, materially and financially underpinned by China, had been the mass murderer of up to 20% of its own population during its almost four year reign of terror. I think Australia’s participation in this geo-political farce is the most shameful in its diplomatic history. Fraser’s foreign minister Andrew Peacock resigned in April 1981 over the issue and subsequently challenged Fraser’s leadership but lost by a 2:1 margin. This serious stain on Australia’s record was only rectified by Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans and his departmental secretary Michael Costello later in the 1980s (a separate big but honorable story).
Comment
The reflections above on Fraser’s late-in-life persona should not be taken as either agreement or disagreement with his position on particular issues. I thought Fraser was right in his criticism of Howard for not instantly consigning Pauline Hanson to political oblivion in 1996 with a simple and forthright condemnation of her views, using his singular authority as prime minister to do so. As for Iraq, from about the middle of 2002, I was privately arguing with American friends that invading Iraq as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was absurd and likely to have profound and disastrous consequences. As it turned out, the results were even worse than I imagined at the time. For Australia to have become so closely involved with this venture shows the dangers of too close a personal identification between allied political leaders; and of extending its limited security and military resources way beyond its natural neighborhood habitat where such resources can make a significant difference (as in the East Timor operation and the recent natural disaster in Vanuatu).
The thing about Fraser is that from the late 1990s, his position on a whole range of issues became a pattern of rejection of his political past; his adoption of a progressiviste posture warmed him to his life-long political adversaries; and one knew that whenever he spoke or wrote on any issue, his stance would be entirely predictable.
So, how does one join the dots between the several personae which Malcolm Fraser displayed to the world during his public life? With great difficulty. See Part 5 and final.
Part 5
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
(Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953)
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones
(Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2 – from Mark Antony’s speech after the death of Caesar)————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
So how do we reconcile the Political Terminator of Labor in 1975 with the late-flowering left-liberal convert of the 1990s and 2000s; the staunch supporter of the US alliance in the 1960s and 1970s with the relentless critic of the US who calls for the end of the alliance in his final months; the strong leader, the humanitarian and effective demolisher of the White Australia policy of the 1970s with the daily purveyor of undergraduate e-placards and cyber-bites of recent years?
I can not avoid the conclusion that Fraser was internally troubled, if not guilt-affected, by his political hyper-aggression of 1975 and the unorthodox and divisive methods he used to reach prime ministerial office. This is the same man who in his later years loudly preached compassion, the rule of law and a morality-based public policy – all incontestable values except when the preacher seems to protest too much. Winning acceptance from his former enemies, and the gathering warmth of his friendship with Gough Whitlam, would serve as a salve for a troubled conscience. It was disingenuous of Fraser to claim that it was not he who had changed but the Liberal Party when he gave up his membership in 2009. It was Whitlam who claimed several times that there was not a sliver of difference between himself and Malcolm Fraser on foreign and human rights policy and that “Fraser had replaced him as the central target in the demonology of the right wing”.
Fraser’s latter-day reversal of position on the US alliance is of a piece with this. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism is just about the cheapest form of juvenile revolt in smaller powers, the equivalent of an unquestioning obeisance to every American policy, such as Fraser demonstrated when in office (e.g. on the recognition of the UN credentials of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1980) and Howard did in relation to the Iraq invasion of 2003. Fraser’s “Dangerous Allies” thesis is not shared by any Asia-Pacific country, including those such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia which do not have formal treaties with the US; and including, I suspect, China whose more far-sighted thinkers would regard the US bases and troops in Japan as a protective barrier against any revival of Japanese militarism.
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A related phenomenon. Malcolm Fraser, of all ex-prime ministers, kept himself unremittingly in the public eye. He had been voted out of office at the tender age of 53. As with most former leaders, he suffered from what Gareth Evans has described as ‘Relevance Deprivation Syndrome’. He was addicted to the game. And again I suspect that this had something to do with redeeming his political self after 1975. In this he reminds one of former US president Richard Nixon who spent 20 years after 1974 engaged in a relentless process of self-redemption (though one should not draw too close an analogy between the Dismissal and Watergate with its vast reservoir of criminality).
The game. Fraser’s discovery of the twittersphere in 2012 resulted, according to one calculator of these things, in some 10,300 tweets over a three year period, or an average of 11 a day, with 20,000 fans hanging out on this daily effusion of cyber-bites. One journalist has described Fraser, in a twist on the line in Dylan Thomas’s poem, as ‘raging against the dying of the limelight’.
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During the first 15 months of his presidency (1993-4), Bill Clinton’s most valued informal adviser and counsellor on foreign policy and relations with Russia and China was Richard Nixon. Consider: a Democratic president, the counter-cultural bovver-boy of the 1960s, whose wife Hilary’s first job as a legal intern was on the Congressional Watergate Committee, chooses the disgraced former president, a Republican, for such a role. It is a shame that Malcolm Fraser, who had a great deal of experience to share, chose to go down a far different path in his twilight years, preferring that of a populist, megaphone oppositionist, wearing a persona that belied his past and confused his friends and admirers.
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It was impossible not to be moved by the funeral service for Malcolm Fraser at the Scot’s Church in Collins Street Melbourne on 27 March: the liturgy of the old Presbyterian faith, the eloquent eulogy of the Scottish pastor, and the spectacle of a solid, long-established family of three generations clearly deeply bound together by love and respect. Fraser’s sons and daughters spoke briefly but passionately. For me, the most poignant moments were those of his two granddaughters: one (Angela) delivering a witty memoir of her grandfather, the other (Hester) playing the piano and singing her own composition in his honour – “The Camellia Tree” – in beautiful ethereal tones that were reminiscent of Katie Noonan. The service as a whole, with the exception of Peter Nixon’s unnecessarily partisan address, portrayed a picture of the private man that was inspirational to those closest to him and which was edifying to behold.
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In the end, the Dismissal will not go away but the likelihood of a repeat is close to zero, given the bitter memories of its divisiveness and aftermath. It will only take a careful drafting of a new covenant under a revised Republic model to bury the possibility for good. Fraser’s late-life political make-over will remain in the record but that too will ebb in time, leaving scholars and historians to ponder the cause of it. And his twitter-feed will eventually disappear into the Great E-Shredder in the Sky, of no consequence to anyone or anything.
Harsh reflections on Malcolm Fraser’s variable personae should in no way diminish his crowning achievement: the genuine humanitarian act of finally nailing the White Australia policy to the ground in practical terms and opening the gates to the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian “wretched of the earth”. This, combined with his work for Care Australia and assistance to similar organisations such as the Fred Hollows Foundation, will be his enduring legacy. Thus, we can reshape Mark Anthony’s dictum in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ to say:
The good that this man did will live after him; everything else will be interred with his bones and eventually turn to dust.
PS While preparing this, I have heard of the death of Peter Walsh, the Finance Minister in the Hawke Labor government 1984-90. That is very sad. Every half-decent government needs a Peter Walsh, to keep the bastards honest and to keep rent-seekers of all kinds at bay. RIP.
Louis The Ruminator 