St George of the Garden wrote on Mar 20^th, 2015 at 8:11pm:





He was very unpopular when in power but mellowed in his later years.

Anyway - he had a good innings  - 84.

Grendel wrote on Mar 20^th, 2015 at 9:21pm:



Remember the chants at protests against him?

It was always -

" Fraser Fraser Fraser  out  out out.
  Fraser Fraser Fraser  out  out out.
  Fraser Fraser Fraser  out  out out.
  Fraser Fraser Fraser  out  out out. "

On hearing of the passing of Malcolm Frazer in the morning of 20/3/'15, I revised a prose-poetic piece I had originally written on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/'14. The following revised piece of writing is somewhat long, too long for those of the Facebook-Twitter generation who prefer short and pith posts. I recommend that many readers just skim or scan or, indeed, stop reading now unless, of course, your interest in this subject has been piqued.
-------------------------------------------------------
HEADY DAYS
All my sins are remembered

Part 1:

When one writes about politics, the people and the events, the ideas and the issues, one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other and engages millions in hair-splitting discussions on topics about which they usually or, at least, often know very little. Often the opinions are endless, opinions which get dropped-about now in cyberspace's social media and elsewhere, and in real space.

I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement more than half a century later. I am now 70. My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those early, those embryonic, years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. That in-house political discussion was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes in what were my pre-puberal years and we are still, as Matthew Arnold once wrote, ".....here as on a darkling plain. Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night."1 The political scene has changed little, in many ways in the last several decades, some 60 years of my life-narrative.

But such experience of political wrangling in my childhood and adolescent years has not prevented me from being interested in the political world. Nor does it prevent me now as I go through these years of my retirement from a 50 year student and paid employment life, 1949 to 1999. Today I learned of the passing of Malcolm Frazer. Fraser was appointed as caretaker prime minister on 11 November 1975 by the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, following the controversial dismissal of the Whitlam Government in which he played a key role. At the time I was settling-in to several years of teaching as a lecturer in a technical and further education and a college of advanced education in Victoria Australia.

Frazer went on to win the largest majority in Australian political history at the subsequent election. After two further election victories in 1977 and 1980, he was defeated by Bob Hawke in 1983 and left politics a short time later. In retirement, Fraser became involved in international relief and humanitarian aid issues and, domestically, as a forthright liberal voice for human rights. On 20 March 2015, Fraser died at the age of 84 after a brief illness.

Part 2:

I'm looking forward to doco's on Frazer in the days ahead. I watched a two-part doco on Gough Whitlam after he passed away just five months ago.2 He was Australia’s 21st Prime Minister from 1972 to 1974 just after I arrived in Australia from Canada when I was in my late 20s as an international pioneer from the Canadian Baha'i community. I wrote the first draft of this statement on Whitlam after watching this political-doco in the evening of my life, early or late it is hard to say. I updated this statement on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/14 and, again, on 21/3/'15 on hearing of the passing of Malcolm Frazer.

More books have been written about Whitlam, including his own writings, than about any other Australian Prime Minister. According to Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, for a period of at least a decade, the Whitlam era was viewed almost entirely in negative terms, but that has changed. Paul Kelly(1947- ), an Australian political journalist and author who has written seven books on political events in Australia, wrote the following 3 paragraphs on hearing of Whitlam's passing at the age of 98 in October 2014:

"Gough Whitlam’s passing is a sad moment for the nation, but it is the time to recognise one of the most extraordinary and inspiring figures produced by the Australian nation and our democracy. Gough’s glories and follies were writ large. Nothing he did was small, mediocre or apologetic. He was a giant in stature, learning, presence and achievement. Nobody who ever met Whitlam will forget him and those who dealt with him regularly in political life will retell Whitlam stories to the end of their days."

"He was a prime minister yet he became a figure transmitted into our national mythology, joining that bizarre cast of uniquely Australian figures that include Ned Kelly, Don Bradman, Phar Lap, Charles Kingsford Smith and Nellie Melba, among others. The great paradox of Gough was his abiding love of tradition yet his visionary sense of Australia’s future. His mind was an organised expanse of rigid, disciplined rationality yet his temperament was explosive, thrilling, funny and egocentric."

"This implanted the fantastic contradiction at the heart of car¬eer and government — the implementation of the most planned agenda in the nation’s history was rocked by excess, upheaval and boundless impatience. Gough called it “crash through or crash”. He meant it and he lived it and, as a consequence, the Whitlam government became the best of times...go to Part 2...

Part 5:

In one year, beginning in late 1973, as I was leaving my first marriage, leaving South Australia, and arriving in Tasmania, and after several months of an initial rise in ALP popularity, cracks appeared in the ALP agenda. The actions of an Arab coalition started a worldwide economic meltdown. Whitlam had assumed Australia’s economy was bulletproof, but inflation and unemployment rose steeply as I was on a role and advancing incrementally in my teaching career. Little did he know at the times, but Frazer was really just waiting in the wings at Labor went from bad to worse.

Ignoring advice, Whitlam pushed through one of his most prominent, and expensive, reforms: free university education for all. The state of the economy deteriorated further in my first months in Tasmania in 1974. Whitlam's motto was crash or crash-through, and he was doing both, little did he know at the time.

Part 5.1:

The conservatives in the Australian federal political system controlled the Senate; they tried to block government legislation, but Whitlam called their bluff by calling an election. The ALP, on 11 April 1974, won with a similar majority to its win in 1972. The Baha'i Five Year Plan, 1974-1979, began that same month. I served as a delegate to the Australian Baha'i national convention that year; I also settled into my tutoring role in a range of education studies, and a relationship with my future wife. She had two daughters ages 3 and 8 and, in 1975, they became my step-daughters.

Whitlam and the ALP enacted a free healthcare service, the forerunner of Medicare. But, as I say above, their popularity went downhill from its rich beginnings in December 1972, as the months of 1973 advanced. I was on a career-roll and, in 1974, I had another 60 hour a week job teaching and tutoring in a new list of subjects to students preparing to teach in primary and high schools as well as work in the world of art.

Part 6:

The optimism and high hopes of the initial months of the ALP in power didn’t last. The party axed Whitlam's trusted deputy Lance Barnard and a scandal erupted around the relationship between his replacement, Jim Cairns, and Cairns’ exotic chief of staff Junee Morose. The decision to sign-up the offshore loan shark Troth Hemline to help buy back Australia’s mineral wealth was like signing a death warrant for Whitlam’s administration. This is yet another story in the long saga of the demise of the Whitlam government in 1974/5. It is also part of the story of the rise of Frazer.

In 1975 the Opposition voted in a strong leader in Malcolm Fraser. Blocking supply this time sparked dramatic events unprecedented in Australian history. The Governor-General Sir John Kerr sacked Whitlam and on 11/11/'75 appointed Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister. It was game over.

Polls from the first week of campaigning showed a nine-point swing against Labour. Whitlam's campaign team disbelieved the results at first, but additional polling returns were clear: the electorate had turned against the ALP. The Coalition attacked Labor for economic conditions, and released television commercials including "The Three Dark Years" showing images from Whitlam government scandals.

Part 7:

The ALP campaign of October to December 1974, which had concentrated on the issue of Whitlam's dismissal, did not address the economy until its final days. By that time Fraser, confident of victory, was content to sit back, avoid specifics and make no mistakes. On election night, 13 December, the Coalition enjoyed the largest victory in Australian history, winning 91 seats to the ALP's 36, and taking a 37–25 majority in the Senate in a 6.5 percent swing against Labor.

The day before the election, on 12/12/'74, I left Tasmania, my several responsibilities, and my job as a senior tutor in human relations and education studies at the then Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. I moved to Elwood Victoria and then Kew, and yet another job in Box Hill with its 60 hours a week. I had yet another set of responsibilities in the Baha’i community. My first marriage ended, and my second began in 1975. That election in December 1974, the comings-and-goings of the ALP and the Liberal Party in 1975, as well as all that partisan-political-media-world remained where it had always been, far-far out on the periphery of what I thought about and felt from day-to-day. If I included my social and community responsibilities in the number of hours per week that occupied my time, I had an 80+ hour week with assorted nose-to-the-grindstone stuff.

Part 8:

Wallace Brown, one of the longest serving and most respected members of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, 1961-1995, was noted for his even-handed reporting of political affairs and his encouragement of young journalists. In a book about his experiences as a journalist covering Australian prime ministers he described Whitlam as follows:

“Whitlam was the most paradoxical of all prime ministers in the last half of the 20th century. A man of superb intellect, knowledge, and literacy, he yet had little ability when it came to economics. Whitlam rivalled Menzies in his passion for the House of Representatives and ability to use it as his stage, and yet his parliamentary skills were rhetorical and not tactical.”3

Premiere, CC

ABC1

7:41pm - 8:34pm

NOW

buzzanddidj wrote on Mar 20^th, 2015 at 11:11am:


his values never wavered????  his 'values' were nothing more than political expediency. He didn't have much in the way of actual principles or values until after he got thrown out. He hated Howard, he hated Gorton and pretty much stomped on anyone that got in his way. He only discovered his own opinions and principles long after he left office.  The Libs didn't change much at all, but Fraser basically changed sides - something he had done a few times before when it suited him.

longweekend58 wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2015 at 7:29pm:


his 'values' were nothing more than political expediency.

It seemed that way when he was opposition leader.

He didn't have much in the way of actual principles or values until after he got thrown out.

It did seem like that.

He hated Howard, he hated Gorton and pretty much stomped on anyone that got in his way.

Howards incompetence got him thrown out so that is fair enough.

He only discovered his own opinions and principles long after he left office.

He did have some standards.

The Libs didn't change much at all, but Fraser basically changed sides

I just knew that you would get something completely wrong. Fraser was probably the last genuine Liberal PM Australia has had the ultra conservatives that have followed him have gone a long way in a different direction.

Fraser and various Labor leaders had taken race off the table by being in agreement on the topic. It took Howard discarding this position to leverage votes on race issues.

If anyone changed sides it has probably been Labor who have moved far enough to the right to line up with where the Liberals would have been when Fraser was their leader / probably Menzies too.

Dnarever wrote on Mar 22^nd, 2015 at 9:05pm:



So was his parents'...