Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs PDF
Preview Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs
The Miegunyah Press The general series of the Miegunyah Volumes was made possible by the Miegunyah Fund established by bequests under the wills of Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade. ‘Miegunyah’ was the home of Mab and Russell Grimwade from 1911 to 1955. Contents A Note from the Narrator Prelude Part 1 Being Heard 1 Roots 2 Learning to Think 3 The Candidate Must Have a Voice 4 Love, Danger and Privilege 5 Vietnam, Act I 6 Too Near the Sun 7 Victory and Withdrawal 8 Life Wasn’t Meant to Be Easy 9 Extremis Part 2 Governing 10 How to Govern 11 Balance 12 The Difficulties of Freedom 13 Leadership 14 The World 15 Commonwealth 16 Foundations 17 Land and Sea 18 Loyalty and Loss Part 3 Changing the World 19 Change 20 Mission to South Africa 21 CARE 22 Enduringly Liberal 23 Hope Appendix Acknowledgements Notes Bibliography A Note from the Narrator This book is part memoir and part authorised biography. It is Malcolm Fraser’s book, yet also the product of a collaboration between him and me, Margaret Simons. Doing it this way was Fraser’s choice. He wanted somebody else involved, and more than just a ghost writer. He wanted to expose his record to a questioning if not a critical eye. ‘I don’t think there is any point in a book that is mere self-justification’, he said when we first met. He wanted to be questioned. This, together with research and organising the material, was my role. I am the narrator or, if you like, the curator of this account of Fraser’s life and work. After this note I will disappear behind the material. It seemed to me and to the publisher, Louise Adler, that this book should be written in the first person, since it was conceived as a memoir. Fraser firmly vetoed that idea. ‘Is there any way that it can be in the first person without me having to say “I, I, I” all the time?’ he said, giving a little self-mocking grimace to each repetition of the word ‘I’. He was told there was not: that saying ‘I’ was what first person meant. ‘Well, I don’t want to say “I, I, I”.’ That is where my job began. My voice was to intercede between the ‘I’ and the reader. Yet there were times when Fraser wanted to speak for himself and in his own voice—particularly on politics and policy. The third person, fortunately, both avoids the ‘I, I, I’ and is flexible enough to allow for the Fraser that emerged in our interviews sometimes to speak directly to the reader. At that first meeting, before I had agreed to take on the project, I asked Fraser if there were limits to what he would talk about. Would he, for example, talk frankly about the dismissal of the Whitlam government? He said that he was bored with that and it was much less important than some of the other things there were to talk about. Then he said, in tones of mild surprise, ‘You know, some people I work with now on human rights say they used to hate me back then’. I said, ‘Perhaps you killed their dreams’. He went long-faced in the way that only Malcolm Fraser can, and replied, ‘They were dreams that had to die’. I think that was the moment in which I decided to take on the project. Later, I teased Fraser that he wanted to write a memoir yet by his own admission hated talking about himself (‘Absolutely loathe it’, he agreed) and, even at the age of seventy-nine, preferred to think about the present and the future rather than the past. ‘Well, the future is so much more interesting’, he said. The past was of interest only to the extent that it illuminated the present and offered lessons for the future. Fraser has never written his own account of the key events of his career. Nor has he read the accounts of others. He has not read, for example, the memoirs of Sir John Kerr or Gough Whitlam, or the books written by political journalists about the way in which he came to power and the impact of his prime ministership. Nor would he have collaborated in the writing of this account but for the fact that he wanted a book that spoke from his experience to the present and the future. He wanted more than a memoir. His motivation for collaborating with this book has been to talk about the continuing importance of the values that have shaped his life and his career. These values are what he sees as the core of liberalism. They are simply stated: respect for the individual, a commitment to individual liberty under the law and the principle that the strong should protect the weak. The story of how they play out, how they are frustrated, how they occasionally triumph and why they must be safeguarded is largely what this book is about. From his earliest political speeches Fraser eschewed rigid ideologies or counsels of human perfection. Liberalism was pragmatic, he said, and flexible. This was what distinguished it from competing schemes of political thought. Liberalism would play out in different ways depending on the times and the people concerned, but the values at the core did not alter. It is this conception of liberalism that has motivated him to collaborate in this book. ‘It’s quite possible to talk about these things without saying that I always lived up to them’, he said at an early stage in the project. So how did we proceed? I interviewed Fraser on roughly a weekly basis for
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