Fraser's activist lament

Malcolm Fraser:  The Political Memoirs
by Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons
(Melbourne University Press, 2010, 864 pages)

To those of us whose detailed political memories begin after the 1983 election Malcolm Fraser is a bit of an enigma.

Demonised (and lauded) for his actions in the 1975 confrontation between the Whitlam government and the Senate;  portrayed as the conservative or right wing assassin of John Gorton;  the man who stated ''life wasn't meant to be easy'' and creator of the first ''razor gang'' to cut government expenditure;  Malcolm Fraser has become a hero of the left in recent years, particularly when confronting the policies of John Howard.

This irony is compounded by the fact that Malcolm Fraser probably did more than anyone to lift the relatively new backbencher and then junior minister John Howard out of the ruck and into the national spotlight.  Elected in 1974, Howard was appointed Treasurer in 1977.

So for those of us who seek an understanding of Malcolm Fraser, this book is welcome.

The book is a political memoir, but it is written in the third person by Margaret Simons.  Fraser benefits from having a professional writer as co-author.  It is well written and readable as well as informative.  Only when it comes to the subject of explaining his own perspective does it suffer from a little proselytising in his cause -- but anyone who objected to that would never buy any memoir.  Compared to others, such as the Hawke Memoirs, it does this less.

In my own experience, few have an open mind about Malcolm Fraser.  On both left and right, opinions of the man have long been set in stone across generations.  But it is the combination of these opinions that intrigues.  The man who led the only genuine constitutional confrontation in our history to force out a government that was literally coming apart is also the man who has become a standard bearer for the left on other issues.  It is fair to say that this book accurately conveys one aspect of Fraser -- he rarely exhibits self-doubt.

The book takes a chronological and thematic approach to Fraser's life, particularly in dealing with his career post-politics.

One of the key elements of Fraser's career is that he lost office and left politics as quite a young man.  Fraser was 52 years old when he lost to Bob Hawke.

To put this in context, Menzies was 71 when he retired, McMahon was 64 when he lost to Whitlam, Hawke was 62 when he was successfully challenged by Keating, and Howard, rather more notably, was 68 when he lost to Rudd.  The only person similarly young to leave politics was Keating, who was also 52 when he lost to Howard.

Fraser still had a substantial part of his working life ahead of him when he ended his political career by resigning from Parliament.  This book details many of these activities at length, from his campaign against apartheid to his work with the foreign aid organisation CARE and his subsequent domestic activities.  While many will be reading the book for the first part -- his political career -- it is when it covers the latter years that a key theme of his entire career becomes apparent.  Margaret Simons writes often of Fraser's ''activist'' nature -- and in some ways this is the prism through which one can understand his political career and role in public debates subsequently.

Fraser constantly refers to John Maynard Keynes as he covers his political career.  Given the period during which he studied at Oxford, this is not surprising.  Fraser was in many ways the last leader of the era of Keynesian consensus.  He took office as this was breaking down, both in practice and in theory, as the rise of more market-oriented views of liberalism took hold around the world.

Fraser laments this, and it's obviously a driving force of his differences with the Liberal Party and modern politics generally.  He simply does not believe that this consensus was flawed.  While he recognises how Keynes' work and theories were misused, he cannot accommodate those who describe themselves as liberals yet differ from its philosophical underpinnings.

Indeed, Fraser's frustration with this is clear as he constantly refers to a role for government in directing the economy and national life -- one of his regrets is listed as making a speech disparaging Keynes.  And like all who hold these views, he uses the current economic travails to justify a long-held position.

As an ''activist'', Fraser sees a larger role for government and the state than most Liberals who followed him.  Fraser refused to undertake unilateral tariff cuts because he did not believe they would be reciprocated.  However, when he expresses his concern about globalisation addressing world poverty he fails to outline that it is the statist nations of the west and governments protecting their own economies that prevent the greatest gains of free trade to the poor.

There is also a touch of pessimism.  In the chapter titled ''Hope'', he outlines that ''for a while'' it seems as if the post-war generation would build a better world.  It strikes me that the massive decreases in world poverty, increases in life expectancy and reductions in child and maternal mortality over the past thirty years are as much a cause for celebration as any comparisons with the decades following the Second World War.

This book will confirm many prejudices about Fraser.  To those who will never forget 1975, neither forgiveness nor resiling from support from his position will be considered -- but it is doubtful that any book would achieve that.  As a supporter of his position in 1975, I see no need to reconsider my own position.

But this book does provide an insight into Fraser.  It explains his personal story as well as his perspective.  A well-written memoir should not seek to persuade, it should seek to promote understanding of events that occurred and why decisions were taken.  In this sense, this book is a success and a valuable addition to understanding the contribution of Australia's fourth longest-serving Prime Minister.  Even if we must occasionally agree to disagree.