Lazarus Rising. John Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ a most equivocal response she had heard Lionel Bowen, the then deputy Labor leader, give to a question about the leadership on radio earlier that day.

      The very next day, 3 February, Janette’s prophecy was realised, as we learned listening to the radio on a drive to the beautiful Myall Lakes, not far from Hawks Nest. In a highly dramatic turn of events, Hayden, that morning, had succumbed to the pressure of his colleagues and stood down from the leadership in favour of Hawke. What it meant to the political landscape was best summarised by a remark of another Hawks Nest holidaymaker who ran a small business. Passing me outside our unit that evening he simply said, ‘So we’ve got an election. Now you’ve blown it.’ He was a Liberal supporter, concerned that the change to Hawke had made it very likely that the Government would be defeated.

      I spoke to Fraser after he had held his news conference and knew that he would face Hawke and not Hayden. He sounded upbeat and remarked that we would be knocking off two Labor leaders at the same time. Yet, he, most of all, must have been totally unsettled by what the Labor Party had done. The truth was that in the space of just 24 hours Fraser had lost control of events. Labor had struck with remarkable boldness, and the dynamic of Australian politics had been turned on its head.

      Janette and I both knew how much Hawke’s accession had changed things and it was very likely curtains for the Government. Australia was in recession, and Bob Hawke had strong public support. We pinned our hopes on the possibility of Hawke blowing up under the pressure of a campaign, with the Australian people deciding that he was too volatile to be entrusted with the prime ministership. He had already obliged with his bad-tempered response to Richard Carleton’s question on Nationwide: ‘Mr Hawke, could I ask you whether you feel a little embarrassed tonight at the blood that’s on your hands?’² That proved to be wishful thinking. Apart from that intemperate outburst on the day that Hayden had quit, Hawke was a model of balance and restraint during the campaign. He gathered strength as the days went by. The switch had a near-euphoric effect on large sections of the public.

      It was impossible not to feel sorry for Hayden. I sent him a personal note expressing the empathy of a political rival who guessed the agony through which he would be passing. There was one especially poignant TV image of Hayden looking on as a quite adoring crowd of people mobbed Hawke at some public gathering.

      Despite this, it took a while into the campaign before I accepted the strong likelihood of defeat. As a political competitor, that, after all, is a natural state. One keeps hoping and fighting until the end. If nothing else, Australian politics had proved to be remarkably unpredictable during the previous year. A lot of my mood flowed from my respect for Fraser’s campaigning abilities. He had won three elections and, up until then, had been the most successful Liberal leader since Menzies.

      In an election campaign, there are two ways of testing public opinion. There are the published and private polls and then there is what I call the field evidence. The published polls were bad, having strengthened for Labor once Hawke took over. I learned, after the election, that Gary Morgan had done some private polling for Fraser two weeks out from the election which showed that the Government was in a hopeless position.

      The field evidence was uniformly bad. The day after the campaign launch in Melbourne, I flew to Brisbane for a small business luncheon in support of Don Cameron, the member for Fadden. It was a poorly attended event; there was a marked lack of enthusiasm, which troubled me, given that small business was part of our traditional base. Later, passing through Tullamarine Airport, I was stopped by a party activist from Casey, a Melbourne electorate held by Peter Falconer. He was in small business and told me how badly we were doing and that high interest rates had done great damage with small-business proprietors. Grant Chapman, the Liberal member for Kingston in South Australia, invited me to address a public meeting in his electorate, which three people attended. Whilst public meetings at 8 o’clock on a weekday night had long since ceased to be flavour of the month, this was ominous. Cameron, Falconer and Chapman all lost their seats in the 1983 election.

      Both Doug Anthony and I wanted Fraser to take up an offer from Rupert Murdoch, who then owned the Ten Network, for a debate with Hawke. The three of us thought that it could help Malcolm, but he refused.

      I spent election day visiting polling booths in Bennelong, thanking my helpers for their support, but sensing by then that the election was gone. We gathered at our Wollstonecraft home to watch the results. Once the result was clear, I rang Fraser, who was plainly shattered by the outcome. It was a difficult conversation. He was the fallen giant, who had for so long seemed invincible.

      Hawke’s win in 1983 has been the best of any Labor leader at a change of government. He won a majority of 25 in a house of only 125. During the campaign, Hawke had captured the imagination of many Australians with his talk of bringing people together. In contrast, Malcolm Fraser often sounded shrill, with exaggerated claims that Australians should put their money under the bed if Labor won.

      Overwhelmingly, though, the Coalition lost because Australia was in deep recession, and Labor was led by a person in Bob Hawke whose blend of larrikinism and intelligence had long appealed to lots of Australians. The fates had conspired to deliver Hawke the leadership at the optimum time for him. He never had to face Fraser in parliament, where he could well have fared poorly.

      Following the chaos of the Whitlam years, Fraser had restored calm and order to the nation’s government. The budget was brought under control. It was being steadily returned to surplus until the recession of the early ‘80s hit, and this had happened through a time of subdued world economic growth.

      To properly assess Malcolm Fraser’s economic stewardship is to understand that, first and foremost, he was a creature of the Menzies–McEwen period of economic management, when plenty of benign and protective government intervention appeared to work. There was strong growth and low unemployment to show for it. Why, therefore, should those policies not be continued? Fraser, and many around him, brought that attitude back to government in 1975.

      For the seven-and-a-half years that we had worked together, the relationship between Malcolm Fraser and me had been politically close. I was an advocate for Fraser within the parliamentary party, as I always believed that he was the right person to lead the party through the time that we were in government. I also had a strong sense of loyalty towards him, reinforced by his generous promotion of me. Our relationship, although friendly, was very much a professional political one, which was never likely to continue once he left parliament in 1983.

      My differences with Fraser, in government, were confined to certain economic issues. It was during my prime ministership that we really parted company, with Fraser attacking many of my stances on social and foreign policy as well: the handling of Pauline Hanson, asylum-seekers, a formal apology to Indigenous people and involvement in Iraq. His quite unfounded allegation that I played the race card ignored, for example, the fact that during the time I was PM my Government maintained a non-discriminatory immigration policy. I deny the claim in Fraser’s memoirs, co-authored with Margaret Simons, that in 1977 I said to him, in a corridor conversation, that we should not take too many Vietnamese refugees.

      In 1993 Malcolm Fraser announced that he would seek the federal presidency of the Liberal Party, but pulled out when it was obvious that he would not be elected. His withdrawal speech vehemently attacked freemarket economics. He said that a small group had pushed our policies further to the right, and that the Liberal Party had become a right-wing conservative one. This was an ideological distortion, but one he would increasingly invoke to explain the growing gulf between him and the party he once led. In truth, the 1980s saw a major shift in the centre of gravity of the economic debate towards a more free-market approach. Attitudes within the Coalition parties as well as the ALP reflected this change.

      For Malcolm Fraser, the harsh reality was that legions of Liberals felt that he had not used the massive mandates of 1975 and 1977 СКАЧАТЬ