Hours After Taking Power Fraser Took A Stand Over Racist Regimes

by David Marr - Sydney Morning Herald

After the drama of November 11, Malcolm Fraser found himself next day holding his first cabinet meeting. The ministers were stunned and excited, recalled John Menadue, who was present in the cabinet room of old Parliament House in his role as head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. "They had never really thought they would pull it off, and they had."

It was a long afternoon. The documents released yesterday record the nuts and bolts: a briefing on the economic situation from Treasury; permission given to TAA to buy an aircraft; notice given to the staffs of Labor ministers; and the rescinding of the Whitlam cabinet's penny-pinching measures to save money as supply dwindled.

Bills and superannuation contributions would now be paid; ministerial and departmental hospitality would resume; season's greeting would be sent. Paragraph 3 (c) of decision No. 8 of the first Fraser cabinet reads: "The Cabinet agreed to remove the special restrictions introduced by the previous government in respect of Christmas cards."

But the great drama of the afternoon is unrecorded in that spare list. To Menadue's amazement, the Liberal grandee Sir John Carrick raised at that first meeting accusations that Australian non-government organisations and the World Council of Churches were supporting liberation movements in southern Africa.

Menadue recalled: "There was speculation that money from these organisations had been used not just for humanitarian purposes in Rhodesia and South Africa but had been used in fact to support terrorist activity." Carrick's intervention was met by mutterings of support around the cabinet table.

The response was a ferocious rebuke. "Malcolm Fraser took this opportunity to tear into Ian Smith - that he wasn't just politically mad, he was clinically mad, and that he, Malcolm, wouldn't have a bar [of] him and people around the cabinet table should forget all these stories about World Council of Churches money being diverted to terrorist activities and that he could understand this opposition to those white regimes in southern Africa.

"I just shook my head - first that it was considered so urgent that it was raised at that first cabinet meeting and second at Malcolm's response, which had me amazed. He pinned his flag to the mast on that one very early."

Many political issues were canvassed that afternoon, but Menadue recalls no discussion about the possibility of civil violence in the aftermath of the sacking of Whitlam. "It says something about the passivity of the Australians. If they wouldn't go on riots or strikes over something like that, what would upset them?"

Cabinet had to deal with the limits Sir John Kerr set on the government he installed: no appointments, no new policies and customary restraint on exploiting the records of the outgoing government. Officers of Treasury petitioned Yarralumla to complain about the information new ministers were asking them to supply. Kerr also received complaints from the Labor senators Doug McClelland and John Wheeldon.

Cabinet responded by setting up a cumbersome procedure for investigating the complaints that involved ministers, heads of departments, Menadue and Fraser - with the caretaker prime minister ultimately reporting the results to the governor-general. Kerr was still hovering over the man he had so controversially put into office.

Menadue had the "general impression" that Fraser and the cabinet complied with the spirit of Kerr's original directives on appointments and policy.

Yet new policies were put in place in these weeks. Menadue explains these decisions as a tactical response to hostile leaks from within the public service. "There was certainly a fair bit of leaking going on out of the departments of material that had been prepared for the government in anticipation of the elections, and I know that was leaked because it cropped up in the press and it was probably used by Labor candidates."

The argument out on the hustings was that the supply crisis and Fraser's caretaker administration was standing in the way of money the Whitlam government had planned to give nursing homes and local government. Though clearly new policy, the caretaker cabinet put the payments through.

Fraser held two cabinet meetings before the elections, on November 12 and 19. After his sweeping victory on December 13 cabinet met only once more in 1975. Discussion about rebadging the country "The Commonwealth of Australia" began but was postponed. With that whimper, the most extraordinary year in Australia political history ended.