Australian Politics

A nice little write up on some Aussie political history

Malcolm Fraser’s vision for a new political party was crafted a decade ago, right before his death — with some unlikely help from a Labor figure who disdained his role in the Dismissal.

Even before Fraser’s apparent post-political transition leftwards, the antipathy from the left would turn out to be partly misplaced. An impeccable cold warrior who held the army and defence portfolios while Australia was in Vietnam, a political hardman who brought the nation to the brink of constitutional crisis in 1975 and who won three elections in a row for the Coalition, Fraser was also ardently anti-apartheid — he developed that at Oxford, where he arrived in 1949 — pro-multiculturalism and pro-refugee while prime minister.

Fraser’s project was also driven by a sense that the current Labor and Liberal parties were no longer “fit for purpose”, dominated, Richards says, by “careerists who are compromised in being able to take forward key issues … Labor is locked into the union model, and the Liberals have become more like Labor in their attitude to crossing the floor. The structures of the major parties really are outdated.”