This anniversary wasn’t meant to be easy: Malcolm Fraser and the modern Liberal Party

Fifty years ago, Liberal MPs chose Malcolm Fraser as their leader. Eight months later, he led them into power in extraordinary – some might say reprehensible – circumstances. He governed for seven and a half years, and remains our fourth-longest serving prime minister.

This year marks some awkward anniversaries for the Liberal Party. But this particular one is awkward for multiple reasons. There is the ruthlessness of Fraser’s quest for power, within and beyond the party itself. There is also the ambivalence of the current Liberal generation towards the memory of one of the party’s more electorally successful leaders.

After Fraser’s time in power, he and his party embarked on very different journeys that still shape our politics today.

How Fraser became leader

Australian politics was pretty febrile in March 1975. The Whitlam government, narrowly re-elected in 1974, was increasingly unpopular. Inflation ran at 17.7% in the 12 months to March, and unemployment was at a post-war high of nearly 5%.

Billy Snedden, Liberal leader from December 1972, was poorly placed to capitalise on these conditions. He had surprised many in 1974 with his strategy to block the government’s budget in the Senate and force an early election.

But having run a tight race, Snedden lost credibility with his post-election claim that he was “not defeated” but merely “did not win enough seats to form a government”. He won a leadership spill in November 1974 but not convincingly enough to prevent another one later on.

A series of “unfortunate public gaffes” and unclear policy statements (on public health insurance among other things) left him vulnerable.

Fraser, who in 1971 sternly (and famously) warned that “life wasn’t meant to be easy”, was the obvious alternative. He was a well-known frontbencher and a former senior minister. His role in the downfall of Liberal prime minister John Gorton meant he had many enemies. But as the Governor-General explained to Queen Elizabeth II in one of his confidential letters, Fraser had “a reputation of being strong, intelligent, aggressive and tough-minded”.

Fraser studiously befriended new MPs whose loyalties were malleable, and used his portfolio (after the 1974 election, this was industrial relations) to win friends among his other colleagues.

According to one profile, he hired a public relations firm to help him solve his “image problems” and to counteract personal criticisms from his internal rival and fellow Victorian, Andrew Peacock.

Fraser sought to keep a clean image while his supporters, armed with the latest opinion polls, ran a backgrounding campaign described by Liberal MP Jim Forbes as “devious, unscrupulous and utterly contemptible”.

The crunch came in March. On March 14, Peacock, who hoped to flush Fraser out, dramatically called for a special party meeting to vote on the leadership question. At a Victorian Liberal state council meeting in Bendigo that weekend, Fraser and Peacock canvassed their supporters, while Snedden gave a speech blaming his woes on the media and the Labor Party. According to The Age, a group of MPs met in Toorak that night to shore up their own positions for the week ahead.

Under pressure on Monday morning, Snedden announced a party room meeting for Friday to settle the issue. Fraser confirmed his candidacy the next day. During four days of campaigning in which MPs pressured each other and party operatives worried openly about fundraising capacity, Snedden’s chances seemed to improve. Fraser’s supporters grew increasingly nervous and Peacock prepared to stand if Snedden lost the spill motion. The latter need not have bothered. In the end, it was Snedden who stood against Fraser and lost by a margin of ten votes.

In search of strong leaders

The Liberal Party has a special need for strong leaders. Gerard Henderson once diagnosed the party with a “Messiah complex”, while the political psychologist Graham Little argued that strong leaders gave parties a veneer of philosophy that could “whet the edge of political combat”. As Frank Bongiorno has more recently put it, strong leaders are those who provide their followers “structure, order and discipline” as well as “stark moral alternatives”.

The collective psychology of the Liberal Party worked in Fraser’s favour in March 1975. There were philosophical differences between the two candidates – Snedden later told his biographer that these contests were always driven by the “difference between conservatives and liberals” – but the vote really was about the styles of leadership they offered. As first-time MP John Howard recalled in his memoir, Fraser “sounded strong and looked like a winner”.

Fraser played the role forcefully for eight years, easily seeing off a challenge from Peacock in the final year of his government. Howard certainly fit the bill for much of his second stint as leader, and especially from 2001 onward. These men offered their followers a combination of ideological doctrine and hard-edged political pragmatism.

In the 1980s and post-2007, the party amassed an impressive history of leadership spills in their search for a strong leader. The current leader, Peter Dutton, made a spectacular contribution with his first leadership bid in August 2018. He eventually won the prize in 2022, not necessarily because he had the strongest claim to be a strong leader, but largely due to the lack of “viable alternatives”. That has made his position awkward at times, not least following the historic Aston by-election defeat in 2023.

Worlds Apart

Over time, Fraser became a trenchant critic of his former party, which hardly knew what to do with him. He failed in a bid for the party’s federal presidency in the 1990s, and was openly critical of its approach to race, asylum seekers and climate policy under Howard. He resigned his life membership shortly after Tony Abbott was elected leader in December 2009.

When Fraser died in March 2015, Abbott and his treasurer Joe Hockey led the awkward parliamentary tributes celebrating the life of a “genuine liberal”, while immigration minister Peter Dutton sat silently.

Dutton has played a key role in distancing the party from aspects of the Fraser legacy. Fraser abhorred racism, and his embrace of multiculturalism marks him out as different from several of his successors.

In 2016, Dutton controversially said that Fraser’s decision to resettle migrants fleeing civil war in Lebanon had been “a mistake”. He claims to have since apologised, but only to one senior member of the Lebanese community.

Fraser’s approach to Indigenous policy was also streets apart from that of Dutton. In the early 1980s Fraser’s government, on the advice of the National Aboriginal Council, considered a Makarrata commission to begin acknowledging the history of “Aboriginal occupation” and identifying areas for “increased Aboriginal involvement” in decision-making.

In 2024, Dutton ruled out a Makarrata commission, promising instead a more paternalistic approach to Indigenous affairs.

In 2008, Fraser attended the Apology to the Stolen Generations while Dutton, a senior Liberal MP at the time, boycotted it. (He has since apologised for this.) During the 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Fraser’s former ministers for Aboriginal affairs supported the “yes” campaign. Dutton was its chief opponent.

When he died, Fraser was reported to be working on a platform for a new political party that would advocate for a Republic, a treaty with First Nations people, “a more independent foreign policy and a post-carbon economy”. In his book Independents’ Day, journalist Brook Turner suggests that some of the individuals who spoke with Fraser then are now at the forefront of the campaigns supporting community independent candidates.

This year, Dutton hopes to win back some of those seats from these independent MPs. The coming contest may indicate that the memory of Fraser’s version of liberalism still has a place in Australia’s politics.