Malcolm Fraser
John Malcolm Fraser , CH (born May 21, 1930 in Melbourne , Victoria , Australia , † March 20, 2015 ibid), was an Australian politician of the Liberal Party of Australia and from November 12, 1975 to March 11, 1983 the 22. Australian Prime Minister . He was previously Army Secretary in the government of Prime Minister Harold Holt , Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1971 under John Gorton and Minister of Education and Science under William McMahon from 1971 to 1972. In 1987 he became founding chairman of CARE in Australia and was President of CARE International from 1990 to 1990 1995.
Fraser, who came from a well-to-do family, became a member of the Australian federal parliament at the age of 25. In the course of the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975 - "The Dismissal" - he was controversially appointed by Governor General Sir John Kerr as the successor to Labor politician Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. In the subsequent elections he was confirmed in office with a record landslide victory.
During his tenure, he promoted multiculturalism and campaigned for an end to racial segregation in South Africa . In terms of foreign policy, he continued the rapprochement with China that his predecessor had begun. Domestically, he supported the accountability of those in power to those in power and, among other things, introduced the office of ombudsman . He also established the family court. His tenure also included freedom of information laws , the 1976 Native Land Rights Act, and the establishment of the Australian Federal Police . The Great Barrier Reef was added to the World Heritage List under him .
In terms of economic policy, he initially opted for an austerity course, which he increasingly gave up. He said, "What is the bottom line must not be the main concern of the government". After an election during a recession, his government lost a majority and Bob Hawke of the Labor Party succeeded him.
After leaving office, he continued to campaign for the end of apartheid in South Africa and was leader of the Commonwealth's "Eminent Persons Group" , which worked towards it. He continued to be a strong advocate for multiculturalism and human rights. He also campaigned for the transformation of Australia from monarchy to republic, working with Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke. In later years he found himself in conflict with his party, from which he left in 2009, just a few months after the election of the arch-conservative liberal Tony Abbott as party chairman. “The party is no longer a liberal party,” he said, “but a conservative party”.
Early years
Malcolm Fraser arrived on May 21, 1930 in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Toorak as the youngest of two children of lawyer John Neville Fraser and his wife Una, née. Woolf, to the world.
His grandfather, Sir Simon Fraser (1832–1919), who was born in Canada as the son of a Scottish farmer and sawmill and was drawn to Australia by the gold rush in Bendigo , eventually made his fortune primarily as a supplier of railroad construction and acquired considerable land holdings, primarily in western Victoria. where he grazed sheep for their wool. He later became a Member of Parliament in Victoria and, from 1901 to 1913, of the first Australian Senate , where he sat for the Protectionist Party , which in those years mutated into the Commonwealth Liberals via the anti-socialists . In 1918 he was knighted.
Young Malcolm grew up on the family's sheep farms at Deniliquin in Riverina District in New South Wales, which his father had inherited, and also on "Nareen" in southwest Victoria. He received his education at Toorak's Glamorgan School and Melbourne Grammar School. He graduated from Magdalen College , Oxford , England in 1952 in philosophy, politics and economics.
In 1956 he married Tamara "Tamie" Beggs, the daughter of a rancher, with whom he had four children.
Political career
In 1954, Fraser ran for the first time for the rural seat of Wannon in western Victoria. Fraser had to admit defeat by only 17 votes difference. In the following year, however, he was able to prevail with a majority of over 5000 votes and became the youngest member of parliament at the age of 25. He retained his seat until he withdrew from parliament in 1983.
In December 1966 Fraser became Minister of Defense under Prime Minister Harold Holt (English second Holt ministry ) and was instrumental in the introduction of conscription , the compulsory recruitment of soldiers for the Australian contingent in the Vietnam War .
After Holt's death in December 1967, Fraser was a major supporter of Education and Science Secretary Senator John Gorton 's ambitions to succeed Holt. After this prime minister, Fraser took over his ministerial office until November 1969. November 1969 to March 1971 he was Minister of Defense. When he unexpectedly resigned from office on March 10, 1971, he complained of the Prime Minister's interference in his administration. In Parliament, Fraser stated that Gorton was unsuitable for the office of Prime Minister.
This was one of the high points of the crisis the governing coalition found itself in at the time. Gorton was eventually replaced by William "Billy" McMahon , under whom Fraser again received the Ministry of Education and Science. The elections on December 2, 1972 finally saw the end of the 23-year governing coalition, which was ultimately burdened by the Vietnam War, inflation and internal rifts, when the reform-minded Australian Labor Party was elected into office under its charismatic leader Gough Whitlam . Labor received 49.59% of the vote and the Liberals 32.04%.
When the new leader of the Liberals, Billy Snedden , lost to Labor in the federal elections on May 18, 1974 , Fraser successfully applied for his successor as party leader in March 1975. Previously, he was the opposition spokesman, first for primary industry and then for labor.
On November 11, 1975, Governor General John Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam and his government under controversial circumstances during the Australian Constitutional Crisis of 1975, and made Fraser interim Prime Minister.
In the following election in December 1975 he was confirmed in this office with an overwhelming majority and the coalition he led with the involvement of the National Country Party (now the National Party of Australia ) also won a majority in the Senate. In the 1980 elections, however, this was lost again and the majority in the House of Commons shrank.
In the Australian summer of 1982–83, Australia experienced recession, drought and social conflicts accompanied by numerous strikes. There were also disputes in Fraser's party. Industry Secretary Andrew Peacock had suddenly resigned in April 1981 and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Fraser.
On February 3, 1983, about eight months before the next scheduled elections, Fraser asked Governor General Ninian Stephen to call early elections. He wanted to achieve a mandate for three more years under unfavorable conditions, taking advantage of the low popularity of the opposition leader Bill Hayden .
By chance, however, at almost the same time at a Labor Party meeting in Sydney, Bill Hayden was replaced by the popular former chairman of the Australian Confederation of Trade Unions , Bob Hawke . In the March 5 elections, his government lost 24 seats and the Labor Party won in the biggest turnaround ever recorded in Australia against a Conservative government. Fraser resigned from the party leadership and resigned from the office of prime minister on March 11th. Two months later, he also resigned from parliament.
During his seven and a half year tenure, Fraser implemented many reforms in the area of human rights and was involved in international movements in support of black African movements, for example in South Africa . He advocated multiculturalism ; In the beginning of 1978 the multilingual radio and television network Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) was founded. Accepting tens of thousands of refugees after the Vietnam War was one of his concerns. He continued the traditional conservative economic policy, contrary to the then trend towards greater deregulation and liberalization , as in the USA under Ronald Reagan or in British Thatcherism .
Later years
After leaving parliament, Malcolm Fraser withdrew to his property Nareen, but continued to be involved in numerous issues such as apartheid in South Africa . In 1985 he became a member of the "Eminent Persons Group" of the Commonwealth , which advocated a dialogue between the conflicting parties to end racial segregation.
From 1987 to 2002 he was chairman of the Australian division of the international aid organization CARE . He was President of CARE International from 1990 to 1995. For several years he wrote articles for the conservatively oriented national daily newspaper The Australian .
He was also committed to the abolition of the monarchy in Australia and appeared for this purpose together with his successor Bob Hawke and his former nemesis Gough Whitlam in public discourses and a television commercial for the Australian Republican Movement .
The Memphis Trousers Affair found its way into the political folklore of Australia. In October 1986, Malcolm Fraser was in his capacity as chairman of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group in Memphis , Tennessee, USA. There, at an advanced hour, he was found in a confused state, clad only in a towel, his trousers lost, in the foyer of a hotel with a highly relevant reputation, the Admiral Benbow Inn . The exact background of the incident was never clarified. Since Malcolm Fraser himself never commented on it, this led to all sorts of, mostly unambiguous, speculations. In later years his wife once said on the subject that her husband had probably been caught by a prank by his colleagues and that she had no reason for any other concerns. As recently as 2005, the title of a humorous series on ABC television, The Memphis Trousers Half Hour , referred to this episode.
In 2000 he was awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal . In March 2010, he published Malcolm Fraser's: The Political Memoirs , a highly regarded memoir cum biography book, co-authored by Margaret Simons.
In May 2010 it became known that Malcolm Fraser had already resigned from the Liberal Party in December of the previous year, shortly after Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull as opposition leader of the Liberals . The reasons given include a shift to the right by the liberals and racist undertones in their immigration policy. On humanitarian and human rights issues in particular, Fraser has expressed widely divergent opinions from the party line in recent years. Most recently, he also criticized the lax attitude of the liberals under their new leaders in connection with the use of forged Australian passports by Israel in the murder of a Hamas representative in Dubai .
Malcolm Fraser died in his home after a brief illness on the morning of March 20, 2015 - just five months after Gough Whitlam passed away.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ "The bottom line alone was not going to be the governments value"; see also "Governments must recognize that they cannot govern for the economic bottom line as though there were no other issues"; from Malcolm Fraser, Margaret Simons: "Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs", The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2010. pp. 783 f.
- ↑ standard.net.au July 15, 2011: Life and spaghetti on the Frasers' farm
- ↑ Sydney Morning Herald, May 26, 2010: "Baillieu tells of sadness after Fraser quits Liberal Party"
- ↑ Malcolm Fraser dies at age 84 , abc.net.au, March 20, 2015, accessed March 20, 2015
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fraser, Malcolm |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Fraser, John Malcolm (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Australian politician and prime minister |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 21, 1930 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Melbourne , Victoria, Australia |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 20, 2015 |
| Place of death | Melbourne |