This is a transcript of the complete original interview conducted for the Australian Biography project. Each transcript page covers one videotape (approximately 35 minutes). There is also QuickTime video of the full interview available. To play the video, click on the icon in the right hand column. In addition, each question in the transcript is linked to the video. Clicking on a question will play the video from that point. (Help with this feature.) Optionally, you can download the video file for offline viewing (approx. 10MB).

The interview has been left it in its original state so that you can get a sense of how the conversation developed. The repetition of some questions, or a question followed by another question, is often due to the end of a particular tape or some other interruption, and has been indicated at the appropriate place in the text. There has been minimal tidying up of the text so that the flavour of the encounter has been kept.

Do you think that what you did in South Africa, that group, is a model that might be used elsewhere in the world in trouble spots?

Oh only in the sense that maybe at different times a group can go somewhere and try and analyse the problem or propose means that might get differing parties together. I don't think the solutions that we proposed for South Africa would have any particular relevance because the condition of South Africa, with the imposition of apartheid and all the rest, was really unique in the world. And the problems of South Africa are not in the same form repeated, I think, in any other country. So what we were doing was specifically related to South Africa. But the idea of mediation, the idea of trying to get people into a conference, the idea of trying to get a unified government and those sorts of principles can apply in other parts of the world. But the circumstances are going to be so different that you can't say, 'Well this is what was done in South Africa, let's do that somewhere else'. It wouldn't be appropriate.

Since you ceased to be prime minister, has there been a sort of ... I mean one speculates, you know, because you were young when you left. Has there been a sort of restlessness in you, trying to find something significant to do?

Oh there probably was for a while because - what was I - 53 and I wasn't sure what I was going to do for a while. I've been involved with CARE for about the last six or seven years and I have some business commitments in Japan and the United States which takes you to those places two or three times each year. And then I have the United Nations involvement and the Commonwealth involvement, all of which took quite a bit of time. So it's really been a very busy period and quite apart from that there's a farm to run.

Do you enjoy that?

The farm? Oh very much so, yes.

What is it about it that you like?

Oh I think trying to breed better stock and you know we've just had a record bull sale and with record prices for us and record numbers of bulls sold. And I always like doing practical things and this is a practical thing. We're breeding better sheep, better wool and it's a cattle stud and a ram stud so it's an intensely busy place. We're fairly progressive in the techniques we use and all the cattle are on a computer program for example and this is, I think, essential for modern breeding. And you know for a long time after I became a member of parliament I had the view that what people did sitting down behind a desk wasn't work. I mean work meant getting physically tired, it meant getting dirty, it meant using a crowbar and a shovel to dig a post hole and whatever. And I still think that's work in a different category. But even farms these days you have machines to do a lot of things that used to be done physically.

And you regret that a little bit do you?

No I don't regret it. It obviously makes life a lot easier and people can go on doing things which otherwise bad backs for others would make it impossible or very difficult. But it was whatever it was, it was part of - you know I know sitting behind a desk is work, but for a long while I felt that it wasn't.

Whatever you think of work, life seems for you to have been about achievement, that it's been very important to you to have a sense of achievement. Was that something you think that has come to you from your childhood? Was that something that was expected of you in the household?

No I don't think so. You know I think when I went into politics my parents both believed, 'Really should he be doing this? Will he make an ass of himself? He's very young', and all the rest. But people do achieve things at pretty young ages these days and there's nothing particularly surprising about that. But I've always looked to the future and I suppose I've always wanted to do interesting things. Whether it's positively about achieving or not I don't know.

Did you admire your grandfather, Sir Simon Fraser, more than your father?

No, not at all. I never knew my grandfather.

But you knew about his record. He was a bit of a legend in the family.

Yes but he had a tremendous stimulus to do a great many things because he had come here as an impoverished Canadian with absolutely nothing and clearly he wanted to get away from that condition. I once said to Field Marshall Slim when he was Governor-General, you know, I suppose in a gratuitous way, 'What an achievement, foot soldier to field marshall'. And he just looked at me and he said, 'Obviously you have no [idea of the] condition of a British Private, because if you had you would understand that it is the most powerful motivation to get as far away from that wretched state as possible'. And so I suppose my grandfather had the same kind of motivation. Get away from that state. And he hadn't spent four years in the trenches in France at any time of his life.

So with you - without privation in your early life to stimulate you, what do you think was your goad? What made Malcolm run?

Oh I find that very difficult to answer. I certainly wanted to do interesting things and indicated earlier ,I think, that I really became member for Wannon almost by accident. I'd thought that one day maybe I'd like to go into politics, after all it will fit in well with being a farmer. It's not really true, because being a politician is much more than a full-time job. Some people, in earlier times, had made it fit in well, but they were more leisurely, in that sense more luxurious days I suspect. So maybe I originally became a politician in a certain degree of ignorance.

What about your maternal grandfather? Not many people know that he was actually Jewish. Did you have anything to do with him?

No, I never knew him either.

Do you think there was anything of that background that came through your mother to you?

Well obviously there'd be some blood or genes or whatever through from grandfathers, but I don't know how you can physically be influenced by people that you've never really met or known or been able to talk to.

I mean some people might wonder whether or not it was this background that made what has surprised some people - your attitude to racial issues - softer than people of your general political persuasions have.

What do you mean by softer?

In that you've been very - maybe it's harder in that you've been very critical of anybody who adopts a racist stance.

Well I don't know where that came from, but it's, whatever it is, it's just part of me. And I've made speeches in 1960 or '61 or something - was that the time of Sharpeville - about Sharpeville because when I was prime minister the journalists, who don't do very much homework and certainly wouldn't have been recording what an inconsequential private member was saying in 1960 or '61, they'd start to write: Fraser's taking this view because he thinks it's politically expedient, and whatever. But it was no different from the view I'd been expressing on earlier occasions, years earlier, and so it gets back to the question of stereotypes and the world people expect people to belong to, a certain pattern. And overwhelmingly, for the most part, people do not belong to those patterns. They might conform to some preconception in relation to a narrow area of activity or of interest, but then you shift that to something and you'll find - no, well he doesn't behave like a Western District farmer, he behaves like somebody else. And you shift it again to another area of interest and it's going to shift again, and this is really one of the great problems. If you don't fit a stereotype, Canberra journalists, at least, don't know how to report you and won't report you accurately - they'll just report their own wonderment, their own bemusement, 'We can't understand what ...' I said to - I don't know if we talked about this yesterday - but a meeting of Australian journalists in London on one occasion, and some - in today's world what are you meant to say - female, lady, woman journalist.

Whatever comes naturally to you.

She said to me, if I could ask one thing of journalists what would I ask, and I said, 'That'd be very simple, to report me exactly as I spoke because I use words with precision'. I mean exactly what I said, and if I didn't I'd correct it. But so often I'd find that I'd said this and journalists would say, 'Well Fraser said this, therefore what does he mean?' Instead of just taking the plain meaning of the words that I used, which is what I meant. And this report then appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald - 'Fraser made a special plea to journalists asking to be reported using the exact words that he used, saying, meaning exactly what he'd said. Obviously therefore Fraser had some hidden motive for saying this' and then the rest of the article was speculating about what in the hell I'd meant. You know, I think that just says it all.

When you were at Melbourne Grammar, and later around the sort of Melbourne establishment traps, did you ever encounter anti-Semitism?

Oh occasionally at Melbourne Grammar you would have, amongst some of the kids, yeah.

How did that strike you at the time?

I think I was so naive I didn't know why some of the kids were picking on others, and it's only later that I would have been conscious that the person being bullied or whatever was in fact a Jew. There weren't very many Jews at Melbourne Grammar.

Were you at all conscious of the fact that you had some Jewishness in your own background?

None at all. Never have been.

In relation to the media, over the years you've had a sort of love/hate relationship with the media because you've had to use it, or has it all been hate. I mean what do you think of the media, and what do you feel about its relationship with politics?

Well in many ways it's a very incestuous relationship. A senior journalist, who's now an editor, once said to me that she was taking a great risk on a certain issue because she was going to report certain actions of me and of the government in quite different ways to the rest of the gallery. I said, 'Why is that a risk? You happen to be reporting it accurately'. 'Oh yes, but other people don't think you mean what you're saying.' Same thing all over again. And Canberra really is a most insidious place and it's getting worse. It's getting larger and worse because it's still a public service, political centre and you now have third generation public servants. I was in a Perth Italian club and there are third and fourth generation Italians in it as well as people who've arrived fresh from Italy and who couldn't speak all that much English. And it was a large club, a prosperous club and there would have been probably a couple of hundred people drinking in it. The four journalists with me were mostly senior journalists and they were huddled down in the corner by themselves, speaking to themselves and I went over and said, 'Look, you spend your lives trying to interpret my government to ordinary Australians, and you can't even talk to ordinary Australians. Why don't you come and have a drink and meet a few ordinary Australians?' Fifteen minutes later they were back in their corner talking to themselves and one of them had the honesty to say to me the next morning that they just didn't know how to talk to the people in that club. And yet they had the impertinence every day of their lives to interpret me and the actions of my government to those very same Australians. And to pretend that they knew what was good for Australia. Now that is a total condemnation of Canberra, but it is typical of Canberra, and not only of journalists. It's also typical of - I had a head of a Prime Minister's Department saying to me in relation to correspondence, 'What does it matter? It's only from a member of the public'. And he should have known enough of me because permanent heads meet together and he would have known the permanent head in the army department, where I totally changed the culture of the department in relation to the public and indeed, in relation to the way they treated their own soldiers and members of the force. But to find the attitude repeated to me by the most senior public servant in the Commonwealth, you know, says - if politicians, if ministers don't sit on that attitude through the public service, and it's very hard, then nobody else will. And one of the sad things about it is that as the nature of the career public service has been broken down, the people who go in as political appointments have the same attitude. They're no different. I would much prefer to have a career public service - Paul Keating wouldn't have been led into the mistakes that he's made in Vietnam and Australian veterans, or people who were killed in Vietnam. He would have been properly and well advised by career public servants. It's people that come in with a government, don't know the history, don't know the traditions, who have no corporate memory. If you're advised by somebody who's been advising two or three other Prime Ministers before you, has seen the mistakes they've made, the successes they've made, you're going to be kept out of trouble much better than if you'd bring on your own principal person.

I suppose you can also be placed in trouble, if they want to, more effectively as well.

Yes, but that was not the habit of good public servants.

Nevertheless ...

They took a great pride in keeping ministers out of trouble. They knew quite well that if a minister got into trouble, it rubbed off on the permanent head, it rubbed off on the department. How did the department allow this to happen? And the [lack of a] culture of a permanent public service is something that has, through the years, led to, led very often to very poor quality government in the United States. Six months of every American administration, so six months out of every four years is lost and wasted while the Presidents desperately try and appoint people to a whole multitude of jobs. And in relation to the public service we, unfortunately, are significantly going down the same track.

It's said however that you yourself were often in conflict with your permanent heads in a way that other ministers sometimes weren't. Were you somebody who was critical and analytical of the advice that was offered you by your permanent heads?

Oh people had to be able to justify their advice, but in what way, give me an instance.

Well there was of course your uniformed officer who you later had a big clash with, when you became Minister for Defence, and that was Daly. And then when you went to - there were several heads of departments after that, both at Defence and then at Education where there were specific instances where you disagreed with them.

Look, a disagreement is not a clash, and permanent heads do not expect to be agreed with on every point. But policy advice doesn't just come from permanent heads and the minister who only speaks to a permanent head is just stupid. You've got a whole raft of people in the department who've got knowledge and different levels and different areas of a department's responsibility. So you don't just listen to a permanent head and most permanent heads certainly want to be able to bring in their deputies and first assistant secretaries and all the rest to help argue a particular case with the minister.

It's been suggested that some of those heads that you came into conflict with complained about the fact that you did go below them and they felt that all advice from the department should be channelled through them to you. They felt that you set up lines of communication down into the department which they thought were improper, to use one of your phrases.

Well instead of saying they, who's they?

Some of the permanent heads ...

Who?

... that served under you.

Who? Who?

The information that I have, that is in some of the books that have been written about you, related to Sir Hugh Ennore, to some of the other people who were in the early days when you first became a minister in the department of defence and ...

Well ...

... in Education and Science.

I haven't read any of those books and that shows how much I think of them, and I'm surprised that I'm being asked questions on the basis of contemporary stories by journalists who don't do very much homework.

I suppose I was asking ...

Hugh Ennore was a very good permanent head, but he was the first to say, 'Use all the resources of the department'. In the army department it was exactly the same because no permanent head can carry in his mind the total resources of the department, or the arguments needed to support a certain point of view. So really the question that you've asked and the sources from which you've got it just indicate the total degree of ignorance of whoever the authors were.

So what I'm asking you is, in your experience were there ever any difficulties with permanent heads who were concerned about their own position when you reached down into the department to use the other resources within the department? Did you never have any clashes over that?

Any permanent head that I had encouraged me to use the resources of the department.

Right, so ...

And wanted the resources ...

... so those reports are completely wrong?

Yes, absolutely.

Right.

And indicate the ignorance of the authors.

Right. The reason that I was asking it, was that it did [suggest] an instance in which the question of who was in authority was raised, and of course that's always been a certain tension, hasn't it, between new politicians coming into a position and the tradition of the department, that there's always a settling in period as you ...

Oh well, when any two people have to work together there's probably a settling in period, but you know, a very good example I think is the Prime Minister's Department. I believe they worked harder in my time than they ever did under Mr Whitlam and certainly much harder than they did under Mr Hawke. And a lot of the senior people worked Saturdays and Sundays, or late at night if something was needed. But all felt they were contributing and I never had any sense of complaint. They liked the fact that they were contributing to the government.

They also knew that you were working very hard yourself. Do you think sometimes you've worked too hard for your own good?

No.

Do you think it's possible to work too hard?

Oh if you work yourself into the grave it probably is, yes. But not many people do that. Probably more people who die from not working enough.

So how have you taken care of the fact that you've been in jobs where you really were asked to stretch yourself?

How do you mean, take care of it?

Well how have you taken care of your health and your family and the rest of your life?

Oh I used to come back here as often as possible and you could get back here from Canberra in a light aircraft in an hour and a half, and a lot of weekends we came back and that was fine. The Prime Minister's Department didn't like it much when I did, because generally I'd go back to Canberra with a - in the sort of, out in the paddocks or whatever you'd think of half a dozen things that'd be a good idea to do, so every time I went back they said I'd have six months work for the department in my briefcase. And sometimes that was true, but it was useful things. If I had ideas that the department thought weren't worth - thought not worth pursuing - they'd say so and we'd argue it out and come to a decision one way or another. And that's the sort of relationship that you need to have if you've got senior people and thoughtful people; you need to be able to use them and exchange ideas and see where you come up.

Who was the best public servant you ever worked with?

Probably Arthur Tange.

Why?

Because he was principled, able, thoughtful, very tough, very hard working.

Did he give you a good argument?

Oh if he didn't agree with me of course he would, yes. That was ...

And did you enjoy that?

Yes, but it's essential. I mean any - there are two kinds of public servants who are no use to me at all - the person who'd come into my office, make an assertion and not be able to back it, not be able to argue it, not be able to demonstrate that what he was saying had some substance to it. You knew that sort of person was dangerous because they wouldn't do their homework adequately and they could give advice that would be very faulty. And the other sort of person was one who just [said], 'Alright, he's the prime minister, I won't argue with him. I'll just accept what he has to say and that's it'. You needed somebody, who if he had views, would put them forward, would argue. Because nobody's got a monopoly of common sense, nobody's got a monopoly of judgement or wisdom and the only way you could work out the best course is through discussion, through analysis and you have to have public servants who are prepared to stand a bit of a grilling if they're putting forward a point of view and then at the end of that you might well be concluding, 'Yes, right, this chap's got something worth following. We've got to do it'.

Have you ever felt the necessity to soften your manner because you felt that you were intimidating somebody who might have something to tell you that it would be useful to hear, but who became afraid because of the fact that you were so strong?

Well I think permanent heads mostly will have told people in their departments that I expected them to argue, I expected them to stand up and by the time they were senior within the Prime Minister's Department, or for that matter the Department of Education, I'd expect them to be able to stand up and argue their point. And I didn't often find people who weren't willing to do that. I mean the quality public servants welcome that approach because they knew that they'd do a better result.

Are you conscious of the fact that you can be intimidating to people? Is this something that you've been told? And have you tried to moderate that at all?

No I don't think I'm intimidating and I haven't really - occasionally I have but I don't really think I can you know. Public servants are dealing with all sorts of people all the time and if they're too intimidated to put forward their point of view or to be able to argue their point of view, well, they probably haven't got what it takes.

Given the situation you described in which you invited the press to relate to ordinary people in a club and they were unable to do it, do you find it irksome, irritating, that you have had an image, created by the press, of someone who, yourself, is aloof and not able to mix with the general public and is perhaps a little bit removed from the general public?

I think this is one of the, one of the things that started to be promoted after my resignation from the Gorton government. And I was an easy target for it, you know, Melbourne Grammar, Oxford, Western District, how in hell can he possible relate. During one of the elections, I've forgotten which one, the Labor Party or - no, journalists - had people down in the electorate for three or four weeks and after four or five days, I had reports coming back - you've got a few friends around here, they're trying to either find some dirt or they're trying to get people from Wannon to be critical of you as a local member. Trying to say that you're stuck up or aloof or that you don't respond to the needs of the electorate. Anything at all. Anyway, they spent four weeks and I had to spend an awful lot of money and there was never a report out of that visit. They never objectively reported what they found was that people in this electorate found that they were better served than they ever had been before in their lives and that Fraser looked after the local interests of the people of Wannon very carefully and with a great deal of hard work and conscientiousness, which is what they had found.

Given your poor view of the media and journalists generally, their standards ...

Yes, but when journalists do this, they're very often instructed to it by somebody more senior.

So ...

It's not necessarily the working journalist's fault. I've had journalists telling me at times that they have been instructed by people on high, from their head office and they say they wished they hadn't got to do it, but they've been given an assignment and they've got to do it. So while some journalists might concentrate on that area, I don't think all do.

But you feel a certain at least ambivalence about the media and the way it goes about its business, and nevertheless you've been forced to use it like all politicians. How have you approached the whole question of relating to the media, who after all are the way you can communicate with a wider public? And how did you deal with the tremendous importance of how you appeared on television and how you presented yourself there? Did you put work into that?

Oh some, but I didn't go to any school. I mean the worst thing is when you're speaking straight down the lens into a camera, you know, in a three or a four or a five minute address to the nation or something. That really is the hardest thing to do and I think I took quite a long while to be reasonably competent at that. But you know, press conferences are not difficult. You go and you say what you want to say. You answer questions the way you want to answer them. I've never been particularly phased by questions and I've generally known how to answer them. On most of the questions that you're asked, on most you're always going to know more about the subject than a journalist. And that puts you at an advantage.

There's been a whole tendency in modern leadership towards personality politics and that means image making. At any stage in your career did you work specifically on changing your image?

No I certainly didn't. I think my press officer might sometimes, and occasionally when I was tired he'd say, 'Why not - we've had an offer to do this, wouldn't you like to do this?' And if I'd been thinking properly I would have said, 'Don't be so silly', and I think they try and ...

What kind of things? What kind of things were suggested to you that you wish you hadn't done?

Well I was down at the ABC one night doing an interview on some sort of political subject and there was a music mixed-up show - what was it called, I've forgotten - anyway they said would I introduce it one night. This was a show for youngsters and people jiving around and it wasn't a thing for me to introduce, and if I'd had any sense I would have just said no.

They wanted to make you look young and with it?

Oh they wanted me to be human and relate to young people. Well it's the wrong way to do it. It just makes you look - well it just shows that you're different from everyone else on that damn program. Because you're older and you're dressed differently and you're doing a different sort of job and inevitably you're going to be different. So if anything, the result is that it sets you apart instead of - and youngsters don't expect prime ministers to be on that sort of thing anyway.

How did you meet your wife, Tammy?

Oh somewhere in Victoria.

Doing what, do you remember?

No. I don't think you're going to get very far with these questions.

No, well I was just really wanting to find out what - how you met her, because I mean it was something important that we need to know. And what, really what I'm leading to is the part that she played in your life - in your political life.

Well in my political life Tammy played a tremendous part and was always enormous encouragement and support and always there when needed. And I suppose, you know, in many ways, was politically very helpful because with her personality people'd say, 'Tammy can put up with him, he can't be all bad'. But - and she was very good with the public. She was very good with demonstrators.

For example?

Oh she could bluff demonstrators out of demonstrating sometimes because it'd be very difficult to be nasty to her.

This is a transcript of the complete original interview conducted for the Australian Biography project. Each transcript page covers one videotape (approximately 35 minutes). There is also QuickTime video of the full interview available. To play the video, click on the icon in the right hand column. In addition, each question in the transcript is linked to the video. Clicking on a question will play the video from that point. (Help with this feature.) Optionally, you can download the video file for offline viewing (approx. 10MB).

The interview has been left it in its original state so that you can get a sense of how the conversation developed. The repetition of some questions, or a question followed by another question, is often due to the end of a particular tape or some other interruption, and has been indicated at the appropriate place in the text. There has been minimal tidying up of the text so that the flavour of the encounter has been kept.

When you got married to Tammy, were you conscious of the need to have a wife who would be able to help you in politics?

No, not at all.

Did she know what she was letting herself in for?

Well she didn't and I didn't. I mean I didn't when I became a politician, and I was already a politician when she married me and I suppose I only knew the beginning of it. Initially, you know, we were living here and I was travelling backwards and forwards each week when parliament was sitting. And I very quickly decided that that's a nonsense way of living, so we took a house in Canberra and for the period of the parliamentary session we stayed there and I told the electorate, 'I'm just not going to be available during this time'. Available, certainly if they've got a problem. They can get at me through the telephone, through my office or whatever, but not available to go to RSL smoke nights and not available to go to electoral functions. And I just said, 'It's nonsense going a thousand miles each week'. No, it would have been more, it would have been nearly 1 500 to and from work and that was accepted. My parliamentary colleagues thought - well that's the end of Fraser, he'll be a oncer, he'll lose his seat. But my majority went on rising because instead of going for an overseas trip in the recess, I'd come back to the electorate and I'd go around the electorate and I reported things to the electorate and I built up linkages and networks with different groups and organisations and people, I think probably more effectively than a lot of my colleagues. And the electoral vote seems to confirm that because for several elections, regardless of the swing, to or against the Liberal Party my own majority increased. But it made life a good deal more, or a good deal easier, moving up to Canberra and taking the kids there for the session. But it meant changing house, what, four times a year. Twice to Canberra and twice back here.

And with four children eventually, was this very difficult for Tammy?

Oh it got more difficult. She organised it very well and always seemed to have the kids ready to go to bed and whatever when ... I mean the parliament sat till 6 o'clock and then it resumed at 8 o'clock, so you had two hours for drinks or dinner or, if you were going out to dinner, that was the time in which it was done and if you were having people in to dinner, that's the time in which it was done. 'Eat it and beat it' was the way of it. Of course, it's difficult enough organising children anyway, and I probably didn't realise how effectively and how smoothly it all ran.

You took it a bit for granted you think?

Probably.

What contribution did she make to your political life?

Well the most important part of it would have been encouragement, help to me, especially when things were difficult. When you'd made your speech condemning Gorton, you know, you just really wonder what you're doing and where it's all going or what the future holds. And she was always there when needed or whatever, and later on when I was prime minister, the family were older so it was easier for her to come around and easier to do some political things in her own right or meetings or functions or whatever, and she was always very effective and very, very good at it.

Do you sometimes feel the public gets two for the price of one, when they have a, when you have a wife like Tammy, who has to be so active in things?

Oh they do, I'm sure they do.

Was she always happy that she'd made this choice, or did she sometimes wonder whether or not she'd done the wrong thing getting mixed up with a politician?

Oh, you'd have to ask her that.

Did she ever complain to you?

No, not at all.

Well that's probably unusual in politics I think, to have a wife who doesn't complain about being a politician's wife.

Mm.

So you were lucky to be supported in that way.

I was very lucky.

Did you feel that you were able in the circumstances of your life to be a good father to your children?

Well again, Tammy would probably carry the main burden of it, but I think the important thing was, when you do have time with the kids you make sure that your attention is with them and that you're not diverted or really thinking and talking about other things. Obviously they were going to boarding school when they were old enough and whatever, but you know, you needed to be around if you could be to teach them to ride or to fish or to shoot or whatever. But again, it's something that Tammy would have been carrying the main burden of.

Did you regret that? Did you wish you'd had more contact with them?

Yeah, you know, there were times certainly.

Do you think the children suffered at all because of your political career?

I think a political career's hard on any kiddie. The more senior the politician is, the more difficult it's going to be.

So was there ever any situation in which you felt that you would have liked to have protected them from the consequences, but you weren't able to?

Yes, but they never complained, and never said anything about it. There was one occasion involving one of the boys at Grimwade. During the supply crisis when the Labor Party had those 'Shame, Fraser, Shame' badges and one of the boy's form masters was wearing one of those badges when he was teaching my son. Now I learned about it almost by accident about a year after the event. But if I'd known about it at the time, there would have been a major riot in that school.

Was there anything else that you felt that they suffered with?

Well I think it was probably often difficult for them, but they weren't complaining. They knew I was involved in politics and at that time they knew I was prime minister, so you know, they didn't come home and say this happened or that happened or whatever.

Do you think they were proud of you and that you set them an example of what could be achieved in the world outside?

Well you'd have to ask them that.

Now, you're somebody who has always set yourself very, very high standards and judged yourself quite severely about things. In other words, been a perfectionist in what you set out to achieve, and quite often that goes along with sense, sometimes feelings of futility, even depression about where you're getting. Do you sometimes find it hard to keep enthusiastic about the world when you look around and you see that things aren't measuring up?

Oh I, you know, you don't - if I wasn't enthusiastic I wouldn't be involved with CARE Australia and CARE International. You have to accept the world as it is and it's a very imperfect place and you're never going to be able to - and no government is going to be able to - solve Australia's problems for all time and say, 'Right, now it's all smooth sailing, there're no problems, no difficulties'. All you can do is to handle the problems that inevitably arise as well as possible in your time and try and leave a country as well balanced and in a strong position for whoever your successors are. But if you think you can get out there and solve all problems, no difficulties are going to arise in the future, and have a sense of failure because you haven't succeeded, the task you've set yourself is a quite hopeless one. You know, from the basis of human nature, problems are going to keep on arising and therefore the art of government is how do you handle a situation in a continuum as it were. It's not - so it's not necessarily where you end up, it's the way you behave or it's what you can achieve along the way, because you're never going to end up at a final point. Life's not like that.

Would you describe yourself as an optimist?

Oh I think probably I am because I - if you weren't an optimist, I think you're very stupid being a politician. And probably stupid being involved with a major aid organisation.

But you don't really expect a lot from human beings. I mean you do feel that human beings on the whole are in a fairly imperfect state.

Well they are, but that's not inconsistent with expecting a good deal from people.

Especially yourself?

Well if you don't expect a reasonable amount from yourself, how can you expect anything from anyone else?

You've been critical of some of your colleagues on the grounds that they were emotional. That's been a theme in some of your criticisms.

One.

Well it was Andrew Peacock as well as John Gorton, both people that you said you felt ...

Oh I was thinking while I was in government.

And ...

I don't think, no I don't know that John Gorton was emotional all that much. He certainly wanted to get his own way. I don't think he was emotional in terms of losing control of his emotions.

How do you handle your own emotions? You're very careful about not expressing a lot on your face. It's a fairly inexpressive and guarded aspect that you present to the world.

Well if I lost my temper, politically, it would be because I intended to.

So you were never overtaken by anger?

Yes, but you've got to control it, unless you think it's going to be useful not to control it in a certain set of circumstances. And in private you might really let your hair down and whatever, and I think anyone needs that sort of safety valve from time to time, but it's not really a good thing to blow your top with colleagues or whatever.

What kind of things make you angry?

Oh deception, stupidity, inefficiency, laziness.

And ...

People not doing the job they're meant to do or said they would do.

In terms of emotion, would you be more likely to get angry or to do a Bob Hawke and weep?

Oh I'm more likely to get angry I think.

And if you were feeling yourself getting angry in situations where it wouldn't do you any good, what would you do about that?

Just not get angry.

Not get angry or control it?

Well control it - same thing.

So do you think the mastering of emotion and the use of emotion in a much more calculated and deliberate way is a very important part of leadership?

Well being able to control yourself, in whatever way, is certainly an important part of leadership. You can't have a leader who cannot control himself. How can he lead a team of very diverse people with differing characters, different temperaments, if he can't master himself?

Would you be able to respect yourself, would you be able to respect a leader who showed emotion publicly?

Showing emotion isn't necessarily something that destroys respect, but you really want to make sure or you want to believe or I would anyway, that a person is in control of themselves. I suppose you can always have extreme circumstances if somebody wept once, but if you're going to do it every time you have a press conference ...

Did you feel disappointed with yourself that you showed some emotion on the night that you, that you lost the election, in '83? Not very much but just a little bit showed through.

Some. Probably.

You would have preferred not to show anything?

Yes.

And yet some people say that it's because you're so in control of yourself that others have sometimes found it hard to see you as a sympathetic human being.

Well maybe, I don't know.

Had you ever sort of been advised to let down your guard a little bit more?

Oh I've been given all sorts of advice but I, you know I just, I don't think - it's not normally in my nature to show that sort of emotion publicly. So I prefer not to.

Looking back on your life so far, how would you like to be remembered, from all the things that you've done to this day?

I've never thought of that.

Well you are part of Australian history. You have a place as an individual in the history of the country. Maybe next century, how would you like people to look back on Malcolm Fraser?

I suppose I'd - well one of the things I'd like, and maybe it's not possible, is for them to really look at what I've done, rather than to read contemporary novels purporting to describe what I've done, because most of those contemporary novels are a lot of nonsense. I mean Philip Ayres made a serious attempt, but the first half of Philip's book is much better than the second half. And that was partly a question of time I think. It would have taken another 18 months to make the second half as good as the first half. But most of the other books are - really. And it's not just a view of journalists, but not too many people can write about contemporary events which they themselves have often been caught up with, with any degree of objectivity or even accuracy. You know a minister who writes a book from memory and memories are notoriously inaccurate. This is one of the problems with - if I do write a history of my own government, I can't rely on my memory for anything. Everything has to be checked.

You're thinking of doing this?

Well I might, I don't know.

Is that because you'd like to be remembered for what you've done rather than what you are? Has it meant more to you to actually be a person of action than to develop a certain character?

Well I think the stage has come really when I, I don't only owe it to myself or the record of my government, but I also owe it to some very good ministerial colleagues to try and set the record straight about what we've done, and what we achieved, because they've all been ... You know, when people criticise the Fraser years, it's not just criticising Fraser, it's criticising everyone who was a part of that government, because they all participated in the decisions and some of the latter-day critics, of course, were one of two of the government ministers at the time. But their criticisms don't stand up. They've been made for a different reason and a different purpose, and I think it's time the record was set straight. And none of the contemporary novels about the time have done that.

When you say novels you're actually referring to the biographies, but you think they're a bit fictional.

They're quite fictional in many respects. And I say that with total conviction, even though I haven't read one of them. I've just been told enough about them and I was asked to do a review of a book that somebody did the other day; that was Neil Brown. And I actually read it and I'd - it was for Quadrant - and I said, 'Look I can't write a review of that. You know, I can't find anything reasonable to say about it. It is not worth dignifying with a commentary'. It really wasn't.

So you're in two minds in some ways still, about whether or not you should commit yourself to writing to, in a sense, answer your critics by giving your account of things.

No I'm not really in two minds about it, but I'm - well I'm in two minds about it only for the reason that I'm not sure that I want to spend the amount of time that needs to be spent on it, and therefore I will not embark on the process unless I've got access to a really top research worker, who's prepared to bury him or herself in the matter for probably two years. Now I don't know whether such a person exists. A couple of people are looking, but I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to burrow through 600 yards of archives in Canberra, I really am not.

What are you going to do with the rest of your life, because you're still only in your early sixties.

Well at the moment I'll go on doing what I'm doing, running the farm, trying to look after CARE Australia and CARE International. I've got a few other business commitments.

For you as a human being now, forget the leader, but just as a person, having lived through sixty years of the 20th century, what for you has life been about? I mean what do you think we're put here for, what do you think we're here for?

Well the objective of life or of government I think really has got to be the kind of life people can live out themselves with their friends, their relatives, their families. And the objective of government ought to be as the base, to make sure that Australian families, whatever way you want them to find that, can lead the kind of lives they want to, reasonably, and with a minimum degree of government intrusion. And government ought to be conducting policies that make that possible for a maximum number of Australians. And the modern day acceptance that we have 10% unemployment, another 12% at least working one or at the most two days a week, when they'd like to work full time, I think is a most heathen and pagan acceptance. It's hideous, and the fact that this has seeped into the bureaucracy, it's seeped into the mores of the Labor Party and of the Liberal Party and of the ACTU, I really find very hard to accept. People ought to be outraged by it. But they're not. They accept it, and are we suddenly meant to believe that where we'd gone for 30 years with unemployment basically under 2% and often under 1%, that the bottom 10% of those who were employed, are suddenly, with better education, with better training and all the rest, not capable of being employed. That's a nonsense, it doesn't hold up. Something very serious has gone wrong with the heart of government in Australia.

Do you feel that inflation is less of a worry than unemployment?

Well today it most certainly is, but it's the question of the techniques and the methods and management of an economy and in many ways, the techniques that had evolved over a long period had just been set aside. One of the major deficiencies relates to the way the central bank runs its affairs. We deregulated everything, so credit available in Australia can be inflated by five billion dollars overnight, just by somebody ringing up. A major corporation rings up his New York banker and says I want a five billion dollar line of credit in my Sydney branch. Nobody has to buy any dollars, which is what everyone said, it's what the journalists all repeated when the dollar was floated, 'Ah, this is wonderful, the currency can't be inflated'. More than ever before it can be inflated at the flick of a finger, at a phone call, through a telex or telephonic transfer or whatever and ...

We've lost control.

Yeah we, the government has lost control and you know they're saying that people will be wiser and what happened in the middle '80s won't occur again, but it's like people building city buildings. It can be very sensible to build one city building in Collins Street, and very foolish to build a dozen. But you've got a dozen different corporations all in the building business. They all own vacant sites say, and they're not going to go along to all their competitors and say, 'Are you going to make a decision to build a 50-storey building in Collins Street, starting next month, because if you're not, we might'. That sort of cooperation does not exist.

So government has to take control ...

Well they're not, they're not going to make decisions about what buildings should be built. But they certainly do need to take enough decisions, governments need to, to make sure that credit remains on an even keel, that money flowing across the exchanges isn't going to damage and destroy the economy. And I don't know whether I mentioned it yesterday, I've forgotten, but I was at a banking conference in Paris about five or six years ago and I was the only Australian there, [and] four or five other ex-politicians like myself. And ... bankers and central bankers from North and South America, from Europe, from Japan, from Asia - not from Australia, because they did not regard the Australian central bank as worthy of an invitation after the way they'd behaved in the '80s - and they issued a bit of a statement at the end of the conference and part of it was that smaller economies - you could add in, such as Australia's but that wasn't in the communiqué - smaller economies need to beware in these deregulated days of massive movements of capital that will swamp the economies and currencies in a way that puts their economies totally out of control. Now Australia's just totally unaware of that.

Do you think as a nation we've tended often to be unaware of all kinds of threats, both in terms of threats to our defence, threats to our economy, other threats around the world,

I think threats to our defence I think we've mostly been fairly been aware of, although some people have tried to pretend that they don't exist. But threats to our economy I think also we have been aware of in the past but we've controlled it very much better. Earlier in my political career, or through most of it, if we were running a significantly adverse balance of payments, we would do something about it so that we'd live within our means. It was one of the things that we had to look after. We weren't going to get ourselves into debt and establish a set of circumstances where the economy might be beyond the control of Australians. But today those sorts of issues and those sorts of values are of no account to the government. They're certainly of no account to use in opposition. We just live in one lovely global peaceful capital market, and it is a lot of nonsense. This is our country and you know, you asked me yesterday, was there any virtue in Mr Whitlam. And I pointed to the fact that he was an economic nationalist. He would no more have agreed with - I mean I don't think Gough understood economics at all, or he couldn't have brought in the budgets he did but he is a nationalist - he would no more have agreed to the economic betrayal of Australia than jumping over the moon. And Menzies wouldn't, and McEwen wouldn't have, and Calwell wouldn't, and Evatt wouldn't have, Chifley and Curtin wouldn't have. Why do Hawke and Keating and Howard and Hewson, as I believe, in accepting the total lack of control implicit in their view of one global capital market. To forget that we are an Australian nation. There's a great oddity with the Prime Minister who talks about independence, sense of purpose, sense of identity, he more than any other prime minister, because he was Treasurer in Hawke's time, he more than any other, has sold Australia's capacity to look after its own affairs to economic interests in other parts of the world. What right has he got to talk about an independent course of action when he doesn't care what Australian asset is sold to what foreigner? You know it really is - if there was a political party, if Cheryl Kernot was prepared to understand this issue and do something about it, she might get 30% of the vote in an election. She might get 20% at the next election anyway.

Do you feel pessimistic about where Australia's going?

Well I feel pessimistic about the policies that lead in these directions. But Australians will wake up at some point, whether it's when our external debts hit 300 billion or 400 billion, I don't know. But at some point the international institutions, the international financial markets [will] because the higher that debt goes up, the higher the margin between rates of interest available to Australian businesses and the rates of interest available to American businesses. And when our people have to pay real rates of interest that are, in today's world, say 10% or 11%, probably the highest in the entire OECD area, about four times, three times anyway higher than real rates of interest rates paid by their counterparts in the United States, is it any wonder we have 10% unemployment. Because that real rate of interest, not so much to the BHP's, because they operate globally, can borrow globally, they can hedge their bets, but the smaller business, the farmer, the business in Hamilton or the small businesses in our capital cities, they only operate in the Australian context. So they're saddled with that cost of money. Is it any wonder that private sector investment is in the doldrums and has been for ten years?

Do you think that life is going to be harder or easier for your grandchildren?

Oh I find that difficult to judge. Generally in so many ways life gets easier because you get more devices. When we first came to this house, we had a Coolgardie safe. I don't know what proportion of the Australian [public] know what a Coolgardie safe is, but a great many would not. And then we got a small kerosene refrigerator, an Electrolux. An enormous luxury, you could keep your milk and you could keep a bit of cream or something in the fridge and it wouldn't go bad in 24 hours. But before that it was a Coolgardie safe, which is just a water thing and drip and hessian down over a wire mesh safe, and through evaporation, kept food mildly cool and mildly fresh. And then you compare - and you know, the, not a steam iron but a flat iron made out of iron, no washing machines, wood stoves, hot kitchens and compare that with the sort of kitchen that a modern couple getting married next week will expect from the very first moment they're married. Standards and conditions for ordinary Australians have changed enormously over the last 50 years and very much for the better.

Do you feel your own life has been hard or easy?

I suppose in some ways it's been easy and in some ways it's been tough.

Which ways has it been easy?

Well I haven't had to worry through most of my life about where the next dollar's coming from. But in terms of work hours and effort and problems to be solved it's often been difficult.

What's been the hardest time of your life?

Oh I don't think you can ...

You've had a few crises.

Well, probably the most difficult to master and control in terms of its impact on myself and maybe because it was the first crisis, and maybe because it was also dealing with somebody I'd regarded as a friend, was resigning from Gorton's ministry. When I was prime minister, the hardest issues to deal with were always the personality issues of a minister that you felt might have transgressed standards, and that you had to do something about it. And then you knew there would be charges of disloyalty to the minister. But we spoke yesterday about different kinds of loyalties. Loyalties to values, and loyalties to people and if a prime minister doesn't uphold loyalty to values, to principles, can you expect anyone else in the goddamn country to uphold [them]. And this was at a time also when this didn't touch the government as such, but a large part of the business or wealthy part of the Australian community were indulging all sorts of illicit tax rorts which we had to throw out the window. So while that didn't directly touch the government, if the government was going to expect principled behaviour from other people, even in other areas, it should demonstrate that it was prepared to act in a principled way itself. And so if an individual transgressed, that was sometimes very difficult.

I would have thought in politics too, it would be just difficult overall because the idea of behaving in a principled way is something that must be given enormous lip service in government or in politics, I should say. And yet the way things have to be done it seems in political life, is often really quite different. There seems sometimes as if there are parallel ethics, that there are certain things that you uphold but there are other things that you have to do to survive.

No I don't think that's right. I spoke yesterday about the importance of procedures and the safeguards built into a democratic system. And we have one set of safeguards, the United States has a quite different set of safeguards, and the two systems are very different but in the end the final result is probably not dissimilar in terms of the need for safeguards and the importance of upholding them. I mean all the problems that Mr Clinton is in now - did somebody cheat or not cheat the tax man many long years ago? - which seems to me to be really what it was all about. Or were investors cheated? And he's having to answer questions about it.

This is a transcript of the complete original interview conducted for the Australian Biography project. Each transcript page covers one videotape (approximately 35 minutes). There is also QuickTime video of the full interview available. To play the video, click on the icon in the right hand column. In addition, each question in the transcript is linked to the video. Clicking on a question will play the video from that point. (Help with this feature.) Optionally, you can download the video file for offline viewing (approx. 10MB).

The interview has been left it in its original state so that you can get a sense of how the conversation developed. The repetition of some questions, or a question followed by another question, is often due to the end of a particular tape or some other interruption, and has been indicated at the appropriate place in the text. There has been minimal tidying up of the text so that the flavour of the encounter has been kept.

In the course of your life and particularly your political life, have you ever been in a situation where you changed your mind about some major policy area?

Probably not after it's been determined. I've often been in a situation where I wanted to think a long while before making up my mind, and I've often wanted more than one cabinet discussion on a subject before making up my mind. But one of the advantages of due process, of going about policy formation methodically is that when you do make a policy decision, you've probably thought of most considerations.

Over the course of your life though, for example in the area of immigration, you did a fairly major turnaround, because in the early speeches that you wrote when you first went into parliament, you were not as keen on immigration and you also had a very, I suppose for that time, a fairly common view of Asia as possibly threatening. And then by the time you were actually in power, you had very much more liberal policies which, as you were saying, you had to in fact virtually impose on a reluctant department.

Well there are two issues here. I had expressed views, and I think I said in the earlier part of the interview that I had been wrong, but because of economic reasons in Australia, I felt that the size of the immigration program should be modified to some extent. I think we had some discussion, I don't believe I made any comments about the composition of the migrant program. I might have, I'll check the speeches I made at that time, but I don't think I did. So that was an economic issue if you like, not going to migration itself. But I had always believed and indeed in my maiden speech I said I hope to live to see an Australia of 25 million people. That wasn't going to happen without a very substantial and far-reaching immigration program. So there was the view taken temporarily if you like, for economic reasons, which I'm perfectly willing to concede was a mistake and it was probably about 1956 or 1957, somewhere around there.

Very early.

A long while ago. I don't think that ... you know, clearly there's a development in anyone's mind over time. But I don't think I ever made speeches saying that migration should be concentrated from Britain or whatever because that just would have been against - see in 1960-61 I was making speeches about apartheid in South Africa, which are totally consistent with anything I'd done or said later on. So there was no change in that area.

The other area of a change of opinion that we talked about, we've already talked about, but those who heard you on radio during the week have asked me to ask you again about it, to make sure that we're clear, in relation to Vietnam, and our position in relation to Vietnam, you have revised some of your views about that.

Not views that I had at the time. I still believe involvement, participation, was right, that it was principled. The country had been divided by international agreement into a north and south. The north had declared itself to be communist, the south was anti-communist, and almost as soon as the ink was dry on the international agreements, the north set about trying to subvert, disrupt the south. What I have said about it is that the war was lost in Washington, with changing policies, with inconsistent policies, and with restrictions placed upon the military in South Vietnam. And I think it was the policy statements in Washington and the inconsistency of directives to the high command in South Vietnam that really would have sapped the morale, not only of American but also of South Vietnamese troops. And there was never an attempt made to persuade either Hanoi or the Soviet Union that the United States or any part of the West was as serious as they ought to have been over the Vietnamese issue, despite having half a million people under arms, as the Americans did. Now that's not a change of mind, that's ... on my part, circumstances led to a northern victory, then you have to live with that northern victory and forget the divisions of that time and Australia needs to promote the best and most cooperative relationships that it can with Vietnam as a whole. And my own organisation CARE Australia has been to the forefront, because we've been stationed in Hanoi for many years now, operating development programs there, with a very good relationship with the Vietnamese government. We were in advance of the Australian government and years in advance of the American government in relation to our relationship as an aid organisation with Hanoi.

Could you describe to us what you feel would be your ideal society? What would be the characteristics of a society that was really functioning well in your view?

Ideal's the wrong word to use. It's very hard to use terms like 'ideal' when you're dealing with imperfect elements and people are imperfect and always will be. That's not a pessimistic view of nature, I mean the ideal people only exist in the eyes of philosophers or people who fantasise about something. So you need a world, you need a situation that accepts the real world for what it is. But really one in which individuals, groups, families, whatever can work out their own lives and their own futures with minimum interference from authority, minimum interference from government, except that which is necessary to maintain an even balance, equity, justice, fairness within society. One which is egalitarian but at the same time one that does not stifle individual initiative. One of the oddities about the Labor government of the last ten years is that we now have the extremes of wealth in Australia which we'd avoided up to 1983, but which are now as much part of Australian society as they are of the United States or European states. And I think that's a great pity. The extremes of wealth are massive, and one of the members of parliament gave me some figures - if I can get it right - the top 1% ten years ago owned as much as the bottom 10%. They now own as much as the bottom 20%. Now if that trend continues, which it will if the financial rules and the deregulatory procedures of the last 8 or 10 years remain in place, do we get to a stage where the top 1% own as much as the bottom 30%, or the bottom 40%. When does somebody start to say, 'This is entirely offensive to what Australia ought to be about' and the fact that it has gone on - I mean if this had happened under a Liberal government, the Labor Party would have been screaming to high heaven about the unfairness, about the injustice of it. And the unions would probably call nation-wide strikes to protest. But it's the Labor Party that has made the rules, that has made this possible, and it's the union movement that has just accepted it, never a word said. I mean let's try and hide the fact that it's happening. That's the attitude.

Do you think it's inevitable that societies or organisations will always have hierarchies?

Oh of a kind, yes. But in part it is the job of government to make sure that hierarchies do not become dogmatic, that they do not become dictatorial, that they do not become oppressive and that's why you have trade practice legislation, that's why you have all sorts of other rules. That's why you have a police force in a slightly different arena. But - that's why you have a Securities & Exchange Commission, but it would be nice if - or our Australian Securities Commission - but it would be very nice to think that it was as effective as the American SEC. Ours would have about one-tenth the power of the SEC.

Would a society that you saw as functioning well for Australia have a monarch?

Ah, well I think society did function pretty well for Australia for about 30 years, not in the pre-war periods but in the latter '40s, '50s, '60s; then it started to unravel in the 1970s. I think, and I think I said it yesterday, our system is a carefully designed balance. You can't just rub out the word 'monarch' and put in 'president'. You're going to have to alter so many other things because you also, if you do that, you rub out all the conventions that go back to Charles I, which make our monarchical system a reasonable one. And, for example, the prime minister is not even mentioned in our Constitution and yet the prime minister is a very essential part of the functioning of parliament and the functioning of the Constitution. It is there by convention and if you try and put the conventions down in words, I don't know anyone who could do that. You can go to a constitutional lawyer and they won't be able to do it because they won't have practised the art of government in Australia and the conventions are a living thing. They're not the same today as they were forty years ago or fifty years ago. They've modified over time and in a way that is accepted by all parties as circumstances make it desirable. Now that's one of the great advantages of conventions. So ...

But why ...

... whether ...

... why are the conventions dependent on a monarch rather than a president?

Because our present conventions flow from the present system. It mightn't - it wouldn't have had to be a monarch, but it is a monarch. And if you rub out the monarchy in the Australian system, unless you take a whole range of other steps which would include trying to formalise and put those conventions on paper, you would lose their force and the High Court would say that you had lost their - they had lost their force. They no longer applied. So you've got to take other steps, you can't avoid that.

Why?

The Turnbull inquiry, for anyone who read it carefully, did one very useful thing, they made it perfectly plain that any simple change to the Constitution from a monarchy to a republic was just not possible. You're going to have to touch a whole range of issues which go to deeply sensitive matters, it includes the powers of the Senate, the right to block supply, the position of the prime minister, a whole range of issues which I suspect Australians could argue about for generations and not necessarily agree on. But if anyone was serious about constitutional change, they would establish an elected constitutional convention, because it was only when that was done in the last century that serious progress was made towards Federation. And it will not happen while it's dealt with on a partisan political basis, as it has been up to this point. But again, those most in favour - I read a document, which was a republican document the other day and it had statements by a number of very prominent republicans and one of the most remarkable things about this document is that it wasn't a positive, forward-looking document, it was a negative one. We had to change because the British had been nasty to the Irish and Thomas Kenneally and others feel that most strongly, much more strongly than the Irish themselves, which is an oddity because the Irish have learnt to live with it, but not Thomas Kenneally. There were issues between Catholic and Protestant which he also felt and which other republican statesmen - ah spokesmen - talked about. But nearly every one of these republican spokesmen was talking about things past with a sense of bitterness and grievance, with a massive chip on his or her shoulder. In other words, with a glorious inferiority complex. 'I'm not myself, I'm not independent, I'm not free, because we have a system that goes back to Britain.' You know, the Prime Minister says that Asians won't understand us till we're a republic. He doesn't really understand Asia because what Asians do not understand, especially for a new country like Australia, is that we have a political leader and other people, who are so determined to cut out the only history we've got. That's what they can't understand. Malaysia is a monarchy, Cambodia is monarchy, you know it's a pretty common system in Asia. They understand it and they understand the linkages. They do not think Australia is not independent because we're a monarchy. And it would be nice to think that one day there could be a debate on this subject which was free of partisan politics and very inaccurate rhetoric.

Yes, I was going to ask you, can you see any arguments for a republic?

Oh not at the moment, no, because - and the strongest argument for the republic is probably the behaviour of some of the young royals. But these things pass and other peoples arrive. I mean we don't remove a democratic system or change it because we have an irresponsible and stupid prime minister; we don't therefore say that democracy is wrong or our constitution must be torn up. We're a little bit more adult than that, and a little bit more sophisticated. We have so many serious problems to undertake, 10% unemployment, $200 billion external debt, how really to make our way, to pay our own way in the world. But how to get 10% or more of the Australian population back with an opportunity for work and dignity and self-esteem, an opportunity that is denied them, and that's an infinitely more serious issue and more important issue than the question of the monarchy and I think if you asked every one of those unemployed, 'Would you sooner have a job or would you sooner be in a republic?' the answer's going to be pretty obvious.

One of the themes of your speeches and of your political stances has been respect for order, for the way things are done, a conservatism about the rule of law and about conventions and proper process, and this position, this conservative position, results in stability in a society, but does it sometimes also result in a failure to embrace new and imaginative possibilities?

No, not at all, and you know to say that respect for the rule of law is a conservative position, well it ought to be a liberal position also because only people who want to cause revolution want to destroy the rule of law. It is the only thing that makes it safe for anyone to walk down Collins Street or Pitt Street. It's the only thing that gives order to society. And one of the great challenges to the rule of law is the total confusion in Australia today amongst many jurists, certainly embraced by the High Court and the Chief Justice - the Chief Justice made a speech in Cambridge saying he could not understand why the English courts were not centres of controversy as his had become. Well of course, any one of those English jurists could have told him the answer, but they were all far, far too polite to do so. The English courts are still courts of law. They interpret the law as it is and the law is something finite, it's a rock. You interpret it. That doesn't mean to say the law is always right. That doesn't mean to say it's meeting the social demands of 1994, but if it is not, it is for parliament to alter the law. Now Garfield Barwick, one of the greatest jurists Australia has known, probably the second best Chief Justice after Dixon that Australia has even known, was often accused by detractors of being on the side of the tax department, because he said that a lot of devices companies were using to reduce tax were legal. And politicians, and Liberal politicians, blamed him for this and they said he shouldn't. But what they were confusing was, and what they, the politicians wanted to avoid, was the fact that if they wanted to change the law in relation to corporate taxation, it was within their capacity to introduce legislation into the parliament at any point. But they didn't want to be held up and accused by some of their business friends perhaps, of being anti-business. So they just blamed Barwick and did nothing. Now Barwick knew what his responsibility was, but the High Court in relation to the Franklin case, which we've not spoken about for example, wasn't a court of law. It was a 4:3 judgement and the judgement was, and it had to conclude to be carried in favour of the Commonwealth, that building a dam in the Franklin would damage our relationships with other states. Because that's the basis of the Foreign Affairs power. Now at the time the High Court made that decision, the property had already been listed by the world heritage people and they had listed that property knowing it was the intention of the state government to build a dam. In other words, building a dam was not going to damage that world heritage property in south-west of Tasmania. And in spite of that plainly known and obvious fact the High Court turns round and says, 'Building a dam will damage our relations with other states'. The High Court was pandering to a clamour in Australia and I made a - you know I made a comment earlier that I was one of those who formed the Australian Conservation Foundation. I got it tax deductibility long before any of these latter-day greenies even knew of the term 'conservation' and that was in about 1960-61. It was not a political issue then. The term 'green' hadn't arisen, environmentalists had hardly arisen, except from serious people who knew what the issues were and were prepared to tackle them seriously, and not make politics about them in a way that is often irresponsible. And so, if a high court is going to do what the American Supreme Court has always done, and that's to make law, or by trying to pander to, or meet changing and differing customs rather than leaving the legislative process to the congress, if our High Court is going to do that, clearly it's going to be a centre of controversy. The law itself will be less stable, and society will be less secure. Because one of the rocks, one of the anchors of a stable and peaceful society is, or has become, unpredictable and insecure. And then the High Court has done the body politic enormous harm in this change of heart and one of the saddest things about it is that Sir John Mason in his Cambridge speech was not even aware of what had happened, or of why it had happened.

In relation to the Franklin, although you disagreed with the way the court behaved over it, what did you think about the issue itself?

I've tramped over a lot of Tasmania, much more than most people. I believe the dam should have been built.

Why?

Because in the longer term it's going to be very important to the prosperity, to the livelihood, to the capacity of Tasmanians to get work. Not today, but when they're short of power, when they're short of water. The only reason Tasmanians were able to get some kind of industry in Tasmania was because of cheap, reliable, hydro-electric power. You see I depart from environmentalists completely who want to shut up an area and deny access of it even to people. I think the purpose of existence is the enjoyment of happiness and people. The idea of a planet with abundant wildlife and flowers and trees and ferns and whatever, but no people, doesn't enchant me greatly. But some environmentalists seem to talk as though it's people [that] should be eradicated.

Because you're a man who's taken such a firm position about principle in politics, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the whole business of matching what you feel is right in a political situation and what you feel is possible, or necessary tactically in politics. And in situations where, in the course of your career there've been a few times where you had to conceal what you were going to do and go against the principle of being open and direct about it, in order to achieve some goal. Were those times when it was difficult for you to decide what you should do?

Well, when have I concealed what I was going to do?

Well, for example, we've already talked about this, but I'm raising it in this context of principle in practice in politics. For example when you decided to resign from the Gorton government and you'd agonised over that decision, was part of it the fact that you had decided you were not going to be able to be frank with your prime minister?

It's not a question of not being frank. You decide on a course of action, you also decide at what time you're going to advise the prime minister. That's not - I'd be giving a policy submission to cabinet, I choose the timing of bringing it to cabinet. Just because I'm working on something which I may or may not bring to my colleagues, and I don't tell them that I'm working on it till I make up my own mind and all the rest and think it through, that's not not being frank.

Well ...

You're confusing a necessary course in human behaviour with principle and they're two quite different things.

I suppose what would have been lost if you'd been sacked rather than been able to resign?

I made a judgement that I didn't want to be sacked. I wanted to resign and so I was going to make sure that I did.

But that was to protect yourself. Was there any principle being ...

No it wasn't just to protect to myself. It was also to be able to make some points to protect the institution of government and the processes of government.

And you couldn't have done that if you'd been sacked?

Much less effectively.

Later, in 1975, when you were asked about whether or not you would block supply, you said that if you were going to block it you wouldn't let Whitlam know because you wanted to catch him with his pants down, if you moved in that direction. Did you, did you worry about that or was that something that you felt was just a straightforward matter? I mean if you had told him in advance that you would do this, he ...

He knew we may. He knew we may. And also it was perfectly plain that, even when we were talking about it they said that Rex Connor's resignation was the last straw. And it was, and pretty soon after that Mr Whitlam and everyone else knew. But before that I didn't know. So how could I let Mr Whitlam know. There was no secret once we'd made the decision, it was done, it was announced. There was no secret about that.

So you have never really experienced a difficulty about tactics in politics and principle?

I don't think I've ever experienced any serious conflict, no, about tactics and principle.

Changing direction somewhat, what religion did your parents raise you in?

Presbyterian.

Was that important in your young life, as you grew?

Oh, Presbyterian or Anglican, it depended which church was the nearest.

And was religion something that was important in the home where you grew up?

Oh moderately I suppose.

Do you now believe in God? I mean is this something - is a spiritual life something that's important to you as a person?

Um, well nobody can ever know really whether God exists or not in a philosophical sense. But if God did not exits, I think for the well-being of the human race, it would be necessary to invent him.

So you think that it's an important part of human affairs, to keep religion in the life of ordinary people?

Yes I do.

Do you feel that that's been something that has been maintained in Australia?

Some churches have been much better at it than others. I think Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, whatever, Uniting Church, have not been good at it. Catholics, Lutherans, and numbers of others have been much better at it.

Is it something that plays much of a part in your life?

Not a major part, no.

Is there any particular reason for that?

Well I never decided I wanted to become a priest or a parson I suppose.

So that, is it something that you thought about a lot for example? Often people when they're undergraduates think about religion and make up their minds which direction they're going to go. Was that an issue for you at all or is it something that's just been part of ...

I don't think it was an issue for anyone I was at university with.

Going back to those days at Oxford, did you take part in ... sorry I'll ask that again. When you were at Oxford were you active in the political life of the ...

Not at all.

Why was that?

I didn't want to be.

Why?

I was probably terrified of making a speech, or having to make a speech.

When did you get over that?

Oh, 20 years later.

So you didn't find the life of the Union at Oxford attractive? Did you go? Did you ...

I went once.

What were they debating?

Something to do with Australia and something to do with groundnuts in the Northern Territory.

And did you find it edifying?

I found the debate stupid. The people speaking knew absolutely nothing about Australia or groundnuts in the Northern Territory. You probably don't know but there was a major British scheme of some kind to grow vast quantities of groundnuts in the Northern Territory. I'm not quite sure how, why or whatever, but it clearly failed and for some reason it became part of a debate in the Oxford Union.

This is a transcript of the complete original interview conducted for the Australian Biography project. Each transcript page covers one videotape (approximately 35 minutes). There is also QuickTime video of the full interview available. To play the video, click on the icon in the right hand column. In addition, each question in the transcript is linked to the video. Clicking on a question will play the video from that point. (Help with this feature.) Optionally, you can download the video file for offline viewing (approx. 10MB).

The interview has been left it in its original state so that you can get a sense of how the conversation developed. The repetition of some questions, or a question followed by another question, is often due to the end of a particular tape or some other interruption, and has been indicated at the appropriate place in the text. There has been minimal tidying up of the text so that the flavour of the encounter has been kept.

As we speak now, they're preparing for an election in South Africa. What do you see as the future for that country that you've taken such a close interest in?

I'm more optimistic than not. It's going to be extraordinarily difficult. They've come a long way over the last three or four years. I mean every time something's gone wrong, a conference gets broken or there are riots between Inkatha and ANC and whatever, there are a lot of people who just say, 'Well it won't work, it's going to be a bloodbath'. But they have in fact overall, or at least the government and the ANC, have shown a singular capacity to overcome their problems and to negotiate a situation in which they can go to an election. They know the result's going to be a black majority, but - and it'll be a black president - but the President, de Klerk, and apparently a majority of the whites, probably a very significant majority, recognises that that's the only course they can take. They're going to have terrible problems, worse problems than most countries. Not just for a year or two, but probably for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. They've got to get a hundred billion dollar economy working in the interests of all the people, instead of the interests of five extraordinary centralised conglomerates and families, or groups of families. Because the South African economy is more centralised in its economic control and power than any other in the world. There are some - I don't expect the ANC to nationalise anything, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they adopt a good old-fashioned American tradition and broke up some of those large corporations and made them establish separate entities. But the Americans have done this with Standard Oil, with AT & T, and that breaks up accumulations of economic power. They haven't yet begun to talk about probably the most difficult problem and that will be the ownership of land, because there are a lot of members of the families of those who have got chucked off the land since 1948 under apartheid. The land was made available to Afrikaners and whatever and if blacks wanted a good bit of land and some Afrikaner wanted it, well then they were dispossessed. Now those same people, or their descendants, are going to want their land back. The Afrikaners if that happens are going to want compensation. But the blacks didn't get any compensation initially, so why should those who took the land and who've occupied it for the last twenty, thirty, forty years get any compensation. Now these are massively difficult issues because nearly all the good, or known to be good arable land is used in South Africa. It's not as it was in Zimbabwe where the - at the time there was excess land and a lot of unused land which could be made available. And of course land is a very sensitive issue, and it will be a very sensitive issue if the farmers of Transvaal or in different parts of the country ... Chief Buthelezi presents a major problem, but he always did. His equation really of earlier policies of the government where they wanted people, organisations who would break up the unity of the blacks and would therefore lend substance to the view that there was no single black view about anything and that they all had different views and all the rest, and Chief Buthelezi has been, over the years, most skilful in pandering to Western opinion. He was anti-communist, he was anti-violence, he was anti-sanctions - three things that, say, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan desperately wanted to hear. This was wonderful music to their ears, especially since they could point to a communist or two in the ranks of the ANC. But that didn't make the ANC communist. It was nationalist and fiercely independent and South African and on verdicts of major security organisations around the world, not really communist in its orientation at all. In 1947 Nelson Mandela moved for the expulsion of all communists from the ANC and I might have mentioned this yesterday, but he got defeated on the good, democratic grounds that a democratic organisation argues against a bad idea, it does not prescribe it. And if Menzies had known a little more of Mandela and the ANC, he mightn't have pursued his referendum.

Which you disagreed with?

Yeah, and I suspect Mr Menzies disagreed with it too. He didn't try and win that referendum. No way. I think he felt he was being pushed by the right-wing of the Liberal Party, by some returned servicemen who desperately wanted this kind of action taken. But you look at his schedule during the referendum, and it wasn't a very active one in making speeches in its support. He just let it lie and let it take its course. But there will be great problems in South Africa, but I expect the election to go ahead. It would be too much to hope that there will not be problems in Natal or in Zulu areas, but - see one of the problems is that Buthelezi's got nowhere to go. The latest polls indicate that he has the support of only 20% of Zulus. And that of that 20%, 52% want to participate in the election. So he's really running out of support, and I think now is held up worldwide to be pretty irresponsible. But if he submits to the ballot, he probably ends up very quickly with nothing, because he's most unlikely to get enough electoral support to win anything. And with - you can't predict the future of a country like South Africa with any real accuracy. But I know a lot of people there and a lot of very good people in both the ANC and people like de Klerk and some of his colleagues who really do understand what has to be done. There are a very, very large number of whites throughout South Africa who desperately know what has to be done and are working to achieve a productive result. So I think they deserve all the support and encouragement that they can be given.

Very many people in this world seek power, the power to control, the power to make decisions. A lot of young people, who might be watching this, think that being in power and having power over others and their destinies is a very desirable thing. You're somebody who's exercised power over quite a period of your life, in taking a lead and controlling what happens to many people. What's it like as an experience? How did you experience the exercise of power?

Well the whole purpose of a democratic society, of course, and a democratic government, is to make sure that whoever's president or prime minister, that he doesn't have too much power. You have power while you can carry your cabinet. You have power while you can carry your party room, while you can carry the parliament. So there are restraints all along the way. I've mentioned throughout these discussions the procedures of government which are important for good government, and which are critical in preventing irresponsible, hasty, foolish, ill-advised, ill-thought actions and if you take all those things into account, they are massive restraints on the exercise of power. But at the same time, those restraints are not really difficult to live with. There are other kinds of restraints, if you want to govern a country well, the physical resources that are available to you, the environment that you're in, the problems the country faces, the time it's going to take to overcome those problems, and you see, Gough Whitlam and I would have a totally different view of this. He just had a bundle of wonderful, good things that, he thought anyway, that he wanted to do. So he was going to implement them all forthwith, regardless of the consequences on the country, regardless of the consequences for the budget, whether we could afford it or not, he didn't think any of it mattered. Just let's do these great bundle of good things. Well you do that without regard for the consequences and you end up doing much more harm, or more harm than good. But the exercise of power really ought to be, and I think for me it was, a sobering experience, because you realise that what you're doing can affect the lives of some millions of people, for better or for worse. And there are two - I think there are two different kinds of politicians. There are those who want power because they have a particular purpose, they want to achieve something or they want to improve society or contribute to Australia. But we can't also deny the fact that there are some people who want power, just because they like to exercise power, and the purpose, the objective of power is secondary. I think it's up to voters if they can, to distinguish which politician is which.

What kind do you think our present Prime Minister, Mr Keating, is?

Oh I think he's got some things that he wants to do. Much more so than Mr Hawke.

Mr Hawke, you feel, liked power for its own sake?

Oh I think he was the object of it. I really do. And his own party did on the day. And the person who was pushed out by his own party, by the people who'd known him best, by his own cabinet, you know they've got to have some substantial reasons for that, especially the Labor Party, because they've got a tradition of loyalty to their leaders, far more than, far deeper than the Liberal Party has. They don't move against a leader unless they have, what they call, just cause.

Well Paul Keating moved against his leader.

I know.

Watching that from outside ...

But he didn't do that - he couldn't do that unless he had a whole host of people supporting him. He had to have a majority of Caucus supporting him.

Watching it from outside, did you think that was a good thing for the country?

I thought it would make Labor harder to beat. I think Mr Hawke was getting very easy to beat.

When you were in power did you ever find it, at a personal level, at a human level, a burden?

Oh not, no not in that sense. I mean the problem in government and I think it's difficult always to avoid it, is to prevent yourself getting too tired, or your colleagues getting too tired. And you can't - sometimes you just cannot avoid that. I was in this room on one occasion when Peter Nixon rang me up and said that he was going to have to resign. There was a Royal Commission into the Dairy Corporation that had made some critical remarks about him, and so, being an honourable minister, he felt there was only one course. The Royal Commission the government had established, he'd established, ended up being quite critical of the minister. So I said, 'Well, you can't do that until I've got to have look at it, and people have got to make up their minds on a basis of knowledge. I know nothing about this report.' So I'd had a pretty full schedule but then I had to get a plane and go straight back to Canberra and you start reading a Royal Commission report of several hundred pages, and I thought that there were serious flaws - I'm not sure who it was but I think it might have been Ted Woodward, for whom I actually have a very high regard. But I'd also known Peter much more, and better than I knew Ted Woodward and he wasn't the sort of minister that Ted was trying to say he was, if it was Ted Woodward, in the conclusions. And I knew I was going to have to say something about this on Tuesday or Wednesday in the parliament. Public servants aren't always very good when ministers get into trouble through something like this, in finding ways and means of defending them or trying to see whether indeed they are in a defensible position. But there were two or three people in Peter's department and one legal officer in my own, who were very good. And they started reading the documents and we started reading the evidence, and in the end, after probably about 36 hours work, I concluded that Peter in fact had no case to answer, and that the judge had come to some conclusions without even taking notice of evidence that had been given to him. And anyway, I ended up making a speech in the parliament which rebutted the judge's conclusions in relation to Peter Nixon point by point. And you know, even the Age who wouldn't have been a friend of mine, was only able to come out with a pretty half-baked editorial, some of this, some of that, you know, something on each side of the barbed wire fence. Their natural inclination would have been to try to tear me to bits because I'd rebutted the judge's conclusions. Well they couldn't because I'd not only read the report, I had read the evidence, or the necessary evidence on which it was based. But then you suddenly have an enormous amount of additional work which has to be done in a given time frame, on top of all the other work that was scheduled to be done within that time frame, and so, it's not always possible to prevent yourself getting tireder than you should let yourself get. That's something that a prime minister or an active prime minister, who's fairly busy, has got to guard against. Actually I was told by Sir John Bunting on one occasion that when the second Menzies government began in 1949, they were talking around the table at the first cabinet meeting and Menzies was saying, 'One of the most important things is to make sure that we never allow ourselves to get tired'. And it is because judgement goes and you don't perform as well and you don't make decisions that are as good. So you know, if there's a burden, it's that sort of burden; how do you, how do you make sure that you stay fresh and lively.

And what did you do about that?

Oh I probably came back here for a couple of days or a day or something.

What did you like most about being prime minister?

Oh, being able to do things that were useful. Being able to get the economy moving, to get investment moving and to get jobs growing. Being able to do something imaginative, unique, I think, in the world in the multicultural policies. Still slightly controversial, but much less so than they used to be.

You would point to that as perhaps the most original and different thing that you did?

Well it was certainly different for Australia and nobody else had embarked in policies in that direction. No other country that I'm aware of and - but you know, you can't really compare that issue with the question of family allowances for low income families. They're two different kinds of things.

And paying them to the woman of the family.

Oh yes. I mean that was just as much a initiative if you like and you know that might have been the most important social welfare initiative of the last 50 years, who knows. It would have affected more people than any other specific initiative.

And what did you dislike about it?

Oh, the only part I think I really disliked was when colleagues got into trouble and I had to take some action. I mean people would often come along and say, 'Look Prime Minister. If I'm ever an embarrassment to the government or if you think that I've transgressed I'll stand aside'. Then you go to them and say, 'Well I think it's time to stand aside', and then they don't want to stand aside. Now Ian Sinclair, who was one when he had some problems, stood aside without any problem at all. He said, 'You tell me if it comes to that stage'. So because he was National Party I would have discussed it with Anthony and kept in touch with him about it, and when we thought the time had come for the good of Ian himself and of the government, because he had to clear up the issues, which he did, but he did it in the right way. Other people might try and hang on and hang on.

Reg Withers?

Well if Reg had ever said to me, 'Look this is a difficulty, there's a Royal Commission report that's really critical, I don't think it's a major issue, but that's for you to decide Prime Minister', and handed me his resignation, I never would have accepted it. But I could never, because it wasn't a matter of that consequence, but at the same time I couldn't ignore what was in the report and I could not say to Reg Withers or to anyone who might repeat it to him, 'If you hand Fraser your resignation, he will not accept it'. He had to do that, knowing that there might be consequences. But he just never did it.

I have a question to ask about something that Joh Bjelke-Petersen claimed in his, one of his biographies. Joh Bjelke-Petersen said that he had persuaded you to press forward with the blocking of supply at a stage where you were uncertain whether or not you should do it, and that he felt - he was claiming some responsibility for that decision. What actually happened with Joh at that time?

Oh we would have talked occasionally but I would never have consulted with him whether I was going to block supply or not. I mean Joh would ring you up about all sorts of things, you know, later on; in other words, there was nothing in that claim at all. The last straw was Rex Connor and very shortly after that I had talks with my senior colleagues and we decided that if we were going to conduct ourselves with any sense of obligation or pride in what we were doing, and not come to be regarded with total contempt, we would give Australians what Australians plainly wanted. And that's the right to vote and relief from the Whitlam government. If that was their judgement, but it was to be their judgement, and you know, one of the odd things about some of the papers, not all of them but because I was Victorian I suppose I'd see the Age more than the others - the only time when a country is really democratic is the single day on which they put a vote into a ballot box. It's the only moment when you're democratic in the ancient Greek sense, if you like, because you all can't vote on each piece of legislation, so you have to delegate that to somebody else. And at those times people don't have much influence over events. It's only when they themselves vote. How can anyone say that political actions designed to achieve that most democratic of all moments, are themselves undemocratic? It's an absolute nonsense. If you are trying to prevent people having the right to vote, that's undemocratic. Actions designed to achieve a vote for people cannot be regarded as undemocratic. Joh didn't, he didn't have a part in it. But he liked to think that he influenced a lot of things. He influenced some but they were mostly in Queensland.

Do you think that it was fate, God, destiny, luck, that made you prime minister, or do you think that it was qualities that were intrinsic to you that meant your rise was inevitable?

Oh it's time and circumstance. If there'd been somebody else that the party thought was better than I, then they would have picked somebody else. And you see, Billy Sneddon would have been a more garrulous person, a more outgoing person, he would have drunk beer with the boys to a greater extent and stayed up later at night, and for while that won him support, but at the end of the day it's performance that counts. Whether you can do the job and at the end of the day, that's what the Party was going to make their judgement on.

Do you think it's possible for somebody to be a good prime minister without a very strong intellect?

Well if you have the capacity to pick a great many good people around you and the good sense to respect their judgement and their opinions, yes it would be possible. I mean Henry Bolte may not have had a great intellect but he certainly had a great capacity for judgement. He had good people around him. His own judgement itself, on many issues, was absolutely first class. So judgement and intellect don't necessarily go hand in hand. If you've got judgement, wisdom, capacity to understand what Australians want, what the country needs, then great intellect you don't have to have.

Has your intellectual life been important to you throughout your life? Is grappling with ideas something that you need to do, enjoy doing?

Well I did more grappling with ideas at university than I have since, because you don't - you get some new ideas about policy, whether it's family allowances or Galbally programs and whatever. But these don't require enormous feats of intellectual effort to understand their consequences and what they mean. Some of the mental exercises that you do in university are, especially if you're trying to follow lectures from somebody like Isiah Berlin, especially if he's a lecturer in modern logic or other people like Strawson, who wrote and spoke in difficult to understand symbols, then that does require a fair bit of intellectual effort. But when you've understood - and perhaps it was the training I'd had that helped make so much of it easier, because I understood what the concepts of economics were about, at least so far as government was concerned, and the Reserve Bank. And I can read legislation and understand that. And I knew a bit about the theory and practice of government, so the course I did was not a bad training ground. But none of it was essential. A good practical person with sound common sense, a capacity for judgement would be able to do the job quite well.

So did you ever have to deal in politics with people that you felt were intellectually poorly equipped for the work, or was the standard ...

Oh I met some people who intellectually were as bright as a button, but as silly as a wheel. Had absolutely no judgement at all.

Can you give me an example?

Yes but it would be offensive. They're in positions at the moment. I met a lot of others that were good. The first kind might have got into my office once. Permanent heads generally had the good sense not to let them in twice.

What do you enjoy doing most? What gives you the most human pleasure?

Oh it's difficult to judge, because so many things give me human pleasure, at different times it's different things. It might be doing something with your family, might be going fishing, might be catching a fish and it might be drinking a bottle of wine. Generally fairly simple things not complex things.

If you were able to pursue these things that just give you simple pleasure all the time, would you get bored?

You'd probably want to do some other things also. Doing, having too much time to do too much of anything that you really enjoy - I mean sometimes you just run out of physical capacity, you can't go on drinking wine for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper. Or at least not very much of it.

Not without fairly serious consequences.

Well even if, you know, as you get older you can't - you should drink better wine as you get older, because your capacity reduces and the total quantity of wine you can have is probably finite, so you shouldn't therefore waste it on plonk.

Is boredom an issue for you?

No I don't think I've ever been bored.

Never?

Not for long. I've been doing things I don't like like sitting in an aeroplane from Melbourne to London. That's boring I suppose but you're doing it for a purpose. I've never lived in a state of boredom and wondered what I'm going to be doing next to get out of the state of boredom or something.

What would you like your epitaph to be?

I haven't even thought of it. I don't know.

How would you like people to think of you?

Well maybe they could use that quotation from the Old Man.

Life wasn't meant to be easy.

But take courage child, it can be delightful.