Bert Kelly, “Fraser’s foolish seven-year feast,”
The Bulletin, June 28, 1983, p. 118.

Recently I saw a cruel and, I hope, unfair cartoon in The Bulletin (May 17) showing Andrew Peacock and John Howard marooned on a raft. Howard was looking anxious as Andrew was saying: “Worry not … the wind will find us a direction,” the implication being that then they would know which way to go.

Andrew Peacock and John Howard in Bulletin cartoonPeople close to Peacock have told me that the cartoon was unfair and that he is showing gratifying signs of having more steel in his backbone than I used to think he had.

I am glad about this and surely his resolve must be strengthened by Maggie Thatcher’s overwhelming win in Britain. This has demonstrated that the electorate can get sick of vacillation and look for a leader who believes in what she says, is not ready to do a U-turn if she is huffed at and who is prepared to do what is right even if it makes her unpopular.

When I look back over the seven Fraser years that the locusts ate, I am full of remorse about the nettles we did not grasp.

I must take some of the blame for this because I was in parliament for two of those years and there were many things I could have done to encourage the Fraser Government to face up to the facts of life.

I remember, soon after our 1975 victory, the government decided to cease paying the pensioner’s funeral benefit, most of which we knew ended up as an undertakers benefit.

But the wets in our party room begged the government not to be cruel and to grab the opportunity to appear compassionate.

And I just sat there and did nothing to help.

The government’s capitulation on this matter seemed to set the standard for future behaviour. Although the government’s rhetoric was splendid, its practice certainly did not match up. We lectured the world about the evils of protectionism, but look what we did at home! We said we would be resolute in the industrial relations field, but we did almost nothing.

When the Fraser Government finally bowed out in March, its only decisive action in this area was the legislation to enable the government to dismiss its own employees who would not obey instructions. But the special privileges given to the unions were still intact after the seven wasted years. Even the stupid 17.5 percent leave loading and the four weeks’ leave provisions were still there with the placid acceptance of the unions, the Arbitration Commission, the Department of Industrial Relations and, to our everlasting shame, our own ministers.

These are only samples of the opportunities forgone. If the wind blew one way that was the way we went, at least most of the time. It often seemed that the only thing we cared about was keeping the Labor Party out of office. “Look at the mess they made when they were there,” you could almost hear us saying. So we did things that we knew were wrong, hoping to buy popularity that way and look what happened to us in the end!

It is now the conventional Liberal Party wisdom to pretend that we were defeated almost everywhere because we did not communicate clearly with the electorate so they could not understand what we were about. This is nonsense. I think the electorate could see all too clearly what we were about and that is why they came to regard us with cynical contempt.

Now Thatcher has demonstrated there is still a place in politics for a leader who really believes in the policies she propounds. I hope this helps Peacock steel himself to become a real leader.

There are an alarming number of wets in the Opposition party-room and it will take real leadership qualities to screw up their courage to sticking point. I hope and pray that Peacock can do this because, if he cannot, we will wander into government by default one day and, after a while, we will wander out again with nothing done, as we did during the wasted years.

It is not fair for the rest of us to sit back and leave the responsibility on Peacock’s young, if broad, shoulders. The other day a friend said to me: “Bert, Australia is getting in an awful mess. You have been in parliament. What do you suggest we should do?” I agreed that we were indeed in a mess and if things got any worse he would just have to start going to political meetings. His reply was plaintive and prompt: “Cripes, Bert, surely things aren’t as serious as that!”

Well, I think they are and what are you going to do about it? And if the Liberal Party is really going to face up to its problems, it will need a lot of encouragement.