Malcolm Fraser funeral: Tony Abbott praises former PM as 'classic' Liberal
|
Version 0 of 1. Malcolm Fraser, Australia’s 22nd prime minister, was mourned at a state funeral on Friday, with guests including three of his successors. Fraser, who was 84, was farewelled at Scots’ church in Melbourne, as bagpipes accompanied the departing hearse following the eulogies. Tony Abbott and the former prime ministers John Howard and Julia Gillard, as well as the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, were among the hundreds of people in attendance. Fraser, who died after a brief illness last week, entered parliament as a Liberal MP in 1955, becoming prime minister in 1975 following the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government. He led the country until election defeat in 1983. Peter Nixon, the transport minister in Fraser’s government, delivered a eulogy to the “thoughtful” Fraser, recalling the controversy of the dismissal. “Malcolm came under a huge personal attack,” he said. “The pressure on him every minute of every day was immense. He showed enormous courage and strength, never once displaying weakness. “And it’s history now that the people of Australia elected him as prime minister with the largest majority in the nation’s history.” Fraser’s daughter Angela and son Hugh also addressed the congregation and his granddaughter Hester performed a song of her own composition. The service featured some lighter moments courtesy of another of his granddaughters, Rachel, who described how Fraser had belatedly adopted Twitter and how he had enjoyed watching the film The Bodyguard “because of Whitney Houston”. A crowd gathered outside the church to pay tribute to Fraser, including a sizeable group from the Vietnamese community, which held a sign stating that Fraser was a “true champion of humanity”. Fraser, who became increasingly outspoken on the issue of human rights, welcomed a wave of Vietnamese refugees to Australia during his prime ministership in the 1970s. Phuong Nguyen, a Vietnamese community leader, said Fraser was “like a father to all of us”. “He saved us and took us in and look at where we are now,” he said. “He saw it as a moral obligation to take us in when others were prepared to wash their hands of us. His moral integrity shone through. “He said to me on the phone: ‘I’m glad you’ve been a success here otherwise my decision wouldn’t have looked right.’ It came after the white Australia policy and allowed us to build the multicultural society we have today.” As well as welcoming the Vietnamese, Fraser granted self-government to the Northern Territory, established the broadcaster SBS and strongly opposed apartheid in South Africa. He is also credited with bringing greater federal protection to the Great Barrier Reef. Fraser parted ways with the Liberal party following the end of his tenure as the prime minister and was a pointed critic of Abbott’s policy on asylum seekers, among other matters, in recent years. Despite this, Abbott said Fraser was a “classic representative of our party”. “He was conservative when he declared that the values and principles by which we live, the human relationships which guide us, and the values to which we aspire as Liberals will not change,” Abbott said. “He was Liberal when he stated that each man, from the street cleaner to the industrialist, has an equal right to a full and happy life, to go his own way unhampered as long as he does not harm our precious social fabric.” |