Background to the 1979 Cabinet records

The following text is a transcript of a presentation given by Professor Patrick Weller AO at the 1979 Cabinet release media briefing held at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra on 8 December 2009.

There is a sense in which looking at these documents is like meeting old friends because some 25 years ago, when I was writing a book on Malcolm Fraser, the Prime Minister said that I could have access to all Cabinet documents; following the British habit of a minister being able to refresh their memory by seeing their papers, he added the extra component and delegated it.

Which was very nice, because for about four years starting in about 1985, I used to traipse down to Canberra, have an office in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and was able to look at all the files on Cabinet. Not just the decisions but the Cabinet files. Those Cabinet files were fascinating because they follow the story through. They not only have the submissions, they have the decisions, they have the advice, and they do it thematically so you can pick up a topic and follow it through over a period of time.

So you not only know what the cabinet decided, but occasionally you find out some of the stories behind what the ministers decided, and I’ll mention a couple of those today.

When you’re talking about the Fraser period, you have to remember Malcolm Fraser really enjoyed Cabinet. He liked being in Cabinet, he liked sitting around the table with his ministers. He liked the influence that it gave him. And he liked cross questioning his ministers. He would say to them not only what do you think, but why do you think that, how did you get there, what was the process by which you got there in the first place?

Sometimes he’ll push them out to a logic and a conclusion and then suddenly switch, and the minister who will be trying to please the Prime Minister would find himself out on a limb because he was advocating something with which the Prime Minister suddenly disagreed. Cabinet, for Fraser, was his natural forum for operating.

The second thing when you read these is to understand Malcolm Fraser always consulted, even if he’d made up his mind. When I went to see him about writing the book he said to me at one stage, ‘Why do you want to write about me?’ I said, ‘Because the public image is of a very dominant Prime Minister, yet everyone I talk to emphasises how much you consult.’ At which he smiled and said, ‘Just because I consulted didn’t mean I didn’t dominate, you know.’ In a sense that insight became the theme of the book. Cabinet was his process of consultation and discussion with his ministers, and often a process of talking to them regularly until he achieved what he set out to achieve.

Now you’ve got some of the figures: there were 880 odd submissions, 550 Cabinet memorandums, 3032 decisions made in the 12 months of 1979. Of the 3032 decisions over 1200 of them were made without submission. That’s to say something is brought to Cabinet with the Prime Minister’s approval – it might be a memorandum – and a decision is made.

Let me give you some of the other figures which are available. In that 12 months there were 15 meetings of the full Ministry, there were 97 meetings of Cabinet and there were 324 meetings of Cabinet committees, either standing committees or ad hoc committees.

Okay, that’s 15 meetings of the Ministry, 97 meetings of Cabinet and 324 meetings of standing and ad hoc committees. Now whether that leads to a good or not so good government is obviously a question which I leave to other people to comment, and I’m not suggesting Fraser was at all those meetings, but he was at quite a lot of those meetings.

Sometimes you would in fact have a day in which you would have five meetings rolling, There’d be a Cabinet meeting, then three or four committees which followed one another.

That’s about 450 meetings in the 12 months; it does give you some idea of  what went into running a Cabinet government under Fraser, and I think if you look at the figures more recently they are less than half that in many of the occasions.

Of course the argument could be that meetings might not go on for so long, so some more figures. In May 1979 there were 78 meetings of Cabinet or its committees which lasted for 107 hours. That’s four 26-hour weeks just sitting in Cabinet, and if you accept the notion that it takes a couple of hours to prepare for an hour of a Cabinet meeting if you’re seriously going to read the papers and contribute and if the department is going to brief the relevant Minister going into those meetings, then 107 hours in meetings is quite a lot of briefing and preparation outside meetings. On top of that 26-hour week are Parliament, departmental business, travel, representation and all the other things which the ministers are required to do at the same time.

Just to give a couple of others examples, after all, May is the Budget, so an Expenditure Review Committee, or whatever the equivalent was in that time, meets very regularly. But in June there were 37 meetings making up 49 hours. In July there were 51 meetings making up 67 hours. So even in the quiet July period Cabinet, or its people, were meeting for about 15, 16, 18 hours within a week. Cabinet was full on under the Fraser Government. It was time consuming and occasionally it went on to very quite early hours in the morning.

The story which might not be 1979 but it doesn’t matter, but it quite possibly was, was Fraser sitting there in The Lodge with a group of civil servants at 2 o’clock in the morning saying, ‘Oh, by the way I need information on this.’ So they took down a note. He said, ‘Look, there’s no hurry, no hurry at all, 9 o’clock will do.’

The other point to make about Fraser is he used the whole gamut of the Cabinet. You will notice when you look at the decisions that some of them were decisions of the Cabinet, but many of them are decisions of Cabinet committees.

There are a number of committees in which Fraser operated very effectively in order to make decisions, which were often final decisions of Cabinet. One which starts growing in 1979, but becomes more full-flown in the next couple of years, was the Co-ordination Committee of Cabinet. Now the Co-ordination Committee consisted of the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, I think the Treasurer John Howard, and a couple of other people, with people flowing in and out. Somebody actually described it as the inner Cabinet in which Fraser and his colleagues discussed items of particular sensitivity.

It had the capacity for making final decisions; that’s decisions which bound the Government without the necessity to go to a full Cabinet for approval. And there was an agreement that if you were a member of the Co-ordination Committee and the Co-ordination Committee made a decision, then you were duly bound to support that decision when you came to the full Cabinet.

So it becomes a sort of expanding circle: Fraser talks to the Co-ordination Committee, they are bound. They go to the full Cabinet, they are bound and of course the full Cabinet, if there is a Ministry, is all ‘committed. So the commitment gradually expands outwards.

Fraser was very adept at using a Cabinet system in order to achieve particular ends that he wanted at particular times. Let me give a particular example which is in these documents. He was going to Lusaka to CHOGM in 1979 and Jim [Stokes] has talked about the time he put into preparing to go to CHOGM.

There were a couple of Cabinet submissions, which are in your brick here, about the preparations for going to CHOGM; one was the general position and the other was Australia’s priorities – and these were prepared over a period of time with the Department of Foreign Affairs and other people so that they could have an agreed position to take to CHOGM.

It arrives in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet around 4 May, about six or eight weeks before CHOGM, and the Department recommends that they be circulated to the Cabinet ministers, under the usual procedure, on 9 May so that they can be discussed at the Cabinet meeting on 16 May for approval to give the Prime Minister authority. This is 4 May.

The Prime Minister says, ‘No, I think this should merely be discussed by the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee and we’ll take it to the Foreign Affairs Defence Committee on 5 May’ – a day later.

So it gets circulated to Foreign Affairs and Defence on 5 May. The Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee agrees. The decision is circulated to the other ministers and the Government policy is set.

So this is the Government policy which agrees on a whole range of negotiating positions and it dictates over the next four years the Australian attitude both to South Africa and to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.

At different times over the next three years people suggest, ‘Well we need to have a discussion of that policy,’ and the Prime Minister’s answer was always quite simple, ‘No, the policy is set. It is not coming up for discussion, it’s fixed.’

So the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, with 24 hours notice, agrees on a particular policy. It’s in your documents. The story behind it is just as interesting as the story itself. It’s how the Prime Minister sets it up.

I did ask him, ‘Where did your policy towards South Africa come from?’ because there were all sorts of reasons given; I talked to people and they gave me dozens of reasons: he had good friends at Oxford who came from Africa, a whole range of things. Eventually he said, ‘None of those, it’s just time and place, I looked at it and this was the conclusion we came to. We agreed on our policy and we stuck to it.’ So there is the case of the use of Cabinet.

Another one on the way back is, in a sense, even more interesting. Australia had set up a temporary Australian post to help coordinate Australian action, so there was just a temporary post in Lusaka. He talked to President Kenneth Kaunda in Lusaka and said, ‘Look, I’d like to get you a permanent post here, but I’m not going to commit it.’ So he rings up the Secretary of the Department, Geoff Yeend, and says, ‘I think we need a permanent post in Lusaka. Can you ring around the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee members and say the Prime Minister would like that, do you agree?’ So Yeend – there’s no paper – Yeend rings around the other members and a couple of them, Lynch and Sinclair – I think they’re the two – say, ‘Well, we don’t really like the procedure for doing this, but if the Prime Minister has made a promise that’s fine, okay,’ reluctantly.

Yeend rings back and says to Fraser, ‘Okay, the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee has agreed.’ So before he leaves, Fraser tells Kenneth Kaunda, ‘We’re going to set up a permanent office in Lusaka.’

When he gets back Yeend says, ‘Well Prime Minister, it might be a good idea if you actually recorded that as a Cabinet decision.’ So you will find in your list of Cabinet decisions, made without submission, a decision that provides an extension of the post in Lusaka; it was the decision made without a meeting. There was no actual meeting of any Cabinet or Cabinet committees. The Prime Minister was using the procedures in order to achieve that purpose.

Now different prime ministers use different tactics in order to get the same sorts of ends. Fraser used the Cabinet process to ensure the support of his senior colleagues in setting out to achieve particular ends. He did this consistently. I suspect behind most of these decisions, there is a story which can usually be found in the Cabinet Office, the Cabinet documents, the Cabinet files which is where I got all these stories from, which actually tell you not just what was decided but the process by which the Government was operating at the time, quite legitimately, due process, according to the Prime Minister who sets up and dictates those sorts of exercises. So I find the story behind Cabinet – but then I’m a political scientist – just as interesting as the stories themselves.

Jim [Stokes] talked about groundhog day, about going back to issues. Let me just point to two or three which I found particularly fascinating. He’s mentioned some of them but it seems to me interesting because the same issues begin to reverberate.

Firstly, John Howard proposed in submission 2901 a broad-based indirect tax in 1979. It’s an interesting submission. It spells out the options, proposes a green paper and is innately cautious in saying well I think this is a good idea, but he does in his recommendations say ‘I recommend that ministers, if disposed to preserve the option of introducing a broad-based tax, agree…’ and then runs a line of proposals. It doesn’t get very far, but this is 1979, not 1999 when he eventually introduces it.

I think I’m right in saying that after the 1980 election he had another go at doing the same thing, which is once again saying this is another opportunity for us, having won the election, to set up a broad-based income tax. So there was an interesting consistency over 20 years proposing a tax which eventually he was able to introduce in 1999, 20 years later and that particular submission bears re-reading because of the similarities to what happens in another later one.

A couple of other things interested me as an academic: re-running notions of student fees. This was a hardy perennial which came up every year when the Department of Finance and the Treasury were recommending ways of both raising money and cutting expenditure. Student fees, particularly for second degrees, which actually come in later, were very common proposals.

There’s also a line about overseas fee-paying students and a bold proposal to take them from 600 to 3000. It’s interesting now that we have something like 500,000 overseas students to see how far the system has changed in the 30 years since those proposals were actually being discussed.

A second interesting one is the Australian Olympic Committee, which puts in a bid here for funding after the Montreal disaster in which Australia gained no gold medals. What’s interesting is not only the argument that the Olympic Committee should get funding to allow people to travel overseas, but the amount that they’re asking for. In 1979 they wanted $100,000. They wanted to increase this, in the Olympic year of 1980, to $700,000. When they say that $100 million 30 years later is not adequate I think this is a bit above CPI in terms of the changes that have been made.

The final one is again to go back to one which Jim [Stokes] mentioned which reads as though it could be written today, with a few slight changes; that is the question of refugees. The push factors from Vietnam and Kampuchea, following the end of the Vietnam War, were very, very strong. In fact the paper presents, at times, quite chilling suggestions – or predictions. When it works out the calculation of arrivals, it assumes that people leaving in boats from Vietnam would have a 50 per cent casualty rate. That less than 50 per cent of them would reach places.

It then talks about the various options that might be available for Australia and they, again, bear re-reading. Can we talk to the country concerned, in this case Vietnam, how can we manage to run a process of first asylum, second asylum? Can we turn back the boats? No we can’t, it claims we would be an international pariah if we just turned back the boats. What are the options?

The option they come up with is a one-year bill to be renewed each year so they can convict what are – well not then, but are now called – people smugglers, and also a  suggestion that they try and get together with the Opposition to develop some sort of bipartisan approach to solve these issues.

You read that and you think it could almost have been written today. Change the words from Vietnam, to Afghanistan or Iraq or Sri Lanka in these particular circumstances.

Many of the problems of course which occurred then still occur now in different forms and the way in which they are presented and the options which look to governments, I think, resonate today when we talk about the way that things could be done.

So the documents, to me, not only take me back to the work I used to do 25 years ago, but raise many of the questions of how we were governed, how we can be governed and how Cabinet should be run, which seem to me quite fascinating. Malcolm Fraser had his own view and the way he did it of course had an impact on how people did it afterwards, not least John Howard who looked at the way Malcolm Fraser did it.

The chapter on the Cabinet that I wrote in my book on Fraser, was called ‘In the Bunker’ because ministers felt they were constantly sitting in Cabinet arguing, arguing, arguing for long, long hours; they thought it was for far too long. Howard was determined to do it differently when he came in and indeed the Hawke Government was determined to do it differently too. So Fraser’s style was a style which created a model which people either choose or choose not to follow.

But the stories behind the Cabinet are often fascinating. They are stories which explain what went on, why it went on, the way it went on, and what that tells us about Fraser and the way the Fraser Government was run.

Thank you.

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