Fraser Makes It Legit

When Australia's Governor General Sir John Kerr fired Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam last month for failing to get his budget funded by the conservative-controlled Senate, it appeared that Whitlam might easily get his job back. For one thing, there seemed to be some truth to Whitlam's protest that he had been the victim of a ruthless power play. Then again, Kerr had named as caretaker Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, 45, the tough but untested leader of the conservative coalition composed of his own Liberal Party and the rural National Country Party.

Yet by the time Australia's 8 million voters went to the polls last week, the early groundswell of sympathy for Whitlam had all but vanished. Fraser and his coalition swept to power in a landslide victory, handing Whitlam the worst defeat of his career.

Whitlam's mistake was to wage his campaign chiefly on the issue of his ouster. He claimed that the future of Australian democracy required that he be returned to office to void the Governor General's "legal coup d'etat." In a brief paroxysm of rage over Kerr's action, strikers shut down slaughterhouses, construction sites and steelworks all over Australia. But before long, Australian voters decided that Whitlam's firing was not the main issue after all. Opinion polls showed that voters were more concerned about bread-and-butter issues--inflation, industrial unrest and unemployment--than the constitutional question posed by Whitlam's sacking.

Fraser seized on the economic issues, emphasizing the jump in Australia's inflation rate from 5% to a high of 17% during what he called the "three dark years of Labor." Capitalizing on concern over unemployment (which went as high as 5.3%), Fraser claimed that one job had been lost for every seven minutes Labor was in power: "Don't give Whitlam the chance to break the job-a-minute barrier because if you do, I'm sure he will."

By late last week polls showed Fraser leading Whitlam by 52% to 42%. More than anything else, it was the soft economy--and the soaring price of Labor's ambitious social welfare program--that proved Whitlam's undoing. For most of Australia's middle-class voters, Whitlam's program, which included a new national health scheme providing free medical care for all and expanded education and welfare benefits, was simply too much too soon.

Closer to U.S. A wealthy sheep rancher from western Victoria, Fraser has promised cutbacks in domestic programs and tax cuts for individuals and business incentives. He will also move to pull Canberra's foreign policy back onto its pre-Whitlam path. Fraser has criticized the Labor government's steps to improve ties with Communist and Third World countries "while neglecting friends and allies with whom we share political ideals and philosophies." That would forecast a return to Australia's traditionally close foreign policy relations with Britain and the U.S.

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