FORMER Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser said the recent federal election campaign was the worst he can remember.

“I think it’s a plague on both your houses, or both the big houses; very much so,” he said.

Speaking at the Beyond Politics session at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Mr Fraser said the result indicated heavy criticism of the way the ALP had conducted its affairs.

“But if it had been a Liberal victory, we wouldn’t be wondering about who will form the next government,” Mr Fraser said.

The former Prime Minister expressed his concerns for Australia’s future, especially with regards to foreign affairs.

“This last election, we might have been an island with no world around us,” he said.

“But there’s a very difficult and dangerous world around us. Nobody spoke about it.”

The impact of controversial fear-mongering tactics applied during the electoral campaigns of both major political parties with respect to asylum seekers outraged Mr Fraser, the recipient of numerous honours including the Human Rights Medal.

“People playing politics with vulnerable people’s lives is the lowest form of politics anywhere in the world,” he said.

He questioned how much of the White Australia policy, which specified that only ‘white’ persons were eligible to immigrate to Australia, actually died in 1973 when it was abolished.

Whether the mentality behind the policy lingers on in the minds of some Australians is a possibility niggling at not only Mr Fraser’s conscience, but that of current international leaders.

“People round the world notice it,” Mr Fraser said.

“It is affecting relations with Australia and other states.”

According to Mr Fraser, Australia will require a leader willing to evoke empathy from a fearful Australian public towards the plight of asylum seekers, a bipartisan agreement to a federal principle policy on asylum seeking, and a regional approach to the issue before progress can be made.

He did not express confidence in either current political candidate to achieve these.

“If we could tell a few human stories of the sorts of people fleeing terror and of the situations they were fleeing from, I believe Australians would respond to that as they responded in relation to Indochina and the Vietnamese,” Mr Fraser said.

“With generosity and with open arms.”

The degree to which Australian universities are being forced to rely on the generosity of full-fee paying international students to sustain the current tertiary system also vexed Mr Fraser.

He predicted an uncertain and difficult future for tertiary education in Australia.

“A lot has happened to make Australia less attractive to [international] students,” Mr Fraser said.

He fears for a future in which universities may need to redirect funds from research initiatives to ensure their own survival.

Mr Fraser suggested a lack of long-term planning was responsible for issues such as these.

“If the country is to have pride,” he said, “there are a lot of things governments are going to have to do because private enterprise cannot or will not do it.”

As the differences between the policies and philosophical standpoints of the two major political parties continue to blur, Mr Fraser mentioned two ways he felt Australians could improve the state of their politics.

The first- a short-term solution of increasing relevance, given the increasing probability of Australians returning to the polls- is to differentiate between the parties based on proficiency.

“Today the difference [between the parties] is the difference in competence- who can do it best,” Mr Fraser said.

Interestingly, the former Liberal Prime Minister commended the performance of the Labor Party through the global financial crisis.

“When you’re saying, ‘We’ve got a recession’, [and] the bank is saying, the treasury is saying, every international body is saying, ‘Get money out there quickly,’ speed is of the essence. It’s not surprising there are going to be mistakes,” he said.

“Big bureaucracies, whether they’re public or private, are not used to acting quickly. If you ask them to act quickly, they’ll shortcut some processes; they’ll make mistakes.”  

He noted that, while the insulation program was ‘clearly terrible’, only two percent of schools complained about the building program, half of which were from state schools in New South Wales, and the New South Wales government.

“Government schools’ money was administered by the states,” Mr Fraser said.

“The Commonwealth’s direct involvement was really with private schools, and that’s where there were virtually no complaints,” he said.

As such, Mr Fraser said one of the late government’s biggest strategic mistakes was to implicitly accept the errors of the New South Wales government by failing to attribute the blunders to the correct source.

“On balance, the whole thing was an enormous plus for Australia, and the errors were miniscule compared to the success of keeping Australia out of recession,” he said.

“At least, to this point.”

To resolve long-term issues in Australian politics, Mr Fraser suggested it was a question of attracting and retaining the right sort of politicians to the game of politics, rather than changing the rules.

“Good people, I believe, can make a terrible Constitution work,” he said.

“Bad people could destroy the best, most clever Constitution in the world.

“So instead of talking about changing the system- doing politics differently- you really ought to be talking about, ‘how do we get the right people, good people?”

Beyond Politics was held in association with Making Health Global.