International policy is deeply serious work—vital to nation and people, and deadly in effects. Yet oft times it lurches from furore to fiasco, via farce to straight-out funny.

The utter pragmatism of Malcolm Fraser’s embrace of China meets the measure of serious work of lasting import, relevant to today’s arguments. First, though, the fun in Fraser’s initial visit to China as PM in June, 1976—a tour that entered Press Gallery lore on all sorts of ‘f’ measures from fantastic to farce.

Fraser’s party, plus journos, attended a sumptuous Chinese dinner to be entertained by rousing renditions of traditional Chinese songs. The PM decided there should be an Oz response and commanded the gallery hacks to sing. Fraser expected Waltzing Matilda. Instead, Ken Begg, of the ABC, and Peter Bowers, of the Sydney Morning Herald, led the hack howlers in a rendition of an advertising ditty for Aeroplane jelly.

The Adelaide Advertiser’s Brett Bayly recalls a gusto performance (although the hacks couldn’t remember all the words) to Fraser’s growing displeasure:

‘When the Chinese asked for an interpretation, Fraser looked at us with a very threatening look. But up jumped Begg to explain to our Communist hosts that the song was about the evil capitalists who were taking over the economy in Australia. Fraser fumed, Tamie giggled, the Chinese applauded and we all felt just great.’

Alan Ramsey wrote that the howler’s performance horrified press secretary, David Barnett, who accused the hacks of embarrassing Fraser and ‘betraying the national interest’.

The trip had already served up multiple helpings of furore, farce and fiasco. A junior Australian diplomat mixed up copies of a press release with copies of the full transcript of the first day of talks between Fraser and China’s Premier. The mix-up meant Fraser’s party got the envelopes with the press release and the hacks got the envelopes with the confidential transcript. Crash, bang, boom, with lots of details about Fraser’s indiscreet remarks about India, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Premier Hua Kuo-feng, in turn, was recorded offering an enthusiastic view of the new British Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, which was an interesting signal of where Maoist China was heading.

The geopolitical furore was Fraser’s floating of the idea of a four-power Pacific agreement reaching towards alliance, bringing together China, the US, Australia and Japan to face-off against the Soviet Union. Travelling with Fraser, the Melbourne Herald’s Peter Costigan broke the scoop this way on 26 June:  ‘The Prime Minister, Mr Fraser, wants China to join with Australia, the US and Japan in a four-power Pacific agreement. He has raised the subject in talks with the Chinese Premier, Hua Kuo-fang.’

There’s some debate about whether Fraser raised the idea so explicitly with Hua, while sketching it in more lurid detail during a drink with Peter Costigan. Senior Fraser aides muttered darkly that fiasco and furore were fermented by unreconstructed Whitlamites in Foreign Affairs, seeking to damage the new PM.

Beijing didn’t mind. The Chinese quickly decided that here was another conservative leader from the West who had come to do business. (For a fine discussion of Fraser and China in 1976, see Professor John Fitzgerald’s masterful account.)

Whitlam got the kudos for diplomatic recognition of China. Yet the embrace of China was one area where Fraser matched Whitlam exactly in policy intent and personal commitment. Fraser’s achievement was to establish that a conservative government in Canberra could be as fervent for the China relationship as Labor.

Deeply different national histories, interests and ideologies didn’t prevent a firm friendship that could surprise on the upside. There was nary a hint that Fraser had been a minister in previous Liberal governments that refused to recognise the devil regime in Beijing (Menzies) and gave formal recognition to Taiwan (Holt).

Fraser’s persona as an ideological warrior could play to his advantage; his visceral distrust of the Soviet Union was shared by China’s leadership. Forget ideology to do a deal to mutual benefit. A China that had fought border wars with Russia was well able to find some geopolitical common ground with Malcolm Fraser. Beijing was not going to sign up to Fraser’s vision of a grand anti-Soviet coalition, but it liked where he was coming from.

Fraser’s label for his approach was ‘enlightened realism’. It was the mantra of a Cold War warrior who’d cooled and become more selective about his enemies. The warrior would be as zealous as ever about resisting the Soviet Union, but anti-communism would not get in the way of new possibilities with China.

The pragmatism of ‘enlightened realism’ created plenty of room for a new China passion. That was signalled in Fraser’s first major statement on foreign policy as Prime Minister, delivered to the House of Representatives on 1 June 1976, just before his first overseas trip as leader, visiting Japan and China.

The ‘enlightened’ bit of the speech was its tribute to deeply held Australian values of democracy, freedom and respect for the individual. Then, the ‘realism’ came crashing in. The ideology of regimes couldn’t be the guiding principle of Australian policy. Interests, not ideology, would drive cooperation:

‘Whatever the basis of a regime, whatever the organisation of its domestic government, the chief determinant of our relations will be that country’s approach to foreign relations, how it meshes with ours, and of necessity the extent of the interests we share. We should strive to deal with other countries, and look to the development of cooperative relations with those countries with who we have some common interests, regardless of ideology. A relationship founded on common interests is ultimately the only relationship that can be depended upon.’

This China script was endlessly reworked in these exact terms by John Howard. Tony Abbott’s indiscreet line that Australia’s China policy is driven by ‘fear and greed’ merely shows he still retains his journalistic ability to simplify and heighten. The hack howlers would applaud. There’s plenty of room for fear and greed as part of the mix in enlightened realism, as Malcolm Fraser well knew. And Fraser also understood the pain caused when private remarks to another leader are made public. Plus ça change….

There was a change of tone in Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s media conference this week, where he announced the deployment of the Australian and New Zealand training contingent to Taji, Iraq. Gone was the more strident rhetoric about the ADF being the ‘long, strong arm of Australia’, leaping at ‘an opportunity to do something which is unambiguously good’—language the PM used at Al Minhad airbase in the UAE last August. The latest announcement was more cautious about the risks faced—‘it is a dangerous place and I can’t tell you that this is risk-free’—and the prospects for success in the context of ‘a pretty dispiriting situation in the Middle East in recent months.’

For all the caution, though, the PM’s instincts about Australia’s role in the world were on full display:

The fundamental point I want to make is that we are a good international citizen. We have a long history of shouldering our responsibilities to the wider world. This is about international security and national security. We will do what we can to keep our country safe, to play our part in the wider world….

This comparison may not often have been made, but Mr Abbott is probably the most liberal internationalist Prime Minister Australia has seen since Malcolm Fraser.

In January 2013 Julia Gillard offered a form of naive regionalism when she declared the end of the 9/11 era and described the strategic outlook as ‘positive and ‘benign’.  It helped Australia get voted onto the UN Security Council.

Kevin Rudd’s approach was a frenzied hard-power gamesmanship schooled in observing Chinese statecraft. That delivered the promise of twelve submarines. John Howard practiced a pragmatism that produced surprising results for East Timor and got us closer to the US and to China simultaneously. Hawke and Keating made big strides to shape regional architecture, but all to the aim of realist balancing in Asia by locking in the US to the alliance and to APEC.

One has to go back to Malcolm Fraser to find a Prime Minister as committed as Abbott to the idea of Australia simply being a force for good in the international community. Fraser’s liberal internationalism famously saw him take a stand against Apartheid South Africa, welcome Vietnamese refugees after the fall of the South in 1975 and oppose Australian participation in the Moscow Olympics after Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

Mr Abbott surprised some observers in his Parliament House eulogy for Mr Fraser when he sought to claim back to the Liberal Party the views of a man whom some judged to have moved significantly to the left after leaving politics. Abbott said:

John Howard has famously observed that the Australian Liberal Party, unlike its namesakes elsewhere, is the custodian in this country of both the liberal political tradition and the conservative one. But there is in fact a third tradition our party represents that is as vital as our liberal and conservative philosophies—a dedication to service and to repaying good fortune, the working out in this world of the gospel notion ‘To whom much is given, much is expected’.

That ‘third tradition’ explains a lot about the personal emphasis Mr Abbott brings to international affairs. Abbott demanded a very high profile Australian response to the Russian shoot-down of flight MH17 over Ukraine and seemed as affronted by Moscow’s refusal to accept responsibility for suppling the weapon as much as the reality of Australian deaths. In the new deployment of forces to Iraq the PM has provided additional forces without there being undue international pressure to offer them. Why? Because ‘the important thing is to make an effective and meaningful contribution to the security of the wider world.’ Doing good internationally promotes Australia’s security because it secures the spread of values like our own and ultimately defeats the ‘Islamist death cult’.

You could object that Mr Abbott’s liberal internationalism doesn’t derive from a commitment to international institution building, such as that of Woodrow Wilson. Our PM’s approach seems to draw more from a sense of moral obligation informed by faith. In this respect Abbott’s closest counterpart is former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Others may claim that the PM’s approach is invalidated by the impact of policies such as ‘stopping the boats’ and aid cuts. But both Abbott and Gillard claimed that a driving priority on boats was to stop drownings at sea. On aid, one defence is that poorly directed development assistance achieves neither institution building nor good moral purpose.

A third objection might be that by deploying troops to Iraq Mr Abbott is just paying ‘alliance dues.’ Not so. Australia did its best to influence a reluctant US to intervene.

A final pointer to this emerging world view can be seen in the priority Abbott has given to strengthening relations with Canada. The two countries are like-minded and share many common values, but what makes Canada important to Tony Abbott is a shared tradition of doing good internationally. In a carefully crafted speech to the Australia–Canada Economic Leadership Forum last year the PM made some revealing remarks:

On a wall in my offices, hangs a painting of a World War One battlefield near Vimy Ridge where Canadian and Australian soldiers had been comrades-in-arms. In those days, it would have been taken for granted that Canadians and Australians should have gone into action together….

The relationship is strong but under-developed even though we are as like-minded as any two countries can be. So, I want to make more of this friendship: for our own good and for the good of the wider world.

Instinctive and based on judgements about an obligation to do good, Mr Abbott’s approach to strategy is significantly different to an Australian norm of realist pragmatism.

The most remarkable feature of Malcolm Fraser’s lifetime pursuit of Australia’s international interests was his journey from rock-ribbed, alliance-loving realist to green-tinged alliance decrier.

Fraser’s eventual rejection of the US alliance as deeply dangerous to Australia put him well outside the Liberal–Labor strategic consensus. Not for Malcolm the alliance addiction that has been the drug-of-choice for Australian defence from day one, 1901.

In office, Fraser was a deeply committed alliance addict in the great Oz tradition; in retirement he renounced the habit with all the fervour of those who reform and recover.

Peter Edwards offers an excellent account of Fraser’s alliance evolution and transformation. And Peter points to the Soviet Union as the bogey man that animated much of Fraser’s leadership. On the alliance and on the communist threat, Fraser was being true to his teacher and political inheritance.

One way to read Fraser-as-PM is to see him as a loyal Menzies disciple, acting out in office many of the aims and attitudes he’d learnt from the master. Fraser entered Parliament at the age of 25 in 1955, the youngest MP at the time, so his education can be attributed as much to a decade of tutelage by Menzies as the third-class degree from Oxford.

Fraser’s exit from Parliament in 1983 and the end of the Cold War six years later were important points of departure beyond the Menzies mantle. Such pop psychology must immediately acknowledge important areas where Fraser was completely at odds with Menzies in government, especially on race, immigration and multiculturalism. In office from 1975 to 1983, though, Fraser’s instincts and understandings of politics and geopolitics were marked by Menzian habits of mind. That is why Fraser always maintained that the Liberal Party had shifted away from him—he stood with Menzies, the Party drifted off. The contest for the Menzies’ mantle is part of the tug-of-war between Howard and Fraser, forming an undercurrent of Howard’s book on Menzies.

Peter Edwards provides the historical context for looking at the shift from realist to radical expressed in Fraser’s jeremiad against the alliance in his last big message to Australia: the book Dangerous Allies. The deep flaws in the book do not detract from the distinct position it marks out in the great national endeavour to navigate the Asian century. As this column commented on the book’s publication, for the first time in its history, Australia had a Prime Minister who didn’t believe in the need for a great and powerful friend.

For a detailed demolition of Fraser’s call to end the alliance, see Rory Medcalf’s essay ‘Malcolm Fraser’s Asia Delusion’. Rory says Fraser offers an absurd caricature of US policy and what this means for Australia: ‘Beneath a veneer of reasonableness, it is characterised by omissions, distortions, half-truths and plain errors of fact. The account is frequently naive, automatically assuming the best of Chinese motives and actions.’ And after that, Rory really starts to get stuck in.

The funny thing is I am sure that Malcolm Fraser would have absolutely loved it as the basis for a wonderful verbal wrestle. Fraser was a political bully who always wanted a good argument. Like Margaret Thatcher, he was often more interested in those who argued with him. Supporters were part of the base, while those who argued might have interesting perspectives to be tested or even incorporated. And those who argued could even be debated into becoming converts. What else is politics for?

Fraser’s shift beyond the alliance was an increasingly apparent part of his political persona through the 1990s. The moment when I shifted Malcolm fully into the alliance nay-sayer camp was his the speech he gave in the Old Parliament House 70th Anniversary Lecture Series in October, 1997.

He posed the problem this way:

Our security arrangements had been based on the reality of the Cold War and on the possibility of a real Communist threat. Our relationships with the US were dominated by the necessity for that security alliance. It gave us comfort. But what implications does the end of the Cold War have for security in East Asia and the Western Pacific? American power was based in the Western Pacific, largely because of the Cold War. Is the deployment still relevant?

Fraser said in that 1997 lecture he couldn’t now give a clear answer to a question about the circumstances in which the US would come to Australia’s military aid:

Is there a perceivable threat that could involve the US, because they will only be involved if their interests are threatened? They will not be involved if Australia’s interests alone are threatened. Over the next hundred years, more and more we are going to have to achieve Australia’s future through our own efforts and through our relationships with countries in East and Southeast Asia. We need the courage and capacity to realise that relationships with Asian countries can give us a more secure future than relationships with Britain or the United States.

Fraser wrestled with a lot of history to produce Dangerous Allies. It must have torn at his Menzian training. And Fraser certainly offered an incomplete picture of what strategic independence would mean and cost. He didn’t even grapple with concepts such as ‘armed neutrality’, while his embrace of Asia meant he was no isolationist. This is an argument that will not die with Australia’s 22nd Prime Minister.