John Malcolm Fraser entered the House of Representatives as the member for Wannon in 1955.
Twenty years later, he successfully challenged the Liberal Party’s leader, Bill Snedden, and assumed the leadership at a time when the Whitlam government was embroiled in the Overseas Loans Affair.
Speaking at a press conference following his election, Fraser said he believed that governments were entitled to expect that they would be able to govern for three years, “unless quite extraordinary and reprehensible circumstances” intervened.
His comments were widely interpreted as a pledge not to block Supply, as can be seen from the front page of the Melbourne Sun on March 22, 1975:
Significantly, whilst Fraser said he wanted to get all talk of elections out of the way, he also said that if the Opposition were to make a decision to block Supply, he would want to do it in such a way that “Mr. Whitlam would wake up one morning and find that he had been caught with his trousers well and truly down”.
Archived Posts
- March 8, 1971: The Malcolm Fraser We Once Knew
- June 18, 1975: Fraser Alleges Gerrymander
- June 30, 1975: Fraser: We’ll Win Any Federal Election Now
- July 9, 1975: Loans Affair: Special One-Day Sitting
- October 15, 1975: Fraser Announces The Coalition Will Block Supply
- October 19, 1975: Fraser Says Blocking Supply Is Justified By Economic Circumstances And Government Scandals
- November 11, 1975: Fraser’s Acceptance Of A Caretaker Commission
- November 27, 1975: Malcolm Fraser’s 1975 Election Policy Speech
- September 1, 1983: Il Dismissale: Max Gillies On The Dismissal
- November 10, 1985: Ten Years On, Channel 9’s Sunday Program Remembers The Dismissal
- November 8, 1995: Whitlam: The Coup Twenty Years After
- November 11, 1995: 20 Years On: Four Corners Remembers The Dismissal
- January 5, 2002: Has Malcolm Changed?
- January 6, 2007: Santamaria’s Role In The Dismissal
- June 6, 2012: Malcolm Fraser’s Whitlam Oration