In a former job as a feature writer, I got to interview George Negus. It was an awesome gig, Negus was a hero to me who partly prompted my move into journalism in my late 20s. He was hosting an excellent program called George Negus Tonight (GNT) at the time, which aired before the ABC News and was inexplicably pulled despite giving the ABC its best ratings for that timeslot since Bellbird.

The timing of the work on that story couldn’t have been better. It coincided with Negus interviewing Malcolm Fraser, who Negus claims had him sacked from his job at the ABC in the 1970s (he later thanked Fraser for that because that led to his plum job on 60 Minutes). I had the pleasure of sitting in the studio watching these two great foes of Australian media and politics come together for a very enlighning chat.

News that Fraser quit the Liberal Party last December would come as no surprise to anyone who saw that May 2004 interview, in which Fraser outlined his discontent with the direction of the Liberal Party, particularly over asylum seekers and the Iraq War.

There are some interesting insights in this the interview about Fraser’s idea of what the Liberal Party should stand for and why he became a Liberal - the full transcript can be read her, but here’s a a few grabs. Be awesome if someone can find the video of it.

GEORGE NEGUS: Why… why a Liberal?

MALCOLM FRASER: Probably because I was at university in the late ’40s, up to 1951. I saw what the Labour Party was doing to Britain. I saw the nationalisation of British industry. And I really believed that they weren’t advancing Britain as they could, as they should’ve. I liked the idea of Menzies’s Liberal Party, a party where big business couldn’t tell the party what to do, where he quite deliberately divorced those who might provide funds from policy making.

GEORGE NEGUS: ‘Cause it was quite deliberately called the Liberal Party, wasn’t it? Not the Conservative Party.

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, Liberal because we’re willing to make experiments, we are determined to be a progressive, forward-looking party, in no way reactionary, in no way conservative.

…  We were the first Western government to start saying, “Governments can spend too much money. We’ve got to spend less.” We established the Galbally Inquiry into post-arrival services for migrants, which, if you like, was the real substantive beginning of a multicultural Australia. This is a large country. We do have boundless plains, which our national anthem says we should share. And four or five thousand boat people a year would have been easily accommodated. The policies we put in place in relation to refugees from Vietnam I believe should still be in place. They’re not. There’s a much tougher attitude.

It’s very easy to scratch the redneck nerve in people. It’s easy to frighten ordinary people about something they don’t know.

GEORGE NEGUS: Many people listening to you talk now would be amazed. That this isn’t the Malcolm Fraser they thought was prime minister of Australia. Why do people think that you wouldn’t say these sort of things?

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I know we had a party room debate…

GEORGE NEGUS: You’re flying in the face of your own party, flying in the face of John Howard…

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I was flying in the face of my own party perhaps when I made sure that we opposed apartheid. From the very first moment I came into office, there was a party room debate and I saw a few people getting up, “Why are we not supporting our white cousins in South Africa?” And I was totally offended by the idea that a white minority should keep a very, very large black majority in a position of political impotence.

GEORGE NEGUS: Have you always been an antiracist, or have you become one?

MALCOLM FRASER: I think I have, but, you know, in my early days I probably wasn’t aware of racist issues. Um… at Oxford, you start to be aware of them. I don’t think I was aware in Melbourne.

Self-indulgent Postscript – I made an arse of myself at the ABC studios that day. When I met Negus, one of my few idols, he immediately greeted me by name without anyone introducing us. My delight in him knowing who I was turned to horror when I realised I was wearing a name tag from a PR lunch I attended earlier that day, which said David Bonnici Melbourne Weekly.
Later, after Malcolm Fraser finished the interview I followed him to get a quick quote about Negus from him. As we were walking and talking West Wing style I thought we were heading back to the makeup department only to follow him straight to the toilet urinal.