‘Dear Mr Fraser’: Don Bradman’s extraordinary letter to new PM

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Sir Donald Bradman personally intervened at the most explosive juncture of Australian political history, stridently advising then new prime minister Malcolm Fraser on how to dismantle the platform of his predecessor Gough Whitlam.

A letter has emerged for the first time, showing how Bradman, writing just two days after the political turmoil of the 1975 dismissal election, bluntly instructed Fraser to take a stand against socialism, unions, the media and Whitlam’s legacy.

December 15 was the penultimate day of a Test match between Australia and the West Indies in Perth, but Bradman had more political and business matters on his mind when he typed out 800 words of counsel to Fraser.

Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam in 1976. The previous year, Fraser blocked supply in the senate to cause a deadlock, leading to Whitlam’s dismissal.Credit:John Lamb

In the letter, uncovered by the Federation University academic Verity Archer and shared with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, Bradman described himself as “a passionate advocate of freedom from socialism (or worse)”, and pushed Fraser to overturn many of Whitlam’s reforms.

“A marvellous victory in which your personal conduct and dignity stood out against the background of arrogance and propaganda indulged in by your opponents,” Bradman, then 67, wrote. “And if I may say so, the charm and bearing of your wife came through with great credit to you both.

“Now you may have to travel a long and difficult road along which your enemies will seek to destroy you.”

Principally, Bradman encouraged Fraser to remove as much regulation of capital as possible, warned against the dangers of inflation, advised on the importance of presenting the national situation accurately to the media and decried the power of unions in Australia at the time.

“What the people need are clearly defined rules which they can read and understand so that they can get on with their affairs,” Bradman wrote.

“The public must be re-educated to believe that private enterprise is entitled to rewards as long as it obeys fair and reasonable rules laid down by government. Maybe you can influence leaders of the press to a better understanding of this necessity of presentation.”

Bradman has often been described as sitting above the back and forth of politics, and he described himself in the letter as “a non-political person”. But it is clear from this and other correspondence, particularly with his friend and former newspaper editor Rohan Rivett around this time, that Bradman chose deliberately to get involved in steering Australia away from the Whitlam era.

A few months after the election, Bradman explained to Rivett that he had felt compelled to take a stand against Whitlam for the sake of the Australian economy.

“That is why I found it necessary to work for the defeat of Whitlam (though I’m sorry for the way it was done) and why I supported Fraser,” Bradman wrote.

Clem Jones, then lord mayor of Brisbane, sat on the Australian Cricket Board opposite Bradman in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 2007 offered the following description of Australia’s greatest ever cricketer.

“Bradman was quite right-wing,” Jones said in Inside Story, Cricket Australia’s official history. “He was the best chairman of any organisation I’ve had anything to do with, absolutely outstanding. But he was a bigoted, right-wing politician. People say he wasn’t political: he was, and very much so.”

The letter was an unexpected discovery for Archer when she was searching through Fraser’s papers at the National Archives in Canberra while writing a book on the history of the term “dole bludger”. She found Bradman’s advice to Fraser among other, similar letters from the likes of Robert Holmes a Court and Lang Hancock.

Archer saw Bradman’s world view as representative of the struggle within the Liberal Party between the bigger government ideals of Robert Menzies and the shift towards more neoliberal and small-government thinking that would soon be embodied by Margaret Thatcher in Britain.

Around this time in other correspondence, Bradman also shared an article about the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek, known as a major influence on conservative figures such as Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan.

“His views represent a shift in the Liberal Party at the time,” Archer said. “There’s two main themes: opposition to unionism, which of course was a theme in conservatism, but also his belief that capital should operate free from regulation, which actually represents a shift in the Liberal Party from a big government conservatism to a small government liberalism.

“He’s taking that neoliberal perspective that government should only interfere with capital where it is needed to prevent fraud, which is a real shift away from conservatism and towards the neoliberal viewpoint. 1975 is quite early for that particular idea to be coming out.

“Bradman obviously held those beliefs really deeply, and also his idea that this would mean, for him, a freedom from socialism if we could remove any regulations on capital. That’s actually a real libertarian idea, it goes a lot further than classical liberalism.”

Within a couple of years, Bradman was wrapped up in the World Series Cricket revolution, personally brokering a peace deal with Kerry Packer after two years of conflict between the players and the Australian Cricket Board.

“Now you may have to travel a long and difficult road along which your enemies will seek to destroy you.”

Sir Donald Bradman

In later life, Bradman would be lionised as the most heroic figure of the type of Australia that the Liberal prime minister John Howard sculpted during his government, the first conservative administration after Fraser lost the 1983 election to Labor’s Bob Hawke.

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Control over inflation, in conjunction with a wage restraint accord agreed with unions, turned out to be the elixir for Australia’s economy under Hawke and Paul Keating in the ensuing decade.

Before Bradman’s death in 2001, Howard often described him as “the greatest living Australian”. As the letter to Fraser makes clear, Bradman was not only a peerless cricketer and an influential administrator, but also a much more political figure than many had previously surmised.

“He has a particular influence in society, as a great cricketer, that business people don’t,” Archer said. “He’s held up as a hero, so he has that element to him that will not just influence politicians but also the general public. People in that position can use that access to their advantage.

“His power at the time is really important too because he had the power to influence people and he had those friendships in high places where he had that access that normal, private citizens don’t have. So it tells us about him and what sort of influence he might have exerted.”

Fraser, of course, left many conservative figures disappointed by how little reform he imparted on Australia’s economy and society between 1975 and 1983. His response to Bradman’s letter, penned a week later, was not very substantial.

“I was interested to read the points you made, and am very much aware of the difficulties facing private enterprise,” Fraser wrote. “My government will be introducing measures towards their alleviation.”

Writing to Rivett in early 1976, Bradman was already worried by Fraser’s early going as prime minister. “I don’t know Fraser,” he wrote, “but to date, I am disappointed by his performance.”

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