Altered History.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: David Kemp's reply (December 2007) to "The Dismal Beginning to the Fraser Years" (July-August 2007) essentially avoids its main thrust. It focuses instead on three incidental matters, and on defending the attitude which his Public Service Act 1999 brought to the gutting of the Commonwealth public service.

Kemp devotes the first of his three pages to what he calls "the main substantive bone of contention" between us--the so-called "strike" of officials in preparing Fraser's public defence of his 17.5 per cent devaluation decision. Main bone of contention? In eight pages, my reference to this trivial incident took up two paragraphs, concluding that "to describe these events as 'a strike' is melodrama on stilts". Kemp's attempted elevation of it to our "main bone of contention" merely heightens those stilts.

As surmised previously, this incident's real significance lies in the animus it seems to have generated for Kemp's later Public Service Act. On that, Kemp says that "overall the quality of Australia's senior public servants remains high", and names five departmental secretaries with whom he was "fortunate to work". Four of them were public servants under the old regime--three of them worked for me in Treasury, where I held them in high regard. What Kemp does not seem to understand is that, as with all such institutional revolutions, the "lags" involved mean that neophyte ministers can still benefit from the products of the system they have so recklessly overthrown. I doubt that many informed observers in Canberra today would share Kemp's judgment.

Kemp does throw additional light, for which historians will be grateful, on the Phillip Lynch letter incident. But while his new facts are interesting, they in no way rebut my basic point about Fraser's treatment of his Treasurer. He does, however, suggest that "the long emotional letter from Lynch" was really a letter of mine ("Its authorship by Stone was obvious"). I had made it clear that I was a principal draftsman, "along lines that he [Lynch] laid out in detail". How does Kemp define "authorship"? Was he the "author" of Fraser's post-devaluation statement? Of course not. Its "basic outlines" were, he says, laid down by Fraser himself, who later "went through it carefully". So, as my article made clear, did Lynch. It is insulting, surely, to the latter's memory to say that the "authorship" of his letter was mine, and to imply that Lynch was merely putty in my hands.

The main thrust (about 70 per cent) of my article criticised Kemp's original account of the economic policy differences between Fraser and all his official economic advisers. In a single paragraph, Kemp offers no substantive response, but simply says that "Stone's suggestion that it was my estimation that the Prime Minister was 'the only man in step on the economic policies needed' is without foundation, and I do not believe ...