Video feedback

Thank you.

Your feedback was successfully sent.

Now that Malcolm Fraser has finally taken the ultimate step and quit the Liberal Party, it has to be asked: what took him so long?

Twenty-seven years have passed since Fraser lost office to a resurgent Labor Party led by Bob Hawke. Fraser left the parliament soon after and handed the Liberal Party to the next generation, headed by John Howard and Andrew Peacock.

Ever since, his legacy as the Liberal leader who wrested power from Gough Whitlam and won three elections, governing for more than seven years, has been under attack from within his own party. The shorthand take on the Fraser years on the non-Labor side has long been that it was a wasted opportunity, a time plagued by ideological confusion.

Fraser's view of his time as prime minister is that his was a genuine Liberal government, in the tradition of party founder Sir Robert Menzies, who did not envisage the organisation as a conservative political outfit.

Fraser expounds at length on this theme in his recently-released memoir/biography, co-authored with Margaret Simons.

It seems that Fraser was willing to bear the slings and arrows of his erstwhile fellow Liberals, as long as he felt he could see signs that the party, having got through John Howard's long period of leadership, would hew towards a less conservative stance on issues of race, border protection, foreign policy and the environment.

However, the ascension of Tony Abbott, the most prominent of all of Howard's political acolytes, to the Liberal leadership last December appears to have snuffed out Fraser's hopes once and for all; he reportedly resigned from the party within days of Abbott taking over.

Labor can take little comfort from this. Fraser is scathing in his assessment of the Rudd government. For Malcolm Fraser, this is a matter of political philosophy, not politics.

Shaun Carney is associate editor of The Age.