It was not only an evident reluctance to embrace economic reform that blighted Malcolm Fraser’s eight years of government and allowed the Hawke-Keating duo falsely to claim the reform initiative (rather than its implementation, to which they are entitled.) Characterised as a government of missed opportunities, a defining moment in Fraser’s premiership (nowhere mentioned in the Simons/Fraser hagiography) was the significance of the early defeat of the government’s ham-fisted attempt to wind-back the waste of the Whitlam years, which Fraser had been elected with a massive majority (of which I was one) to clean up.