Mm.

This was starting to, to, uh, crash.

Um, he was trying to crash through, but this...

The amazing thing about this government was that having won its election in 1972, it was almost immediately plunged into a crisis of legitimacy, which was entirely artificial, if you like, forced on it by the narrative from the coalition, which disregarded the legitimacy of the election outcome, which talked about, you know, voters in...

Doug Anthony, the leader of the Country Party, talked about some of the city voters having an aberrant moment, but, you know, really, um, there hadn't been a genuine change of opinion and so it was all we had to do was to have another election to put things right.

So, that was happening, uh, in May '74, but it had been happening from early 1973, really immediately after the government had been elected in December the previous year.

So, this crisis of legitimacy, and one of the interesting themes about this election was these contrasting narratives of legitimacy.

100%.

What shape was the Liberal Party in in 1972 heading into this election

year? Look, not great.

I mean, the leadership revolving door, yeah, Menzies out, Holt drowned.

Gorton looked promising but then kind of fell apart, was voted out by his own party in April of 71.

And then McMahon came in.

McMahon...

Look, they were just showing this astonishing capacity for bungling and for self-induced crisis.

So we often think about, you think because it was such a great campaign that your natural inclination is to think that it was such a landslide victory, but it was reasonably tight.

Mm-hmm.

I edited Farago, the student newspaper, including in 1974, which was an election that we'll talk about very shortly.

My Fraser years I spent as a journalist at the age, first of all, as a cadet in Melbourne, but I quickly got myself to the Canberra Press Gallery.

And the reason for that was back in my student days, We'd done some kind of then pioneering, quote unquote, actually gonzo journalism, as we like to think of it, by reporting federal politics for National U, which was the national student newspaper, and used to come up to Canberra a couple of times regularly.

And the experience of being in Canberra, I loved Canberra, the city.

I loved the old Parliament House.

We would find ourselves, you know, you could sit in the press gallery and look down actually on Gough Whitlam and Jim Cairns and Bill Hayden and they were all there.

But even in your own research, what's your hypothesis as to the important role that campaigns