Yass Valley resident David Barnett worked for Fraser during his tenure as PM between 1975 and 1983 and he said he was able to bring order back into the Federal government. 

"The job as he saw it was to restore the economic and social stability that we had before the election of the Whitlam Government," Mr Barnett told the Tribune.

"That change that Gough brought was important but the problem was that it was overdone, it went too far.

"Fraser set about steadying all this down and he succeeded in doing that."

Fraser died peacefully  in his home on Friday morning at the age of 84, but Mr Barnett said he wasn't surprised when he heard about his death.

"Well no (I wasn't shocked) he died, he's only a year older than me and when you get into your 80s it's something you contemplate.

“Of course I wasn’t shocked, but I didn’t like it, I admired him tremendously.

Mr Barnett was president of the Press Gallery when he offered his services to Fraser and his team in 1975.

"I basically went in there and said 'would you like me to be your press secretary?' and Tony Eagles and Malcolm discussed it and they came back pretty quickly and said 'yes'."

Mr Barnett said it was hard to gauge what kind of man Fraser was, simply because of the role he took on.

"He wasn't a person he was a prime minister, and like all other prime ministers their personality just disappears into the job and the demands of the job shape them in all their actions."

He added that Fraser's efforts in the job were to be commended.

“He was a tremendously hard working man and he didn’t spare himself in the service of his country and he did all the could be done.

Mr Barnett couldn't provide a "laundry list" of his achievements but he noted a couple of important bits of legislation.

“I suppose the main thing he did was to show that the way that (Robert) Menzies ran the country, his predecessors and his successors, was no longer good enough.”

Mr Barnett spoke of his work in dealing with Vietnamese refugees, his important land rights work done in the Northern Territory and also his action as a conversationalist dealing with the sand mining issue on Fraser Island.