Paul Keating
Australian politician and 24th Prime Minister of Australia, came to prominence first as the reforming Treasurer in the Hawke government, then as the Prime Minister who pulled off an upset victory in the "unwinnable" election of 1993.
Because in the end those kind of conservative tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types who I think led Kim into nothingness, he's got his life to repent in leisure now at what they did to him.
Hewson: I ask the Prime Minister: if you are so confident about your view of Fightback, why will you not call an early election?
Keating: The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly. There has to be a bit of sport in this for all of us. In the psychological battle stakes, we are stripped down and ready to go. I want to see those ashen-faced performances; I want more of them. I want to be encouraged. I want to see you squirm out of this load of rubbish over a number of months. There will be no easy execution for you. You have perpetrated one of the great mischiefs on the Australian public with this thing, trying to rip away our social wage, trying to rip away the Australian values which we built in our society for over a century.
The dogs may bark but the caravan moves on.
The Placido Domingo of Australian politics.
In the end it's the big picture which changes nations and whatever our opponents may say, Australia's changed inexorably for good, for the better.
For John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade. You know, it's like one of those deep diamond mined holes in South Africa, you know, they're about a mile underground. He'd have to come a mile up to get to even equilibrium, let alone have any contest in morality with Kevin Rudd.
We will not adopt the fantastic hypocrisy of modern conservatism which preaches the values of families and communities, while conducting a direct assault on them through reduced wages and conditions and job security.
You just can't have a position where some pumped up bunyip potentate dismisses an elected government.
Silly what's his name, the Shrek, whoever he was on the television this morning?
By the year 2000 we should be able to say that we have learned to live securely, in peace and mutual prosperity among our Asian and Pacific neighbours. We will not be cut off from our British and European cultures and traditions or from those economies. On the contrary, the more engaged we are economically and politically with the region around us, the more value and relevance we bring to those old relationships. Far from putting our identity at risk, our relationships with the region will energise it.
A familiar question for Australians is how much we are a product of our circumstances, and how much we are what we have made ourselves to be. In truth, by the act of migration the country was made: by that voluntary act and by the emigrants' ambitions it was built.
Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable . . . unimaginable . . . unspeakable.
This is the sweetest victory of all. This is a victory for the true believers; the people who, in difficult times, have kept the faith.
It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
The little desiccated coconut is under pressure and he is attacking anything he can get his hands on... (he is) still there araldited to the seat.
John Howard turned the prime ministership into something like a state police minister. He's at the scene of every crime, twice a day on radio, the guy did no thinking.
He’s the greatest L plater of all time.
I mean (blowing lips), I mean he's going Mr Speaker, Mr Speaker, he's going troppo, he's going troppo, he's more to be pitied than despised, he's simply going troppo.
He's a pre-Copernican obscurantist.