80 Paul Keating Quotes

Paul Keating quotes

1. From this day onwards, Howard will wear his leadership like a crown of thorns, and in the parliament I'll do everything to crucify him.

2. If this Government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again, and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for. We will end up being a third rate economy... a banana republic.

3. Where members opposite all come a gutser is in the fact that members on this side all think that we were born to rule you. It has been ingrained in me from childhood to think that my mission in life is to run you, and the Prime Minister (Mr Hawke) thinks that his mission in life is to run you. In fact, the labour movement-that is, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the great industrial labour movement of Australia-thinks that its mission in life is to run you.

4. A dog returning to his vomit

5. The Placido Domingo of Australian politics.

6. 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.

7. I would forbid him going going to the Senate, to account to this unrepresentative swill over there...

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Don't ask me any more questions about Mahathir. I couldn't care less frankly whether he comes to Seattle or not next year. APEC is bigger than all of us - Australia, the United States, Malaysia, Mahathir - or any other recalcitrants.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. No choice we can make as a nation lies between our history and our geography. We can hardly change either of them. They are immutable. The only choice we can make as a nation is the choice about our future.

15. You just can't have a position where some pumped up bunyip potentate dismisses an elected government.

16. [Australian Reserve Bank] Governor MacFarlane said recently when Paul Volcker broke the back of American inflation it's regarded as the policy triumph of the Western world. When I broke the back of Australian inflation they say, 'Oh, you're the fellow that put the interest rates up.' Am I not the same fellow that gave them the 15 years of good growth and high wealth that came from it?

17. Between 1999 and 2004 there was no investment in Australia, it all went into housing and consumption all borrowed on the current account. When Peter Costello runs around saying, 'Oh we've paid off the debt,' it's like the pea and thimble trick. The Government debt or the massive private debt abroad? It's continuing to grow.

18. 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.

19. All tip and no iceberg.

20. The fact is Burke is smarter than two thirds of the Western Australian Labor Party rolled together

21. 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.

22. He's a pre-Copernican obscurantist.

23. Silly what's his name, the Shrek, whoever he was on the television this morning?

24. He's the greatest L plater of all time.

25. The accounts do show that Australia is in a recession. The most important thing about that is, is that this is the recession that Australia had to have.

26. Economic racism.

27. I only had one shot in the locker and I fired it.

28. Get a job. Do some work like the rest of us.

29. We're going to bolt it home.

30. I like the Queen... and I think she liked me.

31. Like an Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades.

32. An abacus gone feral.

33. 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.

34. I was implying that the Honourable Member for Wentworth was like a lizard on a rock - alive, but looking dead.

35. This is the sort of little-boy, stamp your foot stuff which comes from a financial yuppie when you shoe him into parliament.

36. (His performance) is like being flogged with a warm lettuce.

37. I'd put him in the same class as the rest of them: mediocrity.

38. Can a souffle rise twice?

39. I suppose that the honourable gentleman's hair, like his intellect, will recede into the darkness.

40. The Leader of the Opposition is more to be pitied than despised, the poor old thing. The Liberal Party ought to put him down like a faithful dog because he is of no use to it and of no use to the nation.

41. We're not interested in the views of painted, perfumed gigolos.

42. It is the first time the Honourable Gentleman has got out from under the sunlamp.

43. He, as Foreign Minister, was swanning around the United States of America with Shirley MacLaine or trying to crash one of Ted Kennedy's parties...and he was trying to play statesman...while he swanned around, and then he made a cowardly attack upon the former Prime Minister before slinking back into his cabinet.

44. You've been in the dye pot again, Andrew.

45. [Most politicians have] brains like sparrows' nests - all shit and sticks.

46. What we have got is a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze, but nobody will cut it down to replace him.

47. The principle saboteur, the man with the cheap fistful of dollars.

48. He's wound up like a thousand day clock.

49. I am not like the Leader of the Opposition. I did not slither out of the Cabinet room like a mangy maggot.

50. Soon we will be at the stage where he will be offering us a free set of steak knives.

51. You boxhead you wouldn't know. You are flat out counting past ten.

52. I'm not running a seminar for dullards on the other side.

53. ...votes for coalition members who have always been cheats, cheats, cheats and will always be cheats, cheats, cheats and will always defend cheats, cheats, cheats..

54. You were heard in silence, so some of you scumbags on the front bench should wait a minute until you hear the responses from me.

55. The Leader of the Opposition hurls all sorts of abuse at me, and all through question time those pansies over there want retractions of the things we've said about them. They are a bunch of nobodies going nowhere.

56. You had an important place in Australian society on the ABC and you gave it up to be a pop star...with a big cheque...and now you're on to this sort of stuff. That shows what a 24 carat pissant you are, Richard, that's for sure.

57. ... you can't write a cheque for taste.

58. Sydney is the only place to live in Australia - the rest is camping out.

59. ...their existense is putrid. It is absolutely putrid.

60. Every now and then you have to flick the switch to vaudeville.

1. One of the inevitable aspects of debates about euthanasia is the reluctance on the part of advocates to confront the essence of what they propose.

2. I think the rise of China is one of the great events of all economic and human history, and I think this will be overwhelmingly a positive thing for the region and the world.

3. I always believed in burning up the government's political capital, not being Mr Safe Guy, you know?

4. You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn't going to give those up.

5. The death of Malcolm Fraser underwrites a great loss to Australia. Notwithstanding a controversial prime ministership, in later years he harboured one abiding and important idea about Australia - its need and its right to be a strategically independent country.

6. One is left with the thought that given the way we now abuse the ocean and abuse the climate that we are heading towards our own iceberg, which is looming on the horizon. It's not visible yet but it certainly exists there and it won't be my generation that has to deal with the fact that the world is not bountiful forever, that the ocean and the atmosphere are not free goods to be abused, that will have to feed these vast populations. That will be your generation.

7. I think Australia has to be a country which has the 'Welcome' sign out.

8. The lesson of the Federation should be that the lesson is over. Australia must have a new idea of itself. We have to strike out in a new direction, in a new way, armed with our own self-regard, our own confidence and fully appreciating our own uniqueness. All other roads will lead us into the shadow of great powers.

9. Well, frenetic activity in the end suiting journos, running at the behest of little press secretaries does not pay off.

10. I try to use the Australian idiom to its maximum advantage.

11. The only reward in a public life is public progress. You stand back and say, 'What did I get out of it?' You look around, and the place is better, and that's it.

12. If you are sitting on the title of any block of land in New South Wales you can bet an Aboriginal person at some stage was dispossessed of it.

13. Geoffrey Tozer's death is a national tragedy. For the Australian arts and Australian music, losing Tozer is like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss. The kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden.

14. The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present.

15. I used to say in the cabinet room, 'confidence is not like a can of Popeye spinach - you can't take the top off and swallow it down.' You know, confidence has to be earned.

16. Countries get one chance in history of putting into place a savings retirement scheme on the scale of the Australian superannuation system.

17. 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.

18. What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship, and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity.

19. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and 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 that these things could be done to us.

20. Politicians never fade away; they just keep carrying on, you know, their class.