Australian Politician Quotes

Julia Gillard

Kevin Rudd

Tony Abbott

Gough Whitlam

Robert Gordon Menzies

John Howard

Malcolm Fraser

Man is a predatory animal, and this aspect of his nature is nowhere better suited by environment than in the world of politics.

What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.

Robert Gordon Menzies

I am never going to make another comment about another capital city, I promise you, I promise you that.

I don't know if I am a very good politician … I'm not a good hater.

Before becoming an Australian you will be asked to subscribe to certain values. If you have strong objections to those values, don't come to Australia.

Poor Bob. It's very sad; he would rather make a point than make a friend.

Of Robert Menzies

No longer content to be just the lucky country, Australia must now become the clever country.

I admit that we could have done more to win over third-party endorsements and to win over the Senate, and we could have done more to win over the Australian people.

They (the Greens) are a home for people who in the 1950s would have joined the Communist Party. They are watermelons many of them - green on the outside and very, very, very red on the inside.

Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man whose duties make him more or less of a taxing machine. He is intrusted with a certain amount of misery which it is his duty to distribute as fairly as he can.

I'm a media tart. You tell me one politician that's not a media tart, tell me one that's not.

Academic economists have about the status and reliability of astrologers or the readers of Tarot cards. If the medical profession was as lacking in resources…we would not have advanced very far beyond the provision of splints for broken arms.

Barry Owen Jones

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 great task of statesmanship is to apply past lessons to new situations, to draw correct analogies to understand and act upon present forces, to recognise the need for change....

There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek.

How can you render the duties of justice to men when they may destroy you?

When I joined the Labor Party it was made up of the cream of the working-class. When I left it was made up of the dregs of the middle-class.

Kim Edward Beazley

[But] we should not be kowtowing to anybody when it comes to freedom in this country.

I am still an Irish rebel to the backbone and the spinal marrow, a rebel for the same reason that John Hampden and Algernon Sidney, George Washington and Charles Carrol of Carroltown, were rebels—because tyranny had supplanted the law.

Arriving in Australia in 1856

Charles Gavan Duffy

We have a great objective—the light on the hill—which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand.

Geology stands to engineering in the same relation as faith to works.... The success or failure of an undertaking depends largely upon the physical conditions which fall within the province of geology, and the "works" of the engineer should be based on the "faith" of the geologist.

The reality is that if we in this rich, lucky quarter of the planet cannot make a stand for the 30 million other species we share this planet with, let alone our own species, then who can?

I know the Leader of the Opposition [Tony Abbott] has an unhealthy kind of obsession with the so-called "faceless men in the Labor Party"; What he really should be obsessed about is the useless men sitting behind him.

I won't be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated [for cervical cancer], maybe that's because I'm a cruel, callow, callous, heartless bastard but, look, I won't be