Paul Keating Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

[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?

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
I'm a bastard. But I'm a bastard who gets the mail through. And they appreciate that.

Paul Keating
Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable... unimaginable... unspeakable.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
The excesses of the 80s must not reappear in the 90s, The last thing we need now is a return to the 80s philosophy of 'greed is good' and that the only useful interest is self-interest.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
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.

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

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won't get out of bed in the morning unless they've had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
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.

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

Paul Keating
While frenetic activity, in the end suiting journos; running at the behest of little press secretaries does not pay off

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
This little flower, this delicate little beauty, this cream puff, is supposed to be beyond personal criticism…He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.
Of John Hewson

Paul Keating
It really surprises me that some people in this party think we owe Westpac something. Or the ANZ Bank. Or the National.

Paul Keating
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.

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

Paul Keating
Leadership is not about being nice. It's about being right and being strong.

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating
I used to refer to him as Thallium, a slow acting dope

Paul Keating
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.

Paul Keating