“What I believe to be every Australian’s right – a good, safe job with proper pay and conditions.”

When I entered federal parliament at the end of 2007, I was appointed parliamentary secretary for disabilities.

Productivity is driven at the enterprise level. Better wages, better performing workplaces, are driven at the workplace level.

There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death.

Labor is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action – ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.

Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labors monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.

The whole time I was a union leader, we had to put up with John Howard and Tony Abbott attacking workers’ conditions.

To the best of my knowledge, when I became national secretary and, indeed, Victorian secretary, the – my predecessors in the union had detected wrong activities, activities which aren’t in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism.

Trusting people to pursue their own futures invariably provides better outcomes. Money goes where it is needed, rather than being absorbed by administration costs.

My preference is that employees pay their union dues, but what I also get is that I’d rather someone be in the union than not in the union.

I’ve spent my whole working life standing up for workers. Didn’t matter if it was the two trapped miners at Beaconsfield or professional netballers or indeed factory workers or construction workers.

Get a Job’ is about all the rich kids we knew when we were younger, kids who never had jobs but always had money for partying or getting their hair done.

In order to bring down the incarceration rate, you’ve got to start with the beginning of life. You’ve got to make sure that parents and schools are prepared to prepare young people for success. You’ve got to deal with the next stage of life.

Basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I’ve allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.

I’ve been in scenarios as an actor where you have to manufacture an emotion that’s not really there, but it wasn’t hard with Halle because she’s a great person and very beautiful, so it ain’t a tough job at the end of the day.

I write what I want to write. Period. I don’t write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don’t write suspense novels or thrillers.

I’M SYMPATHETIC, because I wasn’t there so I don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe Darren Wilson acted within his rights and duty as an officer of the law and killed Michael Brown in self defense like any of us would in the circumstance.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan’s ‘The Browning Version,’ where my job was to make school-masters’ wives weep with recognition.

My job is to make myself available to play to the best of my ability. Mentally, I’ve got to stay ready to play every day.