You’ve got to remember the Cold War was a very real thing then, so the relationship with the United States was very, very important.
BOB HAWKEBy 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty.
More Bob Hawke Quotes
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It was very much an Australian/New Zealand initiative to have a nuclear free South Pacific. And the Americans were very apprehensive about this.
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We were great mates [with Rajiv Gandhi]: very, very, very close friends. In fact, on my visit to India as Prime Minister, we were going to his home for dinner.
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I think there are a number of reasons, not least of which is the personality of the Queen [ Elizabeth II]. It’s very easy to underrate her significance.
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[Malcolm Fraser] went straight from Melbourne Grammar to Oxford. And he would have been a very lonely person, and I think he probably met a lot of black students there who were also probably lonely.
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I find a fence a very uncomfortable place to squat my bottom.
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An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.
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It had things that it could do and which I thought were worthwhile: one would be South Africa, of course. And, as I said, I assumed a leadership role within the Commonwealth on that.
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I said to my people, “We’re knocking apartheid off but we’ve got to be prepared to assist them.” And I sent senior people over there to assist the incoming South African regime to go about the economic plan.
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One other thing: at the meeting in Canada, [there was] the coup in Fiji. This comes to an important part of the Commonwealth: the role of the Queen [Elizabeth II]. I had absolutely just enormous respect for her as leader of the Commonwealth.
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He said if you believe in the fatherhood of God you must necessarily believe in the brotherhood of man, it follows necessarily and even though I left the church and was not religious, that truth remained with me.
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I got to know him well as Vice President to Ronald Reagan. And George rang me up and said, “Oh, Bob,” he said, “I’m having trouble with Brian [Mulroney].” He said, “He’s got a big wheat trade with Iraq, and he doesn’t want to upset that.” I said, “You leave it with me.”
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He said it was very uncomfortable and he often took it off, but of course, in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been wearing three vests – he would have been gone.
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[John Howard] led the Government. They had the numbers, and just basically automatically went along with the Americans.
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Peoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable.
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Nor will they perceive the distribution of wealth and resources between nations to be unalterably ordained by heaven and incapable of drastic rearrangement by the less than gentle manipulation of man.
BOB HAWKE