There was some suggestion that there was a rapprochement developing between China and the Soviets, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
BOB HAWKEThere was some suggestion that there was a rapprochement developing between China and the Soviets, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
BOB HAWKEI respected [Margaret Thatcher] enormously. She had great integrity in that respect.
BOB HAWKEIt was very much an Australian/New Zealand initiative to have a nuclear free South Pacific. And the Americans were very apprehensive about this.
BOB HAWKENor 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 HAWKEAnd that’s what brought the regime down. The last South African Finance Minister, Barend du Plessis, went on record as saying that it was the investment sanctions that put the final nail in the coffin of apartheid.
BOB HAWKEHe 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.
BOB HAWKEThere is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn’t have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.
BOB HAWKEHe 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.
BOB HAWKEAs far as we’re concerned, there was no sporting organisation [that] should have anything to do with the sport in South Africa.
BOB HAWKEOne 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.
BOB HAWKEGeorge Bush Junior [George W Bush] was a religious fanatic, and Tony Blair wasn’t far behind in a way.
BOB HAWKEBill Heseltine had been at university with me, at the University of Western Australia. I knew him well.
BOB HAWKEWhile society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed.
BOB HAWKEI rang my friend Jim Wolfensohn, who was then running a private commercial bank in New York. I said, “Come up to Vancouver”, and he did. I put my proposition to him. He said, “I think it could work.”
BOB HAWKEBrian Mulroney, myself, [and] Rajiv Gandhi; I think that was the real core [of the Commonwealth ]. That was the engine room, I reckon.
BOB HAWKEIt [also] lives on its history, now, to some extent: its achievements [ of the Commonwealth] in Rhodesia and South Africa, which were enormous. And they’ll live on that for some time,
BOB HAWKE