The world will not wait for us.
BOB HAWKEThe world will not wait for us.
BOB HAWKEI believe [ Rajiv Gandhi] had a real sense that he would be assassinated.
BOB HAWKEI 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.
BOB HAWKEYou’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 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 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 HAWKEBill Heseltine had been at university with me, at the University of Western Australia. I knew him well.
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 HAWKEPeoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable.
BOB HAWKEThe first meeting in 1983 was held in India and I was very off put by her. I just couldn’t abide her, basically.
BOB HAWKEI hated [Robert Mugabe]. He’s one of the worst human beings I’ve ever met. He treated black and white with equal contempt. He was a horrible human being.
BOB HAWKEIt was a remarkable relationship. Margaret [Thatcher] and I had a love/hate relationship. She was always defending the South African regime and we had some terrible fights, including an enormous one in Canada.
BOB HAWKEWe [ with Brian Mulroney and Rajiv Gandhi] went to the meeting in Canada [the 1987 Vancouver CHOGM] and I said to them there that sanctions weren’t working; they were just being busted.
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 HAWKEI had a good personal relationship with Lee Kuan Yew and I used him, in the sense, that he… He made a statement in 1980, and he said in that statement that,
BOB HAWKEI respected [Margaret Thatcher] enormously. She had great integrity in that respect.
BOB HAWKE