While 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 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 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 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 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 HAWKEPeoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable.
BOB HAWKEInstitutions do live on their history.
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 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 HAWKEBill Heseltine had been at university with me, at the University of Western Australia. I knew him well.
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 HAWKEThe world will not wait for us.
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 HAWKEAnd, of course, he was, because nothing more advanced his cause – the cause of terrorism – than the invasion of Iraq. It was an absurdity.
BOB HAWKEWe had a very good relationship. Very good. I liked [Sonny Ramphal]. I thought he was a genuine man.
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 HAWKEYou could talk to her about any of the fifty-one countries of the Commonwealth and you could have an intelligent conversation with her about the economics, the politics. She really immersed herself in the Commonwealth.
BOB HAWKE