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.
BOB HAWKEThe personality of the Queen [ Elizabeth II]… For instance, once she goes – if she’s ever going to die, it seems to be questionable – if Charles [of Wales] were there, whether there’d be the same sort of cement is very questionable, I think.
More Bob Hawke Quotes
-
-
I 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 HAWKE -
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.
BOB HAWKE -
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.
BOB HAWKE -
You 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 -
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 HAWKE -
There 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 HAWKE -
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.”
BOB HAWKE -
I think she finds the Commonwealth and her position as Head of the Commonwealth infinitely more interesting than being the Queen of England, because she has no significant role in the latter.
BOB HAWKE -
I respected [Margaret Thatcher] enormously. She had great integrity in that respect.
BOB HAWKE -
Bill Heseltine had been at university with me, at the University of Western Australia. I knew him well.
BOB HAWKE -
As far as we’re concerned, there was no sporting organisation [that] should have anything to do with the sport in South Africa.
BOB HAWKE -
Peoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable.
BOB HAWKE -
Institutions do live on their history.
BOB HAWKE -
By 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty.
BOB HAWKE -
It was very much an Australian/New Zealand initiative to have a nuclear free South Pacific. And the Americans were very apprehensive about this.
BOB HAWKE