[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. I think he formed friendships with them, which established his judgement about the question of colour. That’s my theory. I don’t know whether it’s right or not, but that’s what I always respected about Malcolm. He was absolutely, totally impeccable on the question of race and colour.

I really had very little to do with Pierre Trudeau. He was off the scene very soon.

Don't talk to me about what's happened since [Nelson] Mandela! His successor was absolutely hopeless - "no such thing as AIDS" - and this present President... It's a tragedy, you know, what's happened there post-Mandela, because he was an iconic figure.

The concept there was that the small number of developed countries within the Commonwealth should provide assistance. This was not just financial but personal, providing experts and so on, to assist less developed members of the Commonwealth to get on the growing path. And that was part of what we did with South Africa.

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.

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." I said, "Will you help us?" He said, "Yes." So, I set aside senior people in our treasury and they worked with Wolfensohn and the investment sanctions were applied. And 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.

All the arguments there are against Malcolm [Turnbull] - and there are many - the one thing in which he is impeccable and why I would support him in this is that he has an absolutely impeccable record on the question of colour and race. People often wondered why. What I see as a possible explanation is [that] he came from a very wealthy family - a 'squattocracy' - and he had private education at home and then he went to boarding school at Melbourne Grammar School, one of those lead schools in Australia.