If this Government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again, and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for. We will end up being a third rate economy... a banana republic.

The United States being in Asia is unambiguously a good thing for the region.

Leadership is not about being nice. it's about being right and being strong

In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.

No choice we can make as a nation lies between our history and our geography. We can hardly change either of them. They are immutable. The only choice we can make as a nation is the choice about our future.

We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine that these things could be done to us.

Nobody wants to have in their CV in the upper echelons of the American economic family that they nationalised major banks.