Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures and overblown promises rather than the practical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in areas like health, housing, education and employment.

You always felt not happy about things, but you just couldn't put your finger on what was going.

If I told my parents that I was going to do that [ to be really counsel to a Prime Minister] when I was kid, they would probably put me in therapy.

I'm a great reader of history. I love - I have been reading history since I was a kid, and learning the lessons globally of what happened with people.

People - whether you like to hear what people have got to say, not you have got to listen to them, and turning your back on people I found very insulting. If you're going to really make peace, you have got to confront each other and look each other in the eye, and that's what's happen - I'm always remember Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat and the reluctance in - Yasser Arafat put his hand down and the reluctance of Yitzhak Rabin, but then he had that second and then he just shook the hand.

The Labor roots are very strong.Paul Keating, made a comment several years ago about looking at that dragging yourself out of poverty, dragging yourself out of that situation.

We were very - we were a working family, and my father had this very simple philosophy, simple working class approach. If you spoke to my father and said, "Mr Smith across the road, what do you think of Mr Smith?", he'd only - he'd only say a couple of words. He'd say, "He's a worker", and that meant this bloke got up in the morning, went out, worked, brought his money home, fed his wife and kids, housed them, got them to school, educated them, made sure they were safe and all that. It had so much connotations to it.