Quotes About Australians

That was an extremely unhelpful thing for Bill Shorten to say because those of us - and as the Attorney-General I've been closely involved in this along with my colleague Nigel Scullion, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs - what we have been trying to do for some years now, throughout the life of the Coalition Government in fact, is to bring the Australian people on a journey with us - conservative Australians as well as more progressive Australians, to persuade them that it is a seemly and fitting and decent and appropriate thing to recognise the first Australians in the Constitution.

Only in sport? The qualification would seem meaningless to many Australians. What also is there that matters as much as sport? It is only in sport that many Australians express those approaches to life that are un-Australian if expressed in any other connection.

Most Australians who've got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies.

I don't have anything against Canadians or Australians.

If politicians continue to promote separatism in Australia, they should not continue to hold their seats in this parliament. They are not truly representing all Australians, and I call on the people to throw them out.

I think probably Australians have just a little more taste than most people.

If you just compare South Africans to the rest of the world, I think that white South Africans, and especially English-speaking white South Africans, are exactly the same as Brits or Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans.

Though your major media kept smacking me upside the head with the word "multicultural," you goddamned Australians are the most racist bunch of people I've ever seen in my life.

It's an interesting thing in this country. I haven't won a gold medal, yet Australians still take me into their houses and hearts, they know my name and they care. I think Aussies like the little Aussie battler and the person who will stand up for their rights and I've never been short of a word, especially with officialdom.

The differences between Indigenous and not Indigenous Australians can be easily attributed not to differences in their genes but to differences in the conditions in which they're born, grow, live, work and age - in other words, to the social determinants of health.

Australians can trust me to get the job done. They can have the confidence that in the heart of the circumstances I will win through in their interests no matter how relentlessly negative the leader of the opposition is.

These are challenging and exciting times. No previous generation of Australians has ever had such an opportunity. No other country in the world has such an opportunity now. So long as we retain faith in ourselves, practise tolerance and reward initiative, we should be in no doubt about succeeding.

If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world's population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and die of terror.

I think that Americans find the Australian humour and the energy of Australians very refreshing - we are quite self-deprecating, we're light-hearted and can have a laugh.

Cricket has so many meanings to so many Australians. It’s become precisely that - an Australian way of life. And what a life it is. Some would even go as far as to say, ‘marvellous’.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.