Quotes About Australians

Fair-goes are not only for oneself, but for underdogs. Even in international sporting matches Australians have been known to switch from their own side to that of a gallant challenger. Australians love a 'battler', an underdog who is fighting the top dog, although their veneration for him is likely to pass if he comes out from under.

The road ahead may be difficult for all Australians, but we need not be divided on partisan lines.

I see lots of differences between Australians and Americans - but as mothers, I think were pretty much alike!

Australians are very provincial in many ways. If they feel that you've used them as a stepping stone to bigger things, they resent it.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

If I had to take hell, I would use the Australians to take it and the New Zealanders to hold it.

When he breathed, he truly was Australia’s greatest white elder and friend without peer of the original Australians.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

I didn't grow up with money, but I grew up with a lot of space. All I did was surf. I was committed to the ocean. That's one thing about Australians; we have the capacity to embrace life.

We are all here now and we have to solve our differences and live together as Australians... I will use the title you have honoured me with to bring the Australian people together... Together we can build a remarkable country, the envy of the rest of the world.

I think the film and TV industry - the acting world - has a tendency to attract a lot of people for the wrong reasons; reasons that are less than artistic. It has a tendency to be pretty superficial, and pretty shallow and fake. I think what New Zealanders and Australians - and the English, I guess - have to offer is that we don't carry a lot of that baggage. We come over and we're pretty grounded. But on the flip side of that, you end up in a very unfamiliar environment being treated in a way that's a little bit surreal.

Australia was once a leader in taking global warming seriously. The former PM [Kevin Rudd] called it 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. But in the past couple of years the national consensus has been eroded and Australians are being encouraged by the polluters and their mates in Parliament to forget it was ever mentioned. It's heartbreaking.

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.

Well, Australians should speak for the national interests of Australia, and whatever role former Australian prime ministers may have, one of the things you do is speak frankly about the country as you see the country's best interests, you know?