During his parliamentary career, Keating's capacity for vitriol, grudge-bearing and personal abuse was remarkable, even by the heightened standards of politics. His verbal assaults in question time have become legendary. His use of language was inventive and invective-laden. He could charm, but he could also destroy.
Journalists consider it a badge of honour to have received a profanity-laden phone call from him. On occasion, he has committed his thoughts to email or fax, but oratory is his true gift, be it public or private.
After verbally abusing one former Herald journalist over a particular state politics story he disagreed with, Keating told him the conversation, such as it was, had been off the record. ''Now don't tell anyone you got a spray from Keating,'' he said. Then he softened. ''OK, you can tell your mates.''
“You’ve got to know what Donald Trump’s policy is,” Keating said.
“He sees the the general international responsibility the US has taken on since 1947 as being too large a burden on the US. It’s too unfair an impost, relieving obligation on countries like Japan, Germany, and ourselves and he is therefore saying: ‘It’s our turn, it’s the US’s turn to worry about itself.
“That is a pretty appealing message for Americans – to start worrying about themselves. That the US should be thinking about itself on its own terms is a popular notion. How silly would we be not to pick up the message? That the US is refocusing on themselves, not alliances.”
The last Australian Statesman worthy of that title.
just as a matter of Mathematical accuracy:
Paul Keating was born on Januar 18th, 1944, which makes him 73.
sorry for being pedantic - no, not really sorry
apparently the Labor experiment has expired
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-polit...ter-sally-mcmanus-speech-20170329-gv9cto.html
“But just as we changed the policy then, we should be changing the policy now. The point is that policy is not changing any more. It has stopped. The reformation, which I induced in the 1980s and 90s has stopped. The policy ideas have stopped.
“We are now in a world where there is no capital intensity of the kind after the war. A lot of the services we provide now don’t require a lot of capital or employment. General Motors at its peak had 900,000 employees; Facebook has 56,000. And Facebook has a bigger market capitalisation than General Motors. The deregulation allowed fungibility — the free movement of money to the right places in the economy — and that underwrote our competitiveness with the help of the exchange rate as our international income changed. But with the inability of monetary policy to stimulate new private investment, one has to ask: what should we do now?
“The first thing we do is not return to the sclerotic economy we had before 1983. We don’t return to the industrial museum. We don’t return to protectionism. We don’t return to centralised wage-fixing. We don’t return to a regulated exchange rate. We don’t return to regulated interest rates. We bank those nation-changing measures, but we then think: what should be the policy settings for the new order?”
Keating once silenced the House with bewilderment when he told Tuckey he had "a head like a swallow's nest". After pausing theatrically, Keating delivered the punchline: "All **** and sticks!"
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