Kim Beazley Quotations

The problem with this government is it never bothers to go round the region and explain what its doing.

The prime minister, the foreign minister and the trade minister were the three wise monkeys: they saw no evil, they spoke no evil, they heard no evil but they knew all about it. It's a sorry story of a government in a mode of reckless negligence.

The prime minister is not telling the truth about this because this has got nothing to do with anything good for the Australian economy,

I am growing more and more concerned about the potential for foreign ships to operate in Australia's coastal waters without adequate vetting,

Barnaby always brings two jumpers to the game. He doesn't know which team to support.

It increases the pressure for Howard to appear.

I was defence minister for a few years,

Our reform legacy by then had not produced a substantial rise in wages and job opportunities. People saw the hard side of reform but not the gains. Many ... traditional Labor supporters carried the brunt of the change and sheeted home the blame to him.

I think he's quite wrong. I think we will win the next election if we're fit for government and we've got the right policies,

We'll have a decent debate in the Labor Party on the mines policy.

What we have to be careful about - and I think the premiers do really try very hard to be careful about this - is that we don't as we go down the process of protecting our society from terrorists, loose essential values in our society,

We actually have good resources there, of people with consular skills and logistic skills,

We oppose this legislation in its entirety and we have done consistently since the government first brought this forward.

We have got to have a better legislation against that legislation and that's what we'll be putting forward,

We have seen repeated sightings of people wandering around the airport(s) unauthorized, people that have not gone through the proper security check and the fact that at regional airports there are no security checks at all, ... The government should have acted much earlier.

This will bring the Howard government down unless they back off. But they probably won't and (these reforms) will take them out.

The good thing about how the party responded is there's a very considerable sense of unity and purpose about it and determination not to keep being involved in navel gazing, we've done enough of that.

What any country now knows is that they've got a prime minister they can sit on, and that he will, if they've got some part of Australian law that they object to, there's a very good chance that when they sit on the prime minister, they will get a result.

We don't want to see the Kangaroo taken out of Qantas,

I've seen John Howard's government do some pretty low things over the years, but hiding behind the Melbourne Cup to introduce these shoot-to-kill laws into parliament and pass them through, well that's the lowest of the low.

These cables place John Howard at the very heart of our very worst national scandal. We believe that they are culpably negligent and we accuse them of turning a blind eye and these cables prove conclusively that that is exactly what they did.

A deliberate blind eye has been turned here and culpable neglect is what the prime minister here is guilty of. He cannot wash his hands like Pontius Pilate and say it was somebody else's responsibility.

a sad moment for the Australian people, who are overwhelmingly opposed to the sale.

As I recollect those times and they were a long time ago my office and myself were consistently in touch with people, including members of the Caucus, who were helping him. It was a tragedy but we must reflect on the fact that there is a wife and children left from this and respect their privacy and therefore, beyond what I have just said, I don't intend to continue comment.

This is an appropriate commitment and a significant one.

They have in their various parliaments, the power to pass laws related to this,

It's a decision of theirs that they took on their own and I express my gratitude to them. They're lovely girls.

Then there's what John Howard didn't tell them. That he was planning an all-out attack on their wages, penalty rates and job security.

I'm prepared to consider what the states put forward in a favorable way.

I'm sorry she feels that way, I really am,

If you actually had a coast guard, you would have effective enforcement in our northern waters. Good fences make good neighbors. As far as maritime issues are concerned, a good fence is a coast guard.

If there were gold medals for biting the hand that feeds you, Mark Latham would be standing on top of the dais.

I am particularly concerned about the risk posed by carriage of very dangerous substances, especially ammonium nitrate. It's becoming clearer that Australian authorities have no way of checking the bona fides of these foreign crews.

The unfortunate thing is that it brings this in to play at a time when there is regional disagreement with our endorsing of national missiles defenses.

This is not about choice -- it's about cutting wages.

The folk who come here through this process should go back to Indonesia, and we will negotiate as much by which that will happen, and only we can do it,

And it has to be dealt with - albeit within the framework of what sustains Australian values while we do it,