politicians-from-australia

"Proud Queen of isles! Thou sittest vast, alone, A host of vassals bending round thy throne: Like some fair swan that skims the silver tide, Her silken cygnets strew'd on every side, So floatest thou, thy Polynesian brood Dispers'd around thee on thy Ocean flood, While ev'ry surge that doth thy bosom lave, Salutes thee "Empress of the Southern Wave.""

"And, oh Britannia! should'st thou cease to ride Despotic Empress of old Ocean's tide;— Should thy tam'd Lion—spent his former might— No longer roar, the terror of the fight:— Should e'er arrive that dark, disastrous hour, When, bow'd by luxury, thou yield'st to pow'r; When thou, no longer freest of the free, To some proud victor bend'st the vanquish'd knee;— May all thy glories in another sphere Relume, and shine more brightly still than here; May this—thy last-born —then arise, To glad thy heart, and greet thy eyes; And float, with flag unfurl'd, A new in another world!"

"Protecting our ocean is good for biodiversity, but also secures the future of sustainable fishing."

"We have a responsibility to the environment and our future to become better at recycling products we use every day."

"Trees are so important to our environment - they cool urban areas, provide shelter & food for native species & absorb loads of carbon."

"“I don’t think it matters whether you are on the side promoting your development or preserving conservation, all would agree that the process under EPBC is unnecessarily tied up with green tape and unnecessarily lengthy,”"

"A reminder that healthy oceans are critical to our environment, economy & wellbeing."

"“If I was the minister for women I would say that I am a feminist, and as the minister for the environment I would certainly say that I am the minister for the environment, so my role in discussions that I have with my colleagues is for the environment,”"

"Ah, Love, the earth is woe’s And sadly helpers needs: And, till its burden goes, Our work is—where it bleeds."

"When, comrades, we thrill to the message of speaker in highway or hall, The voice of the poet is reaching the silenter poet in all: And again, as of old, when the flames are to leap up the turrets of Wrong, Shall the torch of the New Revolution be lit from the words of a Song!"

"They teach and live the Golden Rule Of Young Democracy:—‘That culture, joy and goodliness Be th’ equal right of all: That Greed no more shall those oppress Who by the wayside fall:‘That each shall share what all men sow: That colour, caste’s a lie: That man is God, however low— Is man, however high.’"

"Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place, Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest? A new demesne for Mammon to infest? Or lurks millennial ’neath your face?"

"There is no age more dangerous than old age."

"‘Be true, be brave, be merciful, be free!’"

"Jules Renald has said, "It is not how old you are but how you are old." The way I was old today on my eightieth birthday is that I have just entered the infancy of middle age."

"And our reward? In this wan land, In clientage of Greed, Despised, polluted, maimed and banned, To wander and—to breed."

"This is a rune I ravelled in the still, Arrogant stare of an Australian cow."

"All that we love in olden lands and lore Was signal of her coming long ago! Bacon foresaw her, Campanella, More, And Plato’s eyes were with her star aglow!"

"Parkes said of himself and another member that they were alike in that they consistently lived above their means. He was as much an admirer of the fair sex, so that when once on a specially dashing woman appearing in the gallery of the New South Wales Assembly, and Parkes being asked who she was, replied in sardonic style: "Well I don't know myself. I've asked George Reid and Wise, and they don't know, from which I conclude that she must be a woman of good reputation.""

"Sir Henry Parkes, several times premier of New South Wales, became a father—not for the first time—in his eightieth year. Friends offered their felicitations. ‘Congratulations, Sir Henry, on the birth of your last child,’ said one of them. The old knight snorted. ‘Don’t say my last, you damned fool! Say my latest.’"

"Australia has a word for the s, a word that should be used the world over to describe a killjoy, and that word is ."

"When he falls just short of 'fine writing' his writing is fine."

"Politics in Australia, as in the rest of the world, are becoming duller and soberer, as the world itself becomes temperate in the use of strong waters. I don’t know the political calibre of the three-bottle men; but it is established, in any constructional thought or action, that, if the man who drinks does silly things sometimes, the teetotaller rarely does anything. Not that the drinking of liquor can make a man clever, but that the instinctive teetotaller lacks genius, although I have known one case of a teetotaller genius. Abraham Lincoln, replying to a puritan critic who said that General Grant drank whisky, wished that he had more whisky-drinking generals if whisky made General Grant do the things he did."

"He had the biggest feet I have ever seen; larger feet even than the feet of that Brisbane man, of whom it was said that two large alligator skins had been sent from Cairns to make a pair of boots for him."

"The different men we are in conceit and in humility! Vanity is all the vitamins and all the calories; vanity can keep a man warm in winter without blankets."

"At the age of five I had begun an association with Temperance Societies; which ended at the age of sixteen—when I discovered the goodness of beer."

"'I'll never smoke tobacco, It is a filthy weed— I'll never put it in my mouth,' Said little Bobby Reed.'For there is idle Jerry Jones, As lazy as a pig, Who smoked a clay pipe all day long, And thought it made him big.'"

"Say what they like about Sir Thomas Bent, but he was a man. He mightn’t have much honesty, if there was big money to be got, and he liked his gin and tonic strong an fraquint, an’ a rovin’ eye for wimmen, but outside them matters he was as pure as the drivellin’ snow."

"He just missed a seat in the Senate; and was sorry because he said he wanted to do a bit for Australia that had done so much for him. And he excused defeat by, ‘I’m that unlucky that if it rained soup, everybody else would have a spoon and I'd be left with a fork.’"

"There was a bushman serving at Pentridge a sentence for horse stealing. He was a very honest man. He would not think of stealing a penny, but a horse was a different matter."

"Big Money is always on the Lord's side."

"The womenfolk of early immigrants to Queensland brought cactus in a pot, because it had a ‘pretty flower’, and the ‘prickly pear’ escaped from the pot and destroyed twenty million acres of the finest land in the State; until the cactoblastis was introduced, and destroyed the pear. An old lady—craving her old-world home—brought sweet briar to South Australia; and it accounted for a few million acres in its turn. A fool pastoralist, whose most coherent phrase was ‘Tally-ho!’ or ‘Yoicks!’ introduced the fox, which has almost wiped out the lyre bird; and another fool introduced the starling. Other pests introduced were Freetraders, sectarianism, water hyacinth and rabbits."

"As salt as Lot's wife."

"To-day, a Minister receiving a deputation personally promises ‘consideration of Cabinet’, in a tone that makes the deputation believe it has succeeded. To the wise the old rule persists. If a Government says ‘Yes’, it means ‘Perhaps’; and if it says ‘Perhaps’, it means ‘No’."

"‘I am as happy,’ said he, ‘as a kingk, enchoying himsellef in his harem mit his queens.’"

"Bedford could be one of the rudest of men when he chose to exercise his wit at the expense of others. He happened to be a guest at a party given by a lady of some social pretensions. There arrived to it a husband and wife—the wife, big dominant, and masculine, the husband, small, meek, and submissive. Of them, the hostess said to Bedford, ‘Mr Bedford, I want to introduce you to my friends, Mr and Mrs So-and-so.’ Said Bedford, bowing to the couple, ‘Pleased to meet you. Which is which?’"

"For we have here a beautiful land that none could e’er knock down, The brightest jewel that ever was known in dear old George's crown; The brightest jewel that ever was known and never can be a failure. Although the damn Labor party is doing its best to ruin Australia..."

"Half way to Burwood there was a butcher’s shop, run by a Mrs Macnamara. She was a tall woman of great strength, working fiercely and living hard; a living testimonial to the forceful Colonial diet of beef and corn. She handled meataxe and saw as if they were toys. To see her chopping fore and hind quarters of beef fascinated me. I once heard her tell, without boastfulness, but in honest pride, that she was ‘doing six bodies a week’; which is a great tract and wilderness of meat."

"It is not without design that the monkey with the rainbow stern climbs high. It is the advertisement of his sex appeal, and he doesn't climb far unless there is an audience."

"‘Ah!’ said Wardley, ‘the times are different from my young days. We were independent then; a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay; that’s all we asked. Here are young fellows today without any sense of independence. My two sons have taken the Old Age Pension.’ ‘How old are they, Bill?’ ‘One’s seventy-four and the other seventy-two! No pride.’"

"It is a quaint fact that the mediocre critic demands, in the one breath, a Parliament representative of all the people, and a Parliament of all the virtues and intelligences. A Parliament of genius would not represent the people, who are emphatically not genius, and Parliaments as they are, with one or two men above the average intelligence, and many men of average intelligence, and more men little better than morons, represents the nation—any nation."

"His moments of most sentimental recollection were when he thought of the beauty of the sausages he had manufactured."

"The Governor was a little pink old gentleman; so soft in the skin that he seemed to be stuffed with moss."

"The Bible was second nature; and I had great interest in its gallery of bad men, beloved of the Lord. At least they said they were. Abraham, who represented his wife as his sister, so as to curry favour with Abimelech; Abel the lazy shepherd, who annoyed Cain so that that energetic farmer had to kill him; Noah, who ‘digged a vineyard’ and told tall stories of navigation; Jacob, who refused his brother a meal until Esau signed away his rights; and David, that pious scoundrel, who sent Uriah to death, so that he might steal Bathsheba respectably."

"Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all."

"Pretty as a picture and poor as a crow."

"I read the other day that Hindenberg, waiting to see whether Hitler would secure leadership or not, said, ‘We will see how the cat will jump, with God’s help.’ I presume he meant that God would help him to vision, and not the cat to acrobatics; but one can see how the name of God becomes formula—to be used in every emergency, if only to give the emergency respectability. Hindenberg used the formula in everything. Eighteen months before the war ended, he and Ludendorf knew that they must fail; yet to save face they kept on losing two hundred thousand men a month, and ‘trusting in God.’"

"It is so much easier to do the job if you're on the ground in Rome. The Vatican is not entirely a closed shop, but you have to know where to look, which conferences to attend, which contacts to pursue."

"For non-believers and believers, I think that a fair amount of people will see it as a great salute to an extraordinary Australian who pioneered education for indigenous people, education more broadly, who did so much to help so many other people."

"It seems to me from what I have learned that here in these gentle surroundings have been discovered the true functions of a university and its task of sending out into the world not only men of high educational and cultural standards, but men also of vision, of courage, of honesty and decision."