35 Quotes by David Marr

Abbott was all over the shop on emissions trading. He feared destruction at the ballot box if the Opposition blocked Rudd. “The government’s emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public’s fears,” he had said in late July 2009.

Heydon’s account of how he got himself into this pickle was so like Shorten’s evidence: he hadn’t read the documents; matters were left to his staff; he wasn’t across the detail; one or two crucial facts had slipped his mind; and no matter how bad things might appear, his integrity remained absolute.

He stumbled and told the truth one night: workers had lost protections under WorkChoices.

Even those on the executive supporting his right to take office thought his behaviour “senseless, futile and provocative.

The press has given up saying so but these two men are denouncing what they once supported: a price on carbon and an emissions trading scheme.

The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn’t really deserve.

Where Abbott was most himself, Shorten beat a retreat. “For Labor, national security is – and always will be – above politics,” he says but what he means is that Labor will buckle whenever the government declares security is at stake.

He knows the cruel truth that the baiter is never blamed when victims lose their cool.

He hasn’t reneged on Catholicism entirely. Pope Francis he thinks impressive: “A remarkable guy. A breath of fresh air.” Catholic social teaching is still in his head, along with the “golden rule” every boy was taught at Xavier: “It was at the heart of the Jesuit call to be a ‘man for others.’ And I have spent my working life, both representing workers and as parliamentarian, trying to measure up to this standard of compassion and empathy.