We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.

And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

[Part of Prime Minister Paul Keating's speech at Redfern, December 1992]

I'd said to someone last week, [Costello] will be out next week with Mr Kroger in investment banking, and I wasn't wrong, wasn't wrong. He never had the bottle to take Howard on. You see, Howard did lead this sycophantic Liberal Party, which was not much of a team. They just stuck with him and like lemmings they went over the cliff with him.

I don't know who should lead the Liberals, but I mean, I know who I wouldn't be going for. If they take Tony Abbott they're just going to go back down hill to wherever they've been. He's the one most like Howard ideologically - he's what I call a young fogey. Howard was the old fogey. He's the young fogey.

Brendan Nelson - well I liked him more when he had the ring in his ear, actually. [Malcolm Turbull] is like the big red bunger. You're lighting up, there's a bit of a fizz, but then nothing, nothing. I don't know [Julie Bishop] but if I was voting this very second I'd probably give it to her because I like women. I always reckon they're battling in public life... I always barrack for them.

When I look at the Hawke-Keating governments, they took some pretty tough decisions for the long-term good of the economy. Ultimately, they paid a political price for it. But what I liked about the way in which they approached government was that they were a government of policy reform. And if you are honest about it, and looking at the productivity growth yield which came out of that, and the other great changes which came through the internationalisation of the economy, this actually forms so much of a platform for Australia's long-term economic growth.

And of course, the challenge for us in the future is to sustain the rolling reform of this economy and there is still an agenda of micro-economic reform to continue. So you ask, what do I learn from the past? Government is not just about sitting on your digs and hoping that, you know, something else rolls in your window... Like a mining boom. It's about learning from that legacy, it is about understanding that you have got to engineer the economy for the future which means a rolling program of micro-economic reform.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating sinks his bitter fangs into Treasurer Peter Costello. Costello and Rudd just can't match it with the master.

I wanted to redress the wilful, despicable reduction of trade unionists and trade unionism by the Government in the eyes of the Australian people. I can think of no more noble thing to do than to serve working people and the essence of trade unionism is about the service of working people - men and women who have got no capital particularly, nothing really to sell but their time. The principles of representing those people… this is the stuff of everyday life, which of course all the sharp guys don’t want to be in, they’ve all gone off to the merchant banks and investment banks…

In some respects this is what this election is becoming all about, what the Government is trying to make it about, running as if trade unionists were some sort of economic wreckers. Well, some wreckers - the inflation rate's been 2.5% for 16 straight years… We’ve never seen industrial peace like we have since the days of consensus agreements between the ACTU and the then Labor Governments – those Accords set the new order, and the new order has gone on ever since…

The unions in fact were the progenitors of low inflation, they are the inventors of the 2-3% [range] over the cycle. Not the Reserve Bank... It was adopted by the Government and the unions, and then co-adopted by the Reserve Bank... so the authors of low inflation in Australia were the organised trade unions.