Ban KI-moon: 'I also stand before you with deep concern', farewell address as UN Secretary-General - 2016

20 September 2016, United Nations, New York City, USA

I stand before you with gratitude for your support across the decade I have had the privilege to serve this great organization, the United Nations.

In taking the oath of office in December 2006, I pledged to work with you for “we the peoples”.

With the Charter as our guide, and the dedication of the staff, we have achieved much together.

I also stand before you with deep concern.

Gulfs of mistrust divide citizens from their leaders.  Extremists push people into camps of “us” and “them”.  The Earth assails us with rising seas, record heat and extreme storms.  And danger defines the days of many.

One hundred and thirty million people need life-saving assistance.  Tens of millions of them are children and young people — our next generation already at risk.

Yet after ten years in office, I am more convinced than ever that we have the power to end war, poverty and persecution.  We have the means to prevent conflict.  We have the potential to close the gap between rich and poor, and to make rights real in people’s lives.

With the Sustainable Development Goals, we have a manifesto for a better future.

With the Paris Agreement on climate change, we are tackling the defining challenge of our time.

We have no time to lose.  I urge you, leaders, to bring the Paris Agreement into force before the end of this year.  We need just 26 countries more, representing just 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

I ask you to help lead us to a world of low-carbon growth, increased resilience and greater opportunity and well-being for our children.

These great gains are threatened by grave security threats.

Armed conflicts have grown more protracted and complex.  Governance failures have pushed societies past the brink.  Radicalization has threatened social cohesion – precisely the response that violent extremists seek and welcome.

The tragic consequences are on brutal display from Yemen to Libya and Iraq, from Afghanistan to the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin.

In today’s world, the conflict in Syria is taking the greatest number of lives and sowing the widest instability.  There is no military solution.  Many groups have killed many innocents –but none more so than the Government of Syria, which continues to barrel bomb neighbourhoods and systematically torture thousands of detainees.  Powerful patrons that keep feeding the war machine also have blood on their hands.  Present in this Hall today are representatives of governments that have ignored, facilitated, funded, participated in or even planned and carried out atrocities inflicted by all sides of the Syria conflict against Syrian civilians.

Just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower. Yesterday’s sickening, savage, and apparently deliberate attack on a UN-Syrian Arab Red Crescent aid convoy is the latest example.

The United Nations has been forced to suspend aid convoys as a result of this outrage.

The humanitarians delivering life-saving aid were heroes. Those who bombed them were cowards.

Accountability for crimes such as these is essential.

I appeal to all those with influence to end the fighting and get talks started. A political transition is long overdue.  After so much violence and misrule, the future of Syria should not rest on the fate of a single man.

One year ago, Palestine proudly raised its flag at UN Headquarters.  Yet the prospects for a two-state solution are being lowered by the day.  All the while, the occupation grinds into its 50th year.

As a friend of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, it pains me that this past decade has been ten years lost to peace.  Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion.  Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness.

This is madness.  Replacing a two-state solution with a one-state construct would spell doom: denying Palestinians their freedom and rightful future, and pushing Israel further from its vision of a Jewish democracy towards greater global isolation.

On the Korean Peninsula, the fifth nuclear test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has again threatened regional and international security.  Meanwhile, the people’s suffering and plight are worsening. I urge the leaders of the DPRK to change course and fulfil their obligations – to their own people and to the family of nations.

In Ukraine, the violence has caused an internal upheaval, renewed tensions across Europe and rekindled geopolitical rivalries.

In South Sudan, leaders have also betrayed their people.

Indeed, in too many places, we see leaders rewriting constitutions, manipulating elections and taking other desperate steps to cling to power.

Leaders must understand that holding office is a trust, granted by the people, not personal property.

My message to all is clear: serve your people.  Do not subvert democracy; do not pilfer your country’s resources; do not imprison and torture your critics.

Yesterday we made great progress in helping people find a haven from conflict and tyranny.

The New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants points the way toward saving lives and protecting the rights of millions of people.  We all must meet those promises.

All too often, refugees and migrants face hatred.  Muslims in particular are being targeted by stereotyping and suspicion that have haunting echoes of the dark past.  I say to political leaders and candidates:  do not engage in the cynical and dangerous political math that says you add votes by dividing people and multiplying fear.  The world must stand up against lies and distortions of truth, and reject all forms of discrimination.

We must also address the factors that compel people to move.  That means investing in conflict prevention and engaging in patient diplomacy.  And as the demand for peacekeeping rises, we must continue strengthening peace operations to help countries secure and sustain peace.  I am encouraged that the General Assembly has endorsed the Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, which can help us tackle the drivers of conflict.

In Myanmar, the transition has entered a promising new phase. In Sri Lanka, post-war healing efforts have deepened.  In both countries, true reconciliation rests on ensuring that all communities, minorities and majorities alike, are included in building a new union.

Next Monday, I will travel to Colombia for the signing of a peace agreement to end one of the world’s longest-running armed conflicts.  The United Nations will support the Colombian people every step of the way.

There is also encouraging movements towards an agreement on Cyprus.

Let us all support the progress and solutions that may now be at hand.

Allow me to briefly touch on a few other areas that I hope will long remain priorities of the United Nations.

I am proud that UN Women came to life during my tenure.  It is now our established champion of gender equality and empowerment, aiming for a “50-50 planet”.  I have appointed more women to senior positions at the United Nations than ever before — and I am proud to call myself a feminist.

Women hold up half the sky and are essential to meeting all our goals.

I have been saying that the least utilized resource in our world is the potential for women.

So we must do far more to end deep-seated discrimination and chronic violence against women, to advance their participation in decision-making, and to ensure that every girl gets the start in life she deserves.

I have been a proud defender of the rights of all people, regardless of ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

Our human rights machinery – along with the Human Rights up Front initiative — is placing human rights at the centre.  Human rights are the pillars of society — and the antidotes to violent extremism and civic despair.

We have deepened support for the Responsibility to Protect.  We have made inroads against the death penalty.  Landmark convictions by the International Criminal Court and other bodies have advanced accountability — but we still must do far more to prevent genocide and other atrocity crimes.

Civil society is essential for all of these efforts.

I ask all of you to join me today in saying “yes” to greater space for civil society and independent media, and “no” to cracking down on the freedoms of assembly and expression.

Continued progress will require new heights of solidarity.

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.  Member States have still not agreed on a formula for reform of the Security Council — a continuing risk to its effectiveness and legitimacy.

In the same spirit, I want to put on the table today a major and much needed reform for fairnessand effectiveness in the United Nations.

Far too often, I have seen widely-supported proposals blocked, in the name of consensus, by a few or sometimes even just one country.

We see this being done by large and small countries alike.

Time and again, I have seen essential action and good ideas blocked in the Security Council. Blocked in the General Assembly.  Blocked in the budget process, blocked in the Conference on Disarmament and other bodies.

Is it fair in this complicated 21st century for any one country or few countries to yield such disproportionate power, and hold the world hostage on so many important issues?

Consensus should not be confused with unanimity.  The global public is right to ask whether this is how an organization in which we have invested so much hope and aspirations should function.

I propose, Mr. President, that you explore, with my successor, the establishment of a high-level panel to find practical solutions that will improve decision-making at the United Nations.

States must also respect the independence of the Secretariat, in accordance with the Charter.

When our reports say what needs to be said, Member States should not try and rewrite history.

When our human rights personnel act on behalf of the most vulnerable, Member States should not block their path.

When our humanitarian workers need to reach populations under siege, Member States should remove all obstacles.

And when our envoys and personnel raise difficult issues, Member States should not ostracize them or threaten to banish them from the country.

We must all be open and accountable to the people we serve.

There is one last measure of the change that has defined the past decade.

It is hard to believe, but when I took office, a smart phone like this had not even been introduced to the world.

Today it is a lifeline and, perhaps at times, the bane of our existence!

It is an indispensable part of our lives.

Our phones and social media have connected the world in ways that were unimaginable when I took office.  Yes, they have been abused by extremists and hate groups.  But they have also created a world of new communities and opportunities.

For me, it is all a reminder of the power of individuals to change the world.

After all, people power helped make the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development the most inclusive development process of our time.  People power mobilized millions to push leaders to take climate action.

People power is what I have seen in every corner of the world this past decade.

People like Rebecca Johnson, a nurse I met in Sierra Leone who contracted Ebola, recovered and then rushed and risked her life again to save her community.

People like Yusra Mardini, the Syrian teen swimmer who pushed her damaged refugee boat to safety and then went on to compete in the Rio Olympic Games.

And, of course, people like young Malala Yousafzai, who came to the United Nations and showed us all how one book, one pen and one person can make a difference.

A perfect world may be on the far horizon.

But a route to a better world, a safer world, a more just world, is in each and every one of us.

Ten years on, I know that working together, working united, we can get there. I count on your leadership and commitment.

Thank you very much.

Malarndirra McCarthy: 'Let the people of the Northern Territory have a say', maiden speech - 2016

15 September 2016, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia

Yuwu bajinda nya-wirdi kulu kirna-balirra yinda nyawirdi nyuwu-ja barrawu, bajirru yiurru wiji marnajingulaji ngathangka, bajirru yirru li-wirdiwalangu ji-awarawu li-Ngunawal Ngambri barra jina barra awara yirrunga, bajrru li-ngaha li-malarngu marnaji anka nya-ngathanya bii, li-ngatha kulhakulha, li-ngatha li-nganji karnirru-balirra.

Yes, let us begin. You are there, senior one—Mr President. We have no word for ‘President’ in Yanyuwa, so I refer to you as ‘senior one’. And I thank you for this place, and for all you others also here with me, and you, the traditional owners, the Ngunawal and Ngambri, for this country. This is your country.

To my family and friends who are here today: thank you. Thank you for making the journey. I especially acknowledge my father, John McCarthy, and my son Grayson, who are here with me. And I know my son CJ is watching from his university room in Dallas, Texas; a big hello to you, my son. And to Adam, sitting for his year 11 exam: good luck to you, my son.

I am here today starting off with Yanyuwa, the language of my mother’s families in Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria, nearly 1,000 kilometres south-east of Darwin. My families, they gave me this language, the language of my country. I am a woman whose spirit has come from the salt water, and we are known as li-antha wirriyarra, which means our spiritual origin comes from the sea—from the sea country. And I welcome my Kuku, John Bradley and Nona. Thank you. Bauji barra.

The old people would sing the kujika, the songline. They would follow the path of many kujika, the songlines, like the brolga, the kurdarraku, of my grandmother’s country—the beautiful brolga country; the country where my spirit always returns to. They would sing of the shark dreaming, and how it travelled from Queensland all the way down the coast to the gulf country and out to the islands of my families. And we dance the dance of the mermaids, the ngardiji, the ngardiji kujika of the Gulf and Barkly country, linking so many of our first nations peoples.

I grew up with the old men and women, the marlbu and barrdi bardis, and I am here thinking about them now, and I am thinking about my own path. My road has been a long road like the song, the kujika, that belongs to the old people. And I am standing here in this place, the Australian Senate, in the place of the people, to represent not just my own people—the Yanyuwa, the Garrwa, the Mara and the Kudanji peoples—but to stand for all people of the Northern Territory: all clan groups, all families who call the Northern Territory home, whether they live on the vast cattle stations of the Northern Territory or whether they have travelled from countries like Asia, Africa or the Middle East to forge a new life for their families away from strife-torn lives that offered no future. I stand here for you, too.

In 1842, my McCarthy ancestor sailed the seas from Ireland aboard the ship Palestine to Australia. And he did not come as a convict like hundreds of others before him; instead, he came as a free man. He chose to come, to make this country his home, not just for him but for his young family, to live in Australia, to build his future, his dream, in the land of opportunity, an unknown land yet filled with much hope and prosperity.

It was on the north coast of New South Wales that he made his home as the local magistrate. In the years and decades that followed, his descendants would toil on the land as farmers and timber-getters before my grandad, Alf McCarthy, then moved to Sydney to work in a box factory at Chiswick and then became a tram conductor on the Sydney trams. Along with my grandmother, Mary, they would raise their three sons: my dad, John McCarthy, who is here today; my Uncle Ray, who is also here, with Aunt Angela, and their children and grandchildren; and my Uncle Kevin, along with his wife, Regina, who are sending all their love now as I speak. I am deeply thankful for the love, support and richness in wisdom of my McCarthy families, as I am of my Yanyuwa and Garrawa families. Yo yamalu bingi; it makes my spirit feel really good.

I share with you all my kujika, my songline that weaves its way from the gulf country across the first-nation’s lands of Aboriginal people in Australia. As a journalist, a storyteller for 20 years—for the ABC, for SBS and for the much-needed NITV—I was able to tell the stories of the lives of thousands and thousands of Australians, and even internationally, with the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Network, trying to improve the lives of Indigenous people the world over through Indigenous media. I commend wholeheartedly the work of Indigenous media in Australia. Our country needs you. I especially want to acknowledge amazing women journalists, like those in the gallery today: the ABC’s Lindy Kerin, NITV’s Natalie Ahmat and the awesome, inspiring Caroline Jones.

I am honoured to be elected to represent all people of the Northern Territory in this chamber—to the Australian Senate—and to do so as a member of the Australian Labor Party.

As my McCarthy ancestor sailed his way across the seas to Australia, my Yanyuw ancestors sailed their way across the northern seas from the gulf country, to the land of the Macassan, Sulawesi, to the Torres Strait through to Papua New Guinea. The Macassans traded with the Yanyuwa, as they did with the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land and the Anindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt and the Nungubuyu people of Numbulwar. All of us are interconnected through kujika, through songline. For example, the brolga kujika connects the families of Numbulwar and Groote Eylandt with our families in the gulf country. That is the law of the first-nation’s peoples that defines our connection to country and culture and kin.

In the eyes of first-nation’s people, cultural exchange both amongst clan groups within Australia and with people outside Australia was a natural part of life well before Captain Cook arrived in 1788. There was already a thriving economic foreign trade occurring between Australia and with countries to our north. It is Aboriginal people who were the diplomats with foreign countries, the trading partners who shared knowledge and exchanged agriculture and marine sources of food and tools in the form of harpoons for hunting and knowledge of carving canoes to set sail in the unpredictable wet season seas. Only last month, in the landmark native title hearing in Borroloola, this diplomatic mission between the Yanyuwa and the Macassans was formally recognised in the Western system of law. The Federal Court recognised this relationship. Yet Aboriginal people have always had a system of governance here, and in Yanyuw we refer to it through the kujika.

In 1966, when Vincent Lingiari led the Wave Hill Walk-Off, demanding equal pay and equal rights for his country men and women, my families in the gulf country supported his fight for justice and that of the Gurindji people. So too did thousands of other Australians across the country who believed in a fair go for all. In recent weeks the Gurindji commemorated 50 years since the walk-off and recognised the important role Australian unions played in the late sixties supporting those Australians who could not win their battle for equal pay alone.

Still today the union movement stands beside those who push for a better way of life. I acknowledge in particular the support of those in the gallery today, such as Kay Densley, with the CPSU NT, and her team. Special thanks to Joseph Scales of the Australian Services Union, the MUA and, yes, the CFMEU, as well as United Voice, the ETU, the AMWU and the ACTU. The Turnbull government’s decision to go to an early election in the hope of diminishing the role of unions in this country spectacularly backfired when the Australian people moved away from his vision in their thousands. They recognise that trade unions continue to play a vital role in ensuring justice and equity for all Australians, for we all know that pay equity is not fully enjoyed by all Australians, and homelessness has a human face, and sometimes it is much of my family’s.

In the kinship way, it is my brother, who prefers to sleep in the long grass in Darwin city because it all becomes too hard. At other times the human face is one of someone who has just given up trying to exist between dispassionate laws and the high expectations of those whose job it is to carry them out. The town of Katherine in the Northern Territory has the highest rate of homelessness in the Territory, while Alice Springs is in desperate need of a visionary future that inspires our youth and lightens the load on families. It is a vision I so much want to work on with my fellow federal colleagues: the member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, and the member for Solomon, Luke Gosling, in paving a future for the Northern Territory filled with much hope and opportunity, and my fellow Indigenous colleagues, Senator Pat Dodson and Linda Burney.

I congratulate Chief Minister Michael Gunner and his NT Labor caucus on their recent victory in the Territory, and I certainly look very much forward to working closely with his team. I thank all the NT Labor branches and party members for your overwhelming support in my election to the Senate. Your faith in me helped to also restore my faith that serving the people of the Territory, and indeed Australia, is an honourable path and one that has ignited my spirit once again after the loss of my seat in Arnhem in the 2012 Territory election.

I sincerely congratulate the new member for Arnhem, Selena Uibo, for restoring this beautiful bush seat back to Labor. I acknowledge most sincerely, too, former senator Nova Peris and, before her, former senator Trish Crossin. Both women have supported me in my road to the Senate here today. For their graciousness, patient advice and respect for the challenges I have had to face to get here, I say a heartfelt thank you. To my staff, Mandy Taylor and Charlie Powling, thank you for joining me on this journey.

When the Commonwealth parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976, it was the Yanyuwa people who stepped up to claim back our land. As a young girl, I watched my grandparents, my elders, as they prepared to give evidence about how the Yanyuwa cared for country, especially the islands north of Borroloola. They gave evidence in an old police station, and they could pretty much only speak in Yanyuwa. They were difficult times, and trying to give evidence was something that we had to continuously learn from. In that time, we found that we could not explain things as well as we would have liked to the Western understanding of Aboriginal culture.

It was to be another four decades of litigation—in Borroloola, in Darwin and in Melbourne. It was litigation that passed on to us, the Yanyuwa descendants, to continue to fight for recognition of who we are, li-antha wirriyarra, a people whose spiritual origin comes from the sea. But we did not walk that journey alone. It was only possible with the steadfast support of the Northern Land Council, and I acknowledge all those staff and council members over those 40 years who walked with my families.

We talk about recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Constitution, and I pay tribute to all those in the campaign to support recognition. It is most certainly way overdue, and I say these next sentences without any disrespect to those of you. I urge parliamentarians in both houses to understand this: the Yanyuwa are a people whose struggle for country and recognition took nearly 40 years, and so many elders died well before such recognition and, most importantly, any respect ever took place. Such long, drawn-out legal battles have wearied many families of so many first nation peoples, constantly trying to defend their sense of self, identity and country, who have fought for land rights. Maybe that was the intention; I do not know. Battle fatigued, perhaps we are better to acquiesce. But we are still here, and we are not going to go away.

So I understand fully the impatience and, in some cases, total rejection felt by so many first nation peoples towards the Australian parliament’s push for recognition. It is a difficult pill to swallow, as first peoples, to yet again have to ask others to respect us—our place, our culture and our families—in this country, when we know we have been here well over 60,000 years.

With nearly 30 per cent of the Territory population Indigenous, we will only have half a vote in any referendum, let alone a referendum on recognition, because we are not a state. Is it not time to consider seriously a vision for the north and a vision for the future of all our territories such as Christmas and Cocos Islands? We need a vision that unites over 100 Aboriginal language groups just in the Northern Territory alone, the multicultural communities who have made it home and the descendants of the Afghan cameleers and early pioneers.

It is time the Commonwealth encouraged more seriously the growth of the Northern Territory as perhaps the seventh state in the Australian Federation. Allow the people of the Northern Territory to fully make our own decisions, determine our own future, by engaging in a fair partnership so that we, who have won our lands back—nearly 50 per cent of the landmass—and the young people of the Territory feel they have solid employment, a future filled with shared prosperity and hope.

The Commonwealth must prepare a way for the inclusion of more senators and more members of the House of Representatives so that the people of the Territory can become not just a state but an equal state here in the Australian parliament. It might be 10 or 20 years, but let there be a vision that at least starts.

The Mabo court ruling in 1992 overturned terra nullius. Let the people of the Northern Territory overturn the disbelief that even treaties are unattainable in Australia. Let the people of the Northern Territory have a say. In the year of the Mabo decision, I was questioned over my identity as a Yanyuwa Garrawa woman in the Borroloola land claim process. I found the interrogation focused more on how it could be that an educated Aboriginal woman must somehow not be quite real as a traditional owner of country. How could it be possible to be highly educated in the Western world and still live with a deep sense of cultural understanding in a culture thousands of years old?

It was thanks to the firm belief of my father, a school teacher from Sydney who inspired my educational upbringing, both in the Western ways and in maintaining a strong understanding of Borroloola families, kinship and culture shared by my mother—bless her soul—and shared by my maternal grandparents. I was educated in Borroloola, in Alice Springs and in Sydney, and all the while travelling backwards and forwards to the families in the Gulf Country. It was as a little girl in primary school in Alice Springs that I first saw the man who I would one day sit here in the Senate with—Senator Pat Dodson—when he worked with the Catholic Church in Alice Springs.

I would like to acknowledge the staff and students of St Scholastica’s College, my former high school, who are present in the gallery today. In 1988, I became the first Aboriginal student to become college captain, and I acknowledge my schoolmates who are here, in particular Yvonne Weldon of the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales and her family, Aunty Ann and the Coe families of Cowra. I pay my respects to the memory of the late great Mum Shirl, who was witness to ensuring that both Yvonne and I would finish well with the Good Sams. Today, another Indigenous student sits in the gallery who will be the 2017 college captain: Alice Dennison. I sincerely wish you all the best. I also acknowledge the students and staff of Saint Ignatius’ College, in particular the first nation’s students who danced Senator Dodson and I into the Senate on our first day with our fellow senators.

I now ask Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: please reconsider your plebiscite bill. Please pull back from this brink of public vitriol and make marriage equality a reality in this parliament. We need only be reminded of the hateful and hurtful commentary on race that ended the career of an AFL hero in Swans legend Adam Goodes—do not let that happen here to any of these families in Australia.

My kujika has allowed me to see both worlds—that of the Western world view and that of the Yanyuwa/Garrawa world view. I am at home in both. I am neither one, without the other. But what of those who cannot balance the two and what of those who do not have the same?

I think of the women in my life struggling still just to survive—I call them my mothers, sisters, my friends—who endured tremendous acts of violence against them, with broken limbs, busted faces, amputations and sexual assaults. I stand here with you. My aunt who lost her job that she had had for 10 years without warning simply because she spoke out about the lack of housing for her families, I stand here with you. To the descendants of the stolen generation still seeking closure, I stand with you. To the people with disabilities forever striving for better access to the most basic things in life, I am with you.

And then there is my young cousin-sister who struggled with her identity as a lesbian in a strong traditional Aboriginal culture. Her outward spirit was full of fun and laughter, yet inside she was suffocating from the inability to find balance in her cultural world view and that of the expectations of the broader Australian society around her. So one night she left this world, just gave up, at the age of 23.

To the sista girls and brutha boys who struggle with their sexual identity, I say to you: stay strong, I stand here with you. To the people of the Northern Territory and the Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands, I stand here with you.

Bauji Barra. Thank you.

Julian Leeser: 'It said simply - "I am sorry Sylvia, I just can't cope, love, John", maiden speech - 2016

14 September 2016, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia

As a child the sound of my mother's footsteps coming towards my bedroom to wake me in the morning was a reassuring feature of daily life.

Inevitably I was awake before she made the door; but the rhythm, the sound, and the intensity of her walk were unmistakable.

Each morning the moment would arrive when she'd fling the door open with that effervescent greeting "time to rise and shine".

Twenty years ago this month my mother approached my room to wake me, but it was with a very different sound, pace and tempo.

Seared on my mind from that night was the speed of her approach and her scream as she flung open the door of my bedroom, sobbing, "Dad's gone, Dad's gone."

I got up from my bed to comfort my mum, trying to calm her. I went down the hall to my father's office, where he worked late into the night for his clients.

There I found his pyjamas in a pile and on the glass-topped table in the hall, was a note, like so many of the notes from my father, written in red pen on the back of a used envelope.

It said simply -"I am sorry Sylvia, I just can't cope, love, John".

I felt a great emptiness ripping at my stomach. I went to the garage and saw the car was missing.

We called the Police and later they came round to tell us that they'd found my father's body at the bottom of The Gap at Watsons Bay.

There is a point in life when you are supposed to become a man.

As I stood on the veranda and watched the sun come up that morning, I knew my day had come.

My father loved music.

He played 2CH on the radio from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to bed. Easy listening music was the sound-track of my childhood.

But the day he died the music died with him, and it was years before I could listen to his music again without tearing up.

Over the past twenty years I have gone back over the week leading up to my father's death too many times - and I keep thinking back to the signs he was giving us.

Although we had always been a family that hugged each other, my father had started giving us all very long hugs.

My father prided himself on being a great car parker and yet the week before he died he didn't seem to care how he parked. In hindsight it's clear that something had changed.

I knew it but didn't say anything.

You ask yourself, what could I have done?

What should I have said? Could I have reached out in a way that I didn't? Could I have said, as we say now, "Are you OK?"

I reflect on my own conduct the night before my father died, when he asked if I could help him polish his shoes before he left for a dinner at my brother's school.

I remember as a self-absorbed 20 year old the petulance and rudeness with which I waived away the opportunity to help my father, a man who so often helped me, and not a day goes by that I don't regret it.

Suicide, they used to say, is a victimless crime, but they never count the loved ones left behind.

In the past 20 years we have changed our approach to suicide, depression and mental health.

 And while there has rightly been a focus on the mental health of adolescents and young people, we must remember that people suffering at other stages in their lives are equally important.

And sadly the number of older people taking their own lives is increasing - my own father was fifty five.

In these past 20 years, we have spent millions on mental health and suicide prevention. Every government has tried - but despite all the good will, it is a fight we are losing.

In my own electorate we have had more than 100 people take their own lives in the last eight years. And across Australia eight people die by suicide every day.

All this shows that government money alone will not solve this epidemic. Treating depression as purely a medical issue is not working.

Rather we need to rebuild caring communities where people know and notice the signs and acknowledge the people around them.

Where we ask "Are you OK?", or more directly "Are you contemplating suicide?"

And we need to create the conditions where those who are thinking about suicide feel comfortable enough to ask for help.

Through my work in this place, I want to help empower Australians to build a greater sense of community.

I have seen active engagement in community combat loneliness and enable people to see a world outside themselves.

In a society where people are more pressured and more isolated than ever before, active engagement in community fosters civility, courtesy and understanding, virtues that are too often undervalued and supplanted by anger.

There is a role for government in supporting organisations and individuals that reach out to the socially isolated in our community, even in the face of continued rejection.

And there is a role for government in fostering innovative solutions that address suicide prevention, depression and mental health – enabling communities to learn from what has worked and connecting those efforts across our country.

I want to acknowledge the Prime Minister's personal interest in suicide prevention and the leadership he and the Health Minister took in devising the National Suicide Prevention Strategy.

As a member of this House I want to do what I can to help pierce the loneliness, the desperation and the blackness that people who suffer depression feel.

During my time here I will always be an advocate for better mental health policy.

Dad

When I think of my father, mostly though I think not of the way that he died, but rather of the example set by the way that he lived.

My father John was an only child. His father was a pharmacist.

His mother and her family escaped Nazi Germany in 1936 for the freedom and sanctuary of Australia. My father was an accountant; he had his own practice at Parramatta.

As I child I would go with him to the office or visit clients in their homes, businesses and factories.

He knew their lives, their families and their ups and downs: when they succeeded and when they struggled, when they were failing, and when they were flourishing.

He was a friend they saw once a year to help them get their affairs in order and comply with the law.

But even more than that he was an advisor on how they could get on with and grow their businesses.

To the extent that I become an effective local member for Berowra, it will be because of dad's example of professionalism, trust and care in working for his clients - and the personal touch they loved him for. Dad was a man much involved in his community.

He sat on the board of our local Synagogue. He sat on a theatre board. He was involved in the school my brother and I attended.

Dad was hard working, diligent and prided himself on doing things properly, and by the book. He was quiet, unassuming, patient and slow to anger.

He had a husky voice that made him sound like Louis Armstrong.

He and my mother Sylvia gave me three great gifts: my life, my faith and my education.

My father instilled in my brother Lindsay and me an important set of values:

· Courtesy, civility and fair dealing with everyone with whom he interacted.

· The need to give back to the community and get involved; and

· A deep sense of faith and love of the joys of Judaism.

He gave us a strong sense, shared by all Jews, that our own story is part of a much larger story.

That we should be, in Jonathan Sacks' words, "true to our faith while being a blessing to others regardless of their faith".

While I don't always live up to my father's ideals, his are the fundamental values which have shaped my life.

There is a Jewish idea that one should bring joy or naches to one's parents. I hope that my election to this place would have brought as much naches to him as it does to my mother and the rest of my family.

Mum

It is to my mother Sylvia that I owe the greatest thanks for being here today. Her courage and her unconditional love for my brother Lindsay and me has sustained our family through celebrations and sorrows.

With her unshakable belief that anything was possible for her boys, she created a home filled with love, stability and opportunity.

Nothing has ever been - or will ever be - too much for her.

But of all her gifts to us, the enthusiasm for active citizenship, the patriotism she instilled in my brother and me, the fact that hopefully, we are happy, well rounded and grateful Australians, is her greatest contribution.

My mother Sylvia is a fifth generation Australian.

Her grandfather was a Gallipoli Anzac and rode in the charge of the Light Horse at Be'er Sheva.

Her mother, Barbara, who passed away last week aged 95, served as a nurse in the Australian Army during the Second World War.

Mum's father Sam served in the ill-fated 8th Division, was taken prisoner in Changi and survived the horrors of the Burma Railway.

The war left my grandfather with a stammer and a steely determination.

What kept him alive in those dark days was a dream to come home and start his own hardware business which he did after the war, employing many of his fellow former POWs too.

The prosperity that my grandfather created was due to his hard work and ingenuity in predicting the need for building supplies to meet a post-war building boom.

My mother's Anglo-Jewry gave her a particular take on being an Australian.

Fiercely patriotic about Australia and loyal to the Crown, she realised the historical peculiarity to be both Jewish and free.

And that had such an impact on me.

As I grew up towards the end of the Cold War, with its threat to freedom everywhere, my mother would constantly remind me of the responsibility that comes with the freedom we enjoy in Australia - to be thankful for it, and to preserve it whenever it's threatened here - because, as she would teach me, most people at most times in most places are not free.

As a child my mother read to me about Australia's history and explained how our own family's story fit into the broader Australian story.

A story of explorers, soldiers, farmers, shopkeepers and professionals, people willing to chance their arm, who carved out a nation in this physically isolated but socially tolerant land.

My contribution to this story will be influenced by the combination of my father's quiet virtues, and my mother's perhaps slightly less quiet, but always deeply patriotic, civic, virtues.

Constitution

It was that instilled sense of history and an early interest in politics, that prompted me to want to serve in this place.

And so around the time of my tenth birthday I asked my parents not for a BMX bike or a cricket bat but for a copy of the Australian Constitution.

I think the Latin term for such behaviour is Nerdus Maximus.

Our Constitution is unique and worthy of celebration.

It belongs to everyone. It was written and debated all over the country, led by that great generation of liberal and conservative barrister-parliamentarians.

 Americans and Canadians wrote their constitutions in secret. Modern constitutions tend to be written by legal academics.

But the Australian Constitution was written in the open across Australia, by Australians for Australian conditions: from the School of Arts at Tenterfield, to the Court House at Corowa; from the drawing rooms of Adelaide to the libraries of Hobart; in parliamentary chambers in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne; and of special significance for me, on the Hawkesbury River, in the Berowra electorate, on a paddle-steamer called the Lucinda where our first Prime Minister Sir Edmund Barton and our first Chief Justice Sir Samuel Griffith, drafted the judicial power of the Commonwealth.

The Australian Constitution has provided the basis for stable government and economic prosperity for over a century.

At a time when constitutional structures and political systems around the world are breaking down, Australia's constitutional achievement should be a source of enormous pride.

Our Constitution establishes our unique Australian democracy.

The Constitution matters as much for what it doesn't say as for what it does.

Our Constitution contains no symbolic language and no bill of rights. Its sparse legal language is its strength.

It has meant that only the most creative judges have been able to invent implied rights to frustrate the democratic will.

The Constitution has figured prominently in my career and contributions to the public debate.

As the youngest elected delegate at the 1998 Constitutional Convention, I remain a committed constitutional monarchist, like my friend and former employer the Member for Warringah, I see it as the best system of government of all the available alternatives.

In 2009 I worked with a broad cross-section of Australians to ensure the defeat of an Australian Bill of Rights because I believe in the capacity of the political process, to solve problems, and I'm against an American style judiciary which makes political rather than legal decisions because of their Bill of Rights.

In 2013, with the members for Goldstein and Mitchell and some senators from the other place I led a scrappy but successful insurgency against Labor's plans to have the Commonwealth intervene in local government.

In important public debates, in a time of increasing polarization of views we need people who can build consensus and find the middle ground.

And so in more recent times, I have worked with Indigenous leaders and constitutional conservatives to find a constitutional way to make better policy about, and due recognition of Indigenous Australians, while avoiding the downsides of inserting symbolic language into a technical document, which requires interpretation by judges.

Today the Constitution has an important role to play in the next chapter of Australia's unfinished economic reforms.

The next item on the reform agenda must be to address the inefficiencies in our federation.

The States and the Commonwealth should have more clearly delineated responsibilities and the finances to deliver them.

Instead, today we have a system of buck passing, duplication and inefficiency: a lopsided federation that the framers would not recognise.

Canberra should not have a monopoly on finance and policy.

It has become fashionable to think that whenever the states fail, Canberra will do a better job.

Pink bats, school halls and The Mersey Hospital demonstrate that service delivery is not always Canberra's forte.

Canberra collects too much tax, while every year the States come begging because they don't raise enough money to finance their own services.

Addressing this dissonance in our federation should deliver less red tape, less duplication, better roads, better schools and better hospitals designed and run to meet local needs.

It should also lead to greater policy innovation as competition between the States drives excellence.

I have had the privilege of working for two of Australia's great federalists High Court Justice Ian Callinan, who honours me with his presence today, and Professor Greg Craven.

I have 6 also spent several years thinking about federalism as the Vice President of the Samuel Griffith Society.

I am not the first person to seek to propose reform of the federation on a federalist model.

Coalition and Labor Politicians have pursued this option before.

But every time such solutions have been proposed, they have been undermined by short-term politicking.

Previous economic reforms had a greater chance of success when there was a cross-party consensus.

The same approach is needed to reform our federation today. We know the task is to deliver the States more of their own source revenue and to lighten Canberra's footprint in areas of policy for which it has little expertise.

What has been lacking is the political cooperation to make it happen.

I therefore propose to look for reform partners in all parties in this Parliament to establish a group to build consensus for reform of fiscal federalism.

Reform of this scale can be daunting and while we may not complete the task while we are in this place, nor are we free to desist from it.

Berowra

But by far my most important task is to serve the people of Berowra with the full measure of my devotion.

The electorate of Berowra was created in 1969. Running from the banks of the Hawkesbury River to the M2 motorway, the people of Berowra are community minded and self-reliant.

That is why there is a greater number of volunteers, people of faith and small business owners than in many other communities.

Despite its strengths, the Berowra community is one that faces major infrastructure challenges. Pennant Hills Road is one of the worst roads in Australia.

But now Liberal State and Federal governments are working with the private sector to deliver Northconnex, which will remove 5000 trucks from Pennant Hills Rd every day, improving air quality and reducing noise while completing the missing national transport link between the M1 and the M2.

It is not the only infrastructure issue we face. Other roads like New Line Rd need widening to take into account the growing population in the electorate and in surrounding areas.

And the undulating hills and the sparse population in the rural areas make mobile connectivity difficult.

But the Coalition's mobile blackspot program is starting to address this infrastructure challenge.

I wish to thank the people of Berowra for giving me the extraordinary opportunity to serve them. My first duty will always be to them.

I would like to thank the members of the Liberal Party in Berowra, and my friends and supporters beyond that organisation, for all their work to see me come into this place.

Many have travelled vast distances to be here today. The best way I can demonstrate my gratitude to them is through the quality of my service here.

In that, I hope to emulate the style of my three predecessors Philip Ruddock, who throughout his record term helped build an ethnically diverse country with strong secure borders; Harry Edwards, who was a leading economic thinker on microfinancing; and one of Australia's most distinguished lawyers, the first member for Berowra, Tom Hughes QC, who is here today.

I am also honoured that my friend Heather Henderson, the daughter of Sir Robert Menzies, is here today.

For six and a half years I had the privilege of running the Centre named after her father.

I acknowledge Tom Harley my Chairman at the Menzies Research Centre who is also here.

Sir Robert Menzies was a poor country boy from a one horse town, who by dint of his own hard work and intellect rose to lead his profession, his party and his nation.

Our task as Liberals is to create the conditions so the next generation's Sir Robert Menzies can rise and thrive.

I am conscious of the huge responsibility involved in being the Liberal Member for Berowra.

I will seek to carry on Sir Robert Menzies' traditions of policy and principle in all I do in this place.

Finally I wish to thank my wife Joanna.

If my parents gave me the foundations for a good and worthwhile life in years past, it's Joanna who anchors me in the present, and always points me forward with optimism to the future.

She is the reason more than any other than I am here. Joanna introduced me to Berowra. It was her home before it was mine. I could not have embarked on this journey without her.

She is smart, accomplished, beautiful and challenging and she has never lost faith in me.

She is, in fact, perfect in every way, except for that occasion 11 years ago, when her judgment clearly failed her and she decided to marry me. Joanna - I love you with all my heart.

Every new member comes into this place with life experiences from which they can draw strength.

I come here with the certain knowledge that no one lives a perfect life, that we all need help and community in good times and hard times.

But I draw strength from the example of my family.

I draw strength from my faith. I draw strength from Australia's traditions of service.

And I draw strength from our unique Australian story of progress – epitomized by the story of the individuals who persevered and wrote our Constitution.

Reform is never easy but the opportunity to participate in the public debate and be an advocate for the cause I believe in: a strong, free, confident and prosperous Australia is something that fills me with the greatest enthusiasm.

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Julian Leeser was a guest on episode 25 of the podcast

Peter Khalil: 'To those religious and ethnic groups being used as political footballs: ‘I will stand by you, with you and for you'', maiden speech - 2016

12 September 2016, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia

Mr Speaker, I congratulate you on your election to the chair and I begin my first speech by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land we meet on, the Ngunnawal people, and their elders past and present. I do so because it is a profound mark of respect for the peoples and cultures that have been present on this land from the beginning of time.

I stand in this place because I was elected by the people of Wills to serve them and to make a difference to their lives. I am conscious of being charged with an enormous responsibility bestowed with great honour. Even though it is somewhat improbable that I stand here, I am living proof that in this country politics matters, that it can make a profound difference to people’s lives.

My parents, Fayek and Georgette Khalil, are here with us in the gallery today. They came to Australia from Egypt 47 years ago. Just like those who come today, they were escaping a region where conflict was the norm and opportunities limited. Their sacrifice and that of millions of other migrants helped build Australia—not just its physical environment but the diversity of its culture, the generosity of its peoples and the depth of its humanity. I say these things too because nowhere is this diversity, this generosity of spirit, this decency better reflected than in the people of Wills.

My parents sacrificed so much of their own lives, their dreams and ambitions, to give my sister, Ellen, and I a better life. We started out in an inner-city Melbourne housing commission. Dad had to give up a career in Egypt as a lawyer and he worked for Australia Post. He became a union man, a shop steward, and later was on the state executive of the Victorian postal workers union. Mum gave up her uni degree in Egypt and worked at the Reserve Bank printing labs and as a preschool carer and an interpreter. They worked hard to give us a chance to make something of a new life in Australia.

It was not always easy. There were times of great hardship and ugly prejudice. I grew up in Australia in the seventies and eighties, a world very different from the one we live in today. Racism was more overt and considered acceptable by some. I experienced much of it directly. I will always remember my Grade 6 teacher, Mrs Hendrix, a coloured South African woman, who told me that in apartheid South Africa my parents would not be able to travel on the same bus, because of the difference in their skin complexion. That troubled me deeply as a 12-year-old, but it also awakened in me a yearning for social justice and a nascent political activism.

Although I was a serious kid who went to concerts in support of the ANC with my dad and who read Gandhi and Mandela, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, I was also like every other Aussie kid: I really loved my footy—Aussie rules, of course. My grandparents lived in a housing commission in Preston, and my Auntie Gigi—Giselle—who is here today too, went to Preston East High School with Peter Daicos, the great Collingwood champion. She introduced me to Daics at the Preston fish and chip shop in 1978, when I was five years old, and I was Collingwood for life. I remember dragging Dad down to Victoria Park to watch the Magpies every second Saturday. I would sit on his shoulders as he stood in the outer.

While footy gave me great excitement, agony—1979, 80, 81, 2002 and 2003; I was too young for 77—and some great joy in 1990 and 2010, it taught me deeper life lessons. Daics was an ethnic, more usually called a wog in those days—and other terrible things—much the same as I was being called in the schoolyard. Despite the abuse, Daics was a champion. His exploits inspired me, and I started to believe in myself too. I learned to ignore all of the hatred and prejudice and to let my actions do the talking and that lots of hard work and a little talent will always make you a winner.

My parents also instilled in us the critical importance of education to our futures—education and the lasting impact of dedicated teachers like Mrs Hendrix and my year 9 politics teacher, Mr Sestito, who ignited my passion for Australian politics. I met recently with one of my predecessors in Wills, Bob Hawke, better known, of course, as one of Australia’s greatest Prime Ministers, and I asked Bob whether with all the achievements of his administration there was a policy that went unheralded. He told me that, when he became PM in 1983, only a third of students in Australia finished year 12. Only a third. Through policies his government put in place, by 1991 it had almost tripled to 90 per cent. Bob was particularly proud of that achievement. It was the visionary policy achievements of Labor governments—the one he led and those before and after—that gave me access to a quality education. I am and will be forever grateful.

Mine is not a unique story. Millions of Australians, whatever their ethnic background or their socioeconomic status, were given opportunities through Labor Party policies based on fairness. For my migrant family, affordable housing, Medicare and access to education were life-changing. The Labor Party’s commitment to equality of opportunity is not just a three-word slogan. It meant something to me and my family as it means something to millions of Australians, allowing them to make positive contributions in their lives and to those around them based on their merit and hard work, not on their postcode or their pay cheque, their gender or ethnicity, their religion or culture.

My parents also instilled in me the importance of giving back to the country that has given us so much. They often told me that Australia is not the lucky country, but, rather, we are lucky to be Australian. Migrants like my parents got much from the lucky country, but they also gave much to making it better, more prosperous and as open as its beautiful broad skies. I will do my utmost to advocate for and represent the people of Wills with all my wit and judgement, skill and experience, passion and smarts. I thank them for entrusting me with this great privilege.

When I reflect on what is important in our lives I think immediately of my family, as we all do. We love our families, and if we have children we would do anything for them. We also cherish the bonds we share with our friends and the importance of making an effort for them. Whatever god we worship or not, whatever cultural beliefs we have and whatever ideologies we adhere to, it is a central part of the human condition that we are fulfilled by our connection and service to others.

Yet the public are cynical of politics and politicians. We become lightning rods for people’s frustrations, disappointments and anger. The raw quest for power can threaten to overshadow our more noble instincts. More often than not, the public’s expectations are low, and when they are high they are seldom met. However, at unique and rare times in history politicians become the vessels for inspiring leadership, visionary change or simply doing good. That can only be when we keep our eyes affixed on our very own compass star—the shining light that guided us each to serve in this place, even amidst the voracious storms that rage around us and all too often consume our national politics. We can yet, with a steady gaze on that guiding star, serve to protect and defend the values that make our democracy great while passing new laws that reform our nation, advancing an even greater and fairer Australia. The responsibility and burden for this we happily bear. It signifies something great and important within all of us—a deep desire to make the lives of those around us better.

While a public servant for the Australian Department of Defence, I was sent on a posting to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, tasked with helping to rebuild Iraq following the removal of Saddam’s regime. Although I believed at the time the Iraq War was a strategic and humanitarian disaster, I made a choice to serve my country. I worked in Iraq on rebuilding and training of the Iraqi army that is now taking on Daesh, building the ministry of defence and public service, and negotiating for the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Sunni tribal leaders to jointly fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. While I faced danger, I was ably protected. I thanked the diggers of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment as we moved through the Baghdad streets in the very agile Australian light armoured vehicles.

No matter our ideological beliefs and how we choose to serve, we must recognise the importance of open and honest debate, differing opinions and different beliefs. Australia is a successful migrant country because of our wonderful multicultural model. I am proud to be Australian whilst also embracing my cultural heritage. I do not have to choose between identities. Our multicultural model works because we embrace and do not just tolerate cultural diversity. This diverse and fair society that generations of Australians have created and nurtured is worth protecting. We must educate that difference is not to be feared but embraced. We must all stand up to racism and prejudice. To those who would peddle it in this parliament by playing on fear and ignorance: ‘I will stand steadfast against you.’

I am particularly honoured to be one of the first of two Egyptian Australians elected to the 45th Parliament. The other of course is Dr Anne Aly, the member for Cowan. We are also the first African Australians in this place. I look forward to representing our brothers and sisters who have migrated from Africa and the Middle East. I am also the first Copt to be elected to this place. The Copts are adherents of one of the oldest sects of Christianity that emerged almost 2,000 years ago. Our history stretches back thousands of years connecting us to ancient Egypt. The Coptic language is the last form of the ancient Egyptian language. The Copts have faced the violence of sectarian persecution, as have many other ancient peoples of the Middle East. The Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, the Yazidis and the Kurds have all been on the front line, taking the brunt of violent extremism of Daesh. They deserve our support.

In Australia and in many Western democracies this is a moment in history where we face a fractious body politic exacerbated by or perhaps driven by the ugly rise of demagogues. These charlatans pull from their sleeves the same three-card trick played throughout history: first, identify an angry segment of the population and tell them they are just as angry; second, find a minority to scapegoat, like Asians, Muslims or Mexicans, and blame them for taking all the jobs; and, third, throw in a dose of fear, accuse the scapegoat minority of harming our way of life, stir the angry mob until it reaches boiling point and then claim only the demagogue can fix it. Of course we all know there is no substance to any of it, let alone real policies that can effect genuine change. To those religious and ethnic groups being used as political footballs: ‘I will stand by you, with you and for you. Know this: Labor will defend the multicultural society that we have built and we will never let the hateful dividers rip apart the egalitarian fabric of Australia.'

We must not, however, fall into the trap of blaming the people who are disaffected and angry. They are being exploited, they are genuinely fearful of the threats we all face and they are uncertain of their place in our society. While there are many winners in our globalised world, there are also many people who have lost out. Thousands of workers have lost or are about to lose their manufacturing jobs. Many live in Wills. Not all of these workers, after 20 years or more in a Holden or Ford plant, can become baristas or start-up tech gurus in our so-called exciting innovation society. I say to these people: ‘We the Labor Party and the labour movement are doing the hard yards to develop—and upon winning government will implement—policies that retrain and retool workers, provide vocational education, establish job creation programs and provide support to families that are struggling.’ I say to all of those people who feel disconnected, lost and angry: ‘Do not give yourselves to the haters. Keep faith in us. There will be better days ahead.’

I look forward to being the representative for the people of Wills, which is a diverse and socially progressive microcosm of modern Australia. In suburbs like Coburg, Pascoe Vale, Glenroy and Fawkner, to name a few, 60 per cent of residents were born or have at least one parent born overseas and 40 per cent of households are bilingual. Multiple faiths and over 60 ethnicities are living in harmony.

Wills has a magnificent arts community. The suburb of Brunswick has the highest concentration of artists in Australia. The arts matter. A thriving arts sector is the heart and soul of any society. It cannot be measured in traditional economic terms—its metrics are intangible—but its social benefits are invaluable. I will continue to support Labor’s great policies for the independence and return of substantive funding to the Australia Council and in addition be a voice and a pen on issues, such as parallel importation, that are of great import to authors, of which there are many great ones in Wills.

Wills has a commitment to the environment. Residents have led the way on climate change action, with one of the fastest rates of home and business adoption of solar panels. In the suburbs of Fawkner and Glenroy pensioners have roofs covered in solar panels because it makes environmental and economic sense.

Wills has a social heart that beats strong, exemplified by the work of 11 neighbourhood houses that do so much for the local community. There are many vibrant Italian and Greek pensioner and social clubs—and I enjoyed playing bocce in Fawkner with some of them during the campaign.

I have chosen to serve to change people’s lives, to channel their hopes and dreams, because I believe that Labor values make a difference. I believe in equality of opportunity, access to education, affordable health care and social justice. I believe in equality before the law, regardless of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity or religion. I believe in fighting for job creation, because a job gives a person dignity. I believe in tackling climate change for our and future generations, in sustainable living and in funding for infrastructure and public transport. I believe in a successful multicultural society that celebrates and embraces diversity.

Equality, not privilege; diversity, not divisiveness; hope, not fear. I will fight for these values for the people of Wills and for the nation, as have great Labor governments done for the best part of a century—delivering the reforms that have made all of those so lucky to be Australians.

Prime Minister Curtin, who led Australia through the darkest days of World War II put it much more eloquently than I when he said that the Labor Party and the labour movement stand for:

… humanity as against material gain and has more resilience, more decency and dignity, and the best of human qualities than any other political movement.

The Labor Party has always stood for improving the lives of Australians—for putting people first. It also has a tradition that seeks to extend these values beyond our shores. Prime Minister Chifley spoke of reaching for that light on the hill—to bring something better to the people: better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. Our objective to reach for that light on the hill was and still is to aim for the betterment of all humanity.

That is why I am committed to Australia’s role in the world as a good international citizen, making a difference to people’s lives across the globe. In 2005 I had the opportunity to testify before the US Senate foreign relations committee on security policy in the Middle East. I spoke before then Senator Joe Biden and then Senator Barack Obama. I was struck by Senator Obama’s compassion and search for real solutions. Over a decade later, President Obama is hosting a summit on refugees next week. I call on everyone in this place and those government ministers attending the summit to put aside partisan politics and work to find sustainable and compassionate solutions to the international refugee crisis. As a son of migrants who came from Egypt, escaping a region engulfed by war, I can appreciate the yearning for a life of peace, security and opportunity. For the best part of a decade, and in the recent federal campaign when discussing asylum seeker policy, I argued strongly for an increase in our intake and an end to indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru.

I supported our leader, Bill Shorten, when he made clear that if we won the election one of his first acts would be to negotiate with the UNHCR the resettlement of the refugees to safe and secure countries. We should not be fixated on countries like Cambodia or PNG which have woefully inadequate infrastructure but look to other countries, including New Zealand and Malaysia. But I recognise that even this falls far too short in our moral, legal and international obligations as a good international citizen.

I believe Australia has a moral obligation, at the minimum, to take responsibility for the care of those refugees that have been physically or emotionally damaged by the long-term detention that we have submitted them to. I also think we should re-examine the assumed nexus between detention centres and discouraging people smugglers to ascertain how much this argument holds in the context of robust turn back policies.

Whilst I support the ALP policy I also look forward to playing my part in the ongoing debate and change on this issue. I will advocate that Australia take a leadership role in developing an international agreement in which multiple countries increase their quota intake of refugees so we can begin to find solutions for 25 million asylum seekers and refugees in UNHCR camps around the world. An international agreement between 10, 15 or 20 countries agreeing to take an additional 30, 40 or 50,000 refugees a year each would start to be a real solution, resulting in a million or more refugees being resettled to safe haven each year. If we can as an international community come together to tackle climate change that threatens our planet we can and must come together to find a way to deliver safety and security for millions of refugees. We can and must do away with the lowest-common-denominator policies that have poisoned our political culture. We can and must do better as a nation.

So I speak on this not because it is popular, nor will I resile from the issue because it is unpopular, but because it is simply the right thing to do—because I believe that true leadership is not about appealing to the fear that lurks in our darker angels but appealing to our better angels.

No-one gets to this place without the support of literally hundreds of people. I want to thank the over 1,000 ALP members in Wills, the volunteers—the true believers—who worked tirelessly during the campaign. I salute you, for it is your commitment to the Labor cause that wins elections.

I would like to pay a special tribute to my predecessor, Kelvin Thomson, acknowledging his many, many years of service and advocacy. Thank you, Kelvin, for all your support and wise counsel. Ben Davis, the Victorian Secretary of the AWU, a great union leader of a great union: his wise counsel to me was summed up in four words, ‘Talk to the voters.’

Thanks to Theo Theophanous and his wife, Rita, who are in the gallery, for their strategic guidance, support and friendship, and to Steve Michaelson, also known as Mocca, and Shannon Threlfall Clark, who headed up my campaign team with great professionalism and efficiency.

Thanks to the rest of the campaign team: Carole Fabian, Councillor Lambros Tapinos, Hasan Erdogan, Chris Anderson, Mel Sherrin and Iva Bujanovic, our campaign field organiser, and to my many state colleagues—Minister Philip Dalidakis and Debra are here today. And special thanks to Speaker Telmo Languiller—thank you for your support. To Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek: you have run a tremendous campaign—but more than that you are Labor leaders we can believe in. I thank you and all my federal colleagues—too many of you to thank; you are all my friends as well—for your support over many years

To His Excellency Mohamed Khairat, the Egyptian ambassador: I bet he never dreamed that there would be not one but two Egyptian Australians elected to the federal parliament! Your Grace Bishop Suriel, Abouna Michael: thank you and the Coptic community for your support. And to Robert Ray for his political wisdom.

Thanks to my family, friends and supporters who have made the trip to Canberra for today: to my life-long mate John Jardim, Rose and my goddaughter, Emma, and Erin; to David Noakes, Tiff, Ollie, my godson, Coco and Zoe; and to Priya Saratchandran, Joseph Hanna, Robert Ishak, Simon Banks and Justin Di Lollo. Thanks to my Aunt Gigi, her partner Barry, Aunt Julie, my uncles John and Jerry—who cannot be here—and to my maternal grandmother, Nana Ellen, who is 92 and is here today; to my sister Ellen and my nephews Oscar and Ethan; and to my parents Fayek and Georgette—once again, I love you and I thank you all.

To my wife, Lydia: your sacrifices—the small ones you make every day as well as the big ones you have made and I know will also make—are the very reasons I am standing here today. Thank you for your patience, your wise counsel, your remarkable intelligence and, most importantly, for your love.

To my children, Cassius—the shadow minister for dinosaur welfare!—and to Aya—the parliamentary secretary for loud screaming!—I hope that I can do some good in this place that will make you proud of your dad, and make Australia a better place for your generation. I love you and your mum very much. I hope I can do you all proud and make something of my service.

Herein lies the magic of this place. It resides within and through that call to service, because I can serve and make a difference in the lives of not just my family and my friends but on a grand scale to tens of thousands of people across Wills. The tempest that rages in this place most often at 2 pm belies the quieter work MPs do for their constituents. I know it is not only sound and fury as we strut upon this stage. We have an awesome responsibility and a rare privilege to work even in the eye of the political storm and make our shared political values into realities. The magic of this place is that I—as a most improbable candidate—was elected to truly serve the people of Wills and the nation that has given me so much by making what I believe true for the many, not just the few.

Robert Kennedy: 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep', DNC Convention - 1964

27 August 1964, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA

[20 minute standing ovation]

Mr. Chairman, I wish to speak just for a few moments.

I first want to thank all of you, the delegates to the Democratic National Convention and the supporters of the Democratic Party, for all that you did for President John F. Kennedy.

I want to -- I want to -- I want to express my appreciation to you for the effort that you made on his behalf at the convention four years ago, the efforts that you made on his behalf for his election in November of 1960, and perhaps most importantly, the encouragement and the strength that you gave him after he was elected President of the United States.

I know that it was a source of the greatest strength to him to know that there were thousands of people all over the United States who were together with him, dedicated to certain principles and to certain ideals.

No matter what talent an individual possesses, no matter what energy he might have, no matter what -- how much integrity and honesty he might have, if he is by himself, and particularly a political figure, he can accomplish very little. But if he'ssustained, as President Kennedy was, by the Democratic Party all over the United States, dedicated to the same things that he was attempting to accomplish, youcan accomplish a great deal.

No one knew that really more than President John F. Kennedy. He used to take great pride in telling the trip that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison made up the Hudson River in 1800 on a botanical expedition searching for butterflies; that they ended up down in New York City and that they formed the Democratic Party.

He took great pride in the fact that the Democratic Party was the oldest political Party in the world, and he knew that this linkage of Madison and Jefferson with the leaders in New York combined the North and South, and combined the industrial areas of the country with the rural farms -- that this combination was always dedicated to progress.

All of our Presidents have been dedicated to progress: with Thomas Jefferson in the Louisiana Purchase, and when Thomas Jefferson also realized that the United States could not remain on the Eastern Seaboard and sent Lewis and Clark to the West Coast; of Andrew Jackson; of Woodrow Wilson; for Franklin Roosevelt who saved our citizens who were in great despair because of the financial crisis; of Harry Truman who not only spoke but acted for freedom.

So that when he [John F. Kennedy] became President he not only had his own principles or his own ideals but he had the strength of the Democratic Party. So that when he President he wanted to do something for the mentally ill and the mentally retarded; for those who were not covered by Social Security; for those who were not receiving an adequate minimum wage; for those who did not have adequate housing; for our elderly people who had difficulty paying their medical bills; for our fellow citizens who are not white who had difficulty living in this society. To all this he dedicated himself.

But he realized also that in order for us to make progress here at home, that we had to be strong overseas, that our military strength had to be strong. He said one time, "Only when our arms are sufficient, without doubt, can we be certain" of doubt -- "without doubt, that they will never have to be employed."¹ And so when we had the crisis with the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc in October of 1962, the Soviet Union withdrew their missiles and the bombers from Cuba.

But even beyond that, his idea really was that this country should -- and this world, really, should be a better place when we turned it over to the next generation than when we inherited it from the last generation. And that's why -- And that's why with all of the other efforts that he made -- with the Test Ban Treaty, which was done with Averell Harriman, was so important to him.

And that's why he made such an effort -- And that's why he made such an effort and so was committed to the young people not only of the United States but the young people of the world.

And in all of these efforts you were there -- all of you. And when there were difficulties, you sustained him. When there were periods of crisis, you stood beside him. When there were periods of happiness, you laughed with him. And when there [were] periods of sorrow, you comforted him.

I realize that as an individual that we can't just look back, that we must look forward. When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet:

"When he shall die take him and cut him out into the stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."

And I realize as an individual and really -- I realize that as an individual even more importantly, for our political Party and for the country, that we can't just look to the past, but we must look to the future.

And so I join with you in realizing that what has been started four years ago -- what everyone here started four years ago -- that that's to be sustained; that that's to be continued.

The same effort and the same energy and the same dedication that was given to President John F. Kennedy must be given to President Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. If we make that commitment, it will not only be for the benefit of the Democratic Party, but far more importantly, it will be for the benefit of this whole country.

When we look at this film we might think that President Kennedy once said that:

"We have the capacity to make this the best generation in the history of mankind, or make it the last."

If we do our duty, if we meet our responsibilities and our obligations, not just as Democrats, but as American citizens in our local cities and towns and farms and our states and in the country as a whole, then this country is going to be the best generation in the history of mankind.

And I think that if we dedicate ourselves, as he frequently did to all of you when he spoke, when he quoted from Robert Frost -- and said it applied to himself--but that we could really apply to the Democratic Party and to all of us as individuals -- that:

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

Mrs. Kennedy has asked that this film be dedicated to all of you and to all the others throughout the country who helped make John F. Kennedy President of the United States.

I thank you.

Hillary Clinton: 'This is a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump'', anti-Trump Speech, Reno rally - 2016

25 August 2016, Reno, Nevada, USA

Thank you, Reno! It’s great to be back in Nevada…

My original plan for this visit was to focus on our agenda to help small businesses and entrepreneurs.

This week we proposed new steps to cut red tape and taxes, and make it easier for small businesses to get the credit they need to grow and hire.

Because I believe that in America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it.

We’ll be talking a lot more about our economic plans in the days and weeks ahead.

But today, I want to address something I hear from Americans all over our country.

Everywhere I go, people tell me how concerned they are by the divisive rhetoric coming from my opponent in this election.

It’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for President of the United States.

From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.

He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.

His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.

In just the past week, under the guise of “outreach” to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of largely white audiences and described black communities in insulting and ignorant terms:

“Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership.

Crime at levels nobody has seen… Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”

Those are his words.

Donald Trump misses so much.

He doesn’t see the success of black leaders in every field…

The vibrancy of black-owned businesses…Or the strength of the black church… He doesn’t see the excellence of historically black colleges and universities or the pride of black parents watching their children thrive…And he certainly doesn’t have any solutions to take on the reality of systemic racism and create more equity and opportunity in communities of color.

It takes a lot of nerve to ask people he’s ignored and mistreated for decades, “What do you have to lose?” The answer is everything!

Trump’s lack of knowledge or experience or solutions would be bad enough.

But what he’s doing here is more sinister.

Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.

It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of President he’d be.

This is what I want to make clear today:

A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.

If he doesn’t respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?

Now, I know some people still want to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

They hope that he will eventually reinvent himself – that there’s a kinder, gentler, more responsible Donald Trump waiting in the wings somewhere.

After all, it’s hard to believe anyone – let alone a nominee for President of the United States – could really believe all the things he says.

But the hard truth is, there’s no other Donald Trump. This is it.

Maya Angelou once said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Well, throughout his career and this campaign, Donald Trump has shown us exactly who he is. We should believe him.

When Trump was getting his start in business, he was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black and Latino tenants.

Their applications would be marked with a “C” – “C” for “colored” – and then rejected.

Three years later, the Justice Department took Trump back to court because he hadn’t changed.

The pattern continued through the decades.

State regulators fined one of Trump’s casinos for repeatedly removing black dealers from the floor. No wonder the turn-over rate for his minority employees was way above average.

And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.”

He promoted the racist lie that President Obama isn’t really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black President.

In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

And he accused the Mexican government of actively sending them across the border. None of that is true.

Oh, and by the way, Mexico’s not paying for his wall either.

If it ever gets built, you can be sure that American taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.

Since then, there’s been a steady stream of bigotry.

We all remember when Trump said a distinguished federal judge born in Indiana couldn’t be trusted to do his job because, quote, “He’s a Mexican.”

Think about that.

The man who today is the standard bearer of the Republican Party said a federal judge was incapable of doing his job solely because of his heritage.

Even the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, described that as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

To this day, he’s never apologized to Judge Curiel.

But for Trump, that’s just par for the course.

This is someone who retweets white supremacists online, like the user who goes by the name “white-genocide-TM.” Trump took this fringe bigot with a few dozen followers and spread his message to 11 million people.

His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website.

The Trump campaign also selected a prominent white nationalist leader as a delegate in California. They only dropped him under pressure.

When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack.

And when Trump was asked about anti-Semitic slurs and death threats coming from his supporters, he refused to condemn them.

Through it all, he has continued pushing discredited conspiracy theories with racist undertones.

Trump said thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t.

He suggested that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Perhaps in Trump’s mind, because he was a Cuban immigrant, he must have had something to do with it. Of course there’s absolutely no evidence of that.

Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS. And then he repeated that nonsense over and over.

His latest paranoid fever dream is about my health. All I can say is, Donald, dream on.

This is what happens when you treat the National Enquirer like Gospel.

It’s what happens when you listen to the radio host Alex Jones, who claims that 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings were inside jobs. He said the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were child actors and no one was actually killed there.

Trump didn’t challenge those lies. He went on Jones’ show and said: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

This man wants to be President of the United States.

I’ve stood by President Obama’s side as he made the toughest decisions a Commander-in-Chief ever has to make.

In times of crisis, our country depends on steady leadership… clear thinking… and calm judgment… because one wrong move can mean the difference between life and death.

The last thing we need in the Situation Room is a loose cannon who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, and who buys so easily into racially-tinged rumors.

Someone detached from reality should never be in charge of making decisions that are as real as they come.

It’s another reason why Donald Trump is simply temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States.

Now, some people will say that his bluster and bigotry is just over-heated campaign rhetoric – an outrageous person saying outrageous things for attention.

But look at the policies Trump has proposed. They would put prejudice into practice.

And don’t be distracted by his latest attempts to muddy the waters.

He may have some new people putting new words in his mouth… but we know where he stands.

He would form a deportation force to round up millions of immigrants and kick them out of the country.

He’d abolish the bedrock constitutional principle that says if you’re born in the United States, you’re an American citizen. He says that children born in America to undocumented parents are, quote, “anchor babies” and should be deported.

Millions of them.

And he’d ban Muslims around the world – 1.5 billion men, women, and children –from entering our country just because of their religion.

Think about that for a minute. How would it actually work? People landing in U.S. airports would line up to get their passports stamped, just like they do now.

But in Trump’s America, when they step up to the counter, the immigration officer would ask every single person, “What is your religion?”

And then what?

What if someone says, “I’m a Christian,” but the agent doesn’t believe them.

Do they have to prove it? How would they do that?

Ever since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, America has distinguished itself as a haven for people fleeing religious persecution.

Under Donald Trump, America would distinguish itself as the only country in the world to impose a religious test at the border.

Come to think of it, there actually may be one place that does that. It’s the so-called Islamic State. The territory ISIS controls. It would be a cruel irony if America followed its lead.

Don’t worry, some will say, as President, Trump will be surrounded by smart advisors who will rein in his worst impulses.

So when a tweet gets under his skin and he wants to retaliate with a cruise missile, maybe cooler heads will be there to convince him not to.

Maybe.

But look at who he’s put in charge of his campaign.

Trump likes to say he only hires the “best people.” But he’s had to fire so many campaign managers it’s like an episode of the Apprentice.

The latest shake-up was designed to – quote – “Let Trump be Trump.” To do that, he hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO.

To give you a flavor of his work, here are a few headlines they’ve published:

“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

“Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”

“Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield”

“Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.”

That one came shortly after the Charleston massacre, when Democrats and Republicans alike were doing everything they could to heal racial divides. Breitbart tried to enflame them further.

Just imagine – Donald Trump reading that and thinking: “this is what I need more of in my campaign.”

Bannon has nasty things to say about pretty much everyone.

This spring, he railed against Paul Ryan for, quote “rubbing his social-justice Catholicism in my nose every second.”

No wonder he’s gone to work for Trump – the only Presidential candidate ever to get into a public feud with the Pope.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas.

Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right.”

The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loosely organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the “Alt-Right.” A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

This is part of a broader story -- the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world.

Just yesterday, one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with Donald Trump in Mississippi.

Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are quote “worth less” than men, and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race -- that’s who Trump wants by his side.

The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs.

Now he’s standing on the same stage as the Republican nominee.

Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies.

He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally.

American presidents from Truman to Reagan have rejected the kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia.

We should, too.

All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.

Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.

On David Duke’s radio show the other day, the mood was jubilant.

“We appear to have taken over the Republican Party,” one white supremacist said.

Duke laughed. There’s still more work to do, he said.

No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here. The names may have changed… Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright.

And now Trump is trying to rebrand himself as well. Don’t be fooled.

There’s an old Mexican proverb that says “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.”

We know who Trump is. A few words on a teleprompter won’t change that.

He says he wants to “make America great again,” but his real message remains “Make America hate again.”

This isn’t just about one election. It’s about who we are as a nation.

It’s about the kind of example we want to set for our children and grandchildren.

Next time you watch Donald Trump rant on television, think about all the kids listening across our country. They hear a lot more than we think.

Parents and teachers are already worried about what they’re calling the “Trump Effect.”

Bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants.

At a recent high school basketball game in Indiana, white students held up Trump signs and taunted Latino players on the opposing team with chants of “Build the wall!” and “Speak English.”

After a similar incident in Iowa, one frustrated school principal said, “They see it in a presidential campaign and now it's OK for everyone to say this.”

We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior in our own homes. How can we stand for it from a candidate for president?

This is a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump. It’s a moment of reckoning for all of us who love our country and believe that America is better than this.

Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the Party to get out.

The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims “love America just as much as I do.”

In 2008, John McCain told his own supporters they were wrong about the man he was trying to defeat. Senator McCain made sure they knew – Barack Obama is an American citizen and “a decent person.”

We need that kind of leadership again.

Every day, more Americans are standing up and saying “enough is enough” – including a lot of Republicans. I’m honored to have their support.

And I promise you this: with your help, I will be a President for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. For those who vote for me and those who don't.

For all Americans.

Because I believe we are stronger together.

It’s a vision for the future rooted in our values and reflected in a rising generation of young people who are the most open, diverse, and connected we’ve ever seen.

Just look at our fabulous Olympic team.

Like Ibtihaj Muhammad, an African-American Muslim from New Jersey who won the bronze medal in fencing with grace and skill. Would she even have a place in Donald Trump’s America?

When I was growing up, Simone Manuel wouldn’t have been allowed to swim in the same public pool as Katie Ledecky. Now they’re winning Olympic medals as teammates.

So let’s keep moving forward together.

Let’s stand up against prejudice and paranoia.

Let’s prove once again, that America is great because is America is good.

Thank you, and may God bless the United States.

Khizr M. Khan: 'Donald Trump, you have sacrificed nothing and no one', DNC - 2016

28 July 2016, DNC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Tonight, we are honored to stand here as the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, and as patriotic American Muslims with undivided loyalty to our country.

Like many immigrants, we came to this country empty-handed. We believed in American democracy — that with hard work and the goodness of this country, we could share in and contribute to its blessings.

We were blessed to raise our three sons in a nation where they were free to be themselves and follow their dreams.

Our son, Humayun, had dreams of being a military lawyer. But he put those dreams aside the day he sacrificed his life to save his fellow soldiers.

Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son "the best of America."

If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America.

Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.

Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words "liberty" and "equal protection of law."

Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of the brave patriots who died defending America — you will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.

You have sacrificed nothing and no one.

We can't solve our problems by building walls and sowing division.

We are Stronger Together.

And we will keep getting stronger when Hillary Clinton becomes our next President.

Barack Obama: 'America is already great', DNC - 2016

27 July 2016, DNC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2016

I love you back!

Hello America, hello Democrats!

So 12 years ago tonight I addressed this convention for the very first time.

You met my two little girls, Malia and Sasha, now two amazing young women who just fill me with pride.

You fell for my brilliant wife and partner, Michelle...

...who has made me a better father and a better man, who has gone on to inspire our nation as first lady and who somehow hasn't aged a day.

I know, the same cannot be said for me. My girls remind me all the time. Wow, you've changed so much, daddy.

And then they try to clean it up. Not bad, just more mature.

And it's true, I was so young that first time in Boston.

And look, I'll admit it, maybe I was a little nervous addressing such a big crowd. But I was filled with faith; faith in America, the generous, bighearted, hopeful country that made my story, that made all of our stories possible.

A lot's happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war and it's been tested by recession and all manner of challenges, I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am even more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.

How could I not be, after all that we've achieved together?

After the worst recession in 80 years, we've fought our way back. We've seen deficits come down, 401(k)s recover, an auto industry set new records, unemployment reach eight-year lows, and our businesses create 15 million new jobs.

After a century of trying, we declared that health care in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody.

After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil, we doubled our production of clean energy.

We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

 Through diplomacy, we shut down Iran's nuclear weapons program, we opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba, brought nearly 200 nations together around a climate agreement that could save this planet for our children.

We put policies in place to help students with loans, protect consumers from fraud, cut veteran homelessness almost in half. And through countless acts of quiet courage, America learned that love has no limits, and marriage equality is now a reality across the land.

By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started. And through every victory and every setback, I've insisted that change is never easy, and never quick; that we wouldn't meet all of our challenges in one term, or one presidency, or even in one lifetime.

So tonight, I'm here to tell you that yes, we've still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven-and-a-half years. We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer; our homeland more secure, and our world more peaceful and sustainable for the next generation.

We're not done perfecting our union, or living up to our founding creed that all of us are created equal, all of us are free in the eyes of God.

And that work involves a big choice this November. I think it's fair to say, this is not your typical election. It's not just a choice between parties or policies, the usual debates between left and right. This is a more fundamental choice about who we are as a people, and whether we stay true to this great American experiment in self-government.

Look, we Democrats have always had plenty of differences with the Republican Party, and there's nothing wrong with that. it's precisely this contest of ideas that pushes our country forward.

But what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn't particularly Republican and it sure wasn't conservative. What we heard was a deeply pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other and turn away from the rest of the world. There were no serious solutions to pressing problems, just the fanning of resentment and blame and anger and hate. And that is not the America I know.

The America I know is full of courage and optimism and ingenuity. The America I know is decent and generous. Sure, we have real anxieties about paying the bills and protecting our kids, caring for a sick parent. We get frustrated with political gridlock and worry about racial divisions. We are shocked and saddened by the madness of Orlando or Nice. There are pockets of America that never recovered from factory closures, men who took pride in hard work and providing for their families who now feel forgotten, parents who wonder whether their kids will have the same opportunities we had.

All of that is real. We're challenged to do better, to be better. But as I've traveled this country, through all 50 states, as I've rejoiced with you and mourned with you, what I have also seen, more than anything, is what is right with America.

I see people working hard and starting businesses. I see people teaching kids and serving our country. I see engineers inventing stuff, doctors coming up with new cures. I see a younger generation full of energy and new ideas, not constrained by what is, ready to seize what ought to be.

And most of all, I see Americans of every party, every background, every faith who believe that we are stronger together, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, young, old, gay, straight, men, women, folks with disabilities, all pledging allegiance, under the same proud flag, to this big, bold country that we love.

That's what I see! That's the America that I know!

And there is only one candidate in this race who believes in that future, has devoted her life to it; a mother and grandmother who would do anything to help our children thrive, a leader with real plans to break down barriers and blast through glass ceilings and widen the circle of opportunity to every single American, the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton.

Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!

That's right. That's right.

Let me tell you, eight years ago, you may remember Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination. We battled for a year-and- a-half. Let me tell you, it was tough because Hillary was tough. I was worn out.

She was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger Rogers it was backwards in heels.

And every time I thought I might have that race won, Hillary just came back stronger.

But after it was all over, I asked Hillary to join my team.

And she was a little surprised, some of my staff were surprised.

But ultimately said yes because she knew that what was at stake was bigger than either of us.

And for four years, for four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline. I came to realize that her unbelievable work ethic wasn't for praise, it wasn't for attention, that she was in this for everyone who needs a champion.

I understood that after all these years, she has never forgotten just who she's fighting for.

Hillary's still got the tenacity that she had as a young woman working at the Children's Defense Fund, going door to door to ultimately make sure kids with disabilities could get a quality education.

She's still got the heart she showed as our first lady, working with Congress to help push through a Children's Health Insurance Program that to this day protects millions of kids.

She's still seared with the memory of every American she met who lost loved ones on 9/11, which is why, as a senator from New York, she fought so hard for funding to help first responders, to help the city rebuild; why, as secretary of state, she sat with me in the Situation Room and forcefully argued in favor of the mission that took out bin Laden.

You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office. You can read about it, you can study it. But until you've sat at that desk, you don't know what it's like to manage a global crisis or send young people to war. But Hillary's been in the room, she's been part of those decisions.

She knows what's at stake in the decisions our government makes, what's at stake for the working family, for the senior citizen, for the small-business owner, for the soldier, for the veteran. And even in the midst of crisis, she listens to people and she keeps her cool and she treats everybody with respect. And no matter how daunting the odds, no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits.

That's the Hillary I know. That's the Hillary I've come to admire. And that's why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman, not me, not Bill, nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.

I hope you don't mind, Bill, but I was just telling the truth, man.

And by the way, in case you were wondering about her judgment, take a look at her choice of running mate. Tim Kaine is as good a man, as humble and as committed a public servant as anybody that I know. I know his family. I love Anne, I love their kids. He will be a great vice president, he will make Hillary a better president, just like my dear friend and brother Joe Biden has made me a better president.

Now, Hillary has real plans to address the concerns she's heard from you on the campaign trail. She's got specific ideas to invest in new jobs, to help workers share in their company's profits, to help put kids in preschool, and put students through college without taking on a ton of debt. That's what leaders do.

And then there's Donald Trump.

Don't boo; vote!

You know, the Donald is not really a plans guy. He's not really a facts guy, either.

He calls himself a business guy, which is true, but I have to say, I know plenty of businessmen and women who've achieved remarkable success without leaving a trail of lawsuits and unpaid workers and people feeling like they got cheated.

Does anyone really believe that a guy who's spent his 70 years on this Earth showing no regard for working people is suddenly going to be your champion? Your voice? Hey, if so, you should vote for him.

But if you're someone who's truly concerned about paying your bills, if you're really concerned about pocketbook issues and seeing the economy grow and creating more opportunity for everybody, then the choice isn't even close. If you want someone with a lifelong track record of fighting for higher wages and better benefits and a fairer tax code and a bigger voice for workers and stronger regulations on Wall Street, then you should vote for Hillary Clinton.

And if you're rightly concerned about who's going to keep you and your family safe in a dangerous world, well, the choice is even clearer. Hillary Clinton is respected around the world, not just by leaders, but by the people they serve.

I have to say this. People outside of the United States do not understand what's going on in this election, they really don't.

Because they know Hillary, they've seen her work. She's worked closely with our intelligence teams, our diplomats, our military. And she has the judgment and the experience and the temperament to meet the threat from terrorism. It's not new to her. Our troops have pounded ISIL without mercy, taking out their leaders, taking back territory. And I know Hillary won't relent until ISIL is destroyed.

She will finish the job and she'll do it without resorting to torture or banning entire religions from entering our country. She is fit and she is ready to be the next commander in chief.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump calls our military a disaster. Apparently, he doesn't know the men and women who make up the strongest fighting force the world has ever known.

He suggests America is weak. He must not hear the billions of men and women and children, from the Baltics to Burma, who still look to America to be the light of freedom and dignity and human rights. He cozies up to Putin, praises Saddam Hussein, tells our NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection.

Well, America's promises do not come with a price tag. We meet our commitments. We bear our burdens. That's one of the reasons why almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago when I took office.

America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness does not depend on Donald Trump.

In fact, it doesn't depend on any one person. And that, in the end, may be the biggest difference in this election, the meaning of our democracy.

Ronald Reagan called America "a shining city on a hill." Donald Trump calls it "a divided crime scene" that only he can fix. It doesn't matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they've been in decades, because he's not actually offering any real solutions to those issues. He's just offering slogans, and he's offering fear. He's betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election.

And that's another bet that Donald Trump will lose. And the reason he'll lose it is because he's selling the American people short. We are not a fragile people, we're not a frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don't look to be ruled.

Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that we the people can form a more perfect union. That's who we are. That's our birthright, the capacity to shape our own destiny.

That's what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny and our GIs to liberate a continent. It's what gave women the courage to reach for the ballot and marchers to cross a bridge in Selma and workers to organize and fight for collective bargaining and better wages.

America has never been about what one person says he'll do for us. It's about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard and slow and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.

And that's what Hillary Clinton understands. She knows that this is a big, diverse country, she has seen it, she's traveled, she's talked to folks and she understands that most issues are rarely black and white. She understands that even when you're 100 percent right, getting things done requires compromise. That democracy doesn't work if we constantly demonize each other.

She knows that for progress to happen, we have to listen to each other and see ourselves in each other, and fight for our principles, but also fight to find common ground, no matter how elusive that may sometimes seem.

Hillary knows we can work through racial divides in this country when we realize the worry black parents feel when their son leaves the house isn't so different than what a brave cop's family feels when he puts on the blue and goes to work, that we can honor police and treat every community fairly. We can do that.

And she knows that acknowledging problems that have festered for decades isn't making race relations worse, it's creating the possibility for people of good will to join and make things better.

Hillary knows we can insist on a lawful and orderly immigration system while still seeing striving students and their toiling parents as loving families, not criminals or rapists, families that came here for the same reasons our forebears came, to work and to study and to make a better life, in a place where we can talk and worship and love as we please. She knows their dream is quintessentially American, and the American dream is something no wall will ever contain. (APPLAUSE)

These are the things that Hillary knows. It can be frustrating, this business of democracy. Trust me, I know. Hillary knows, too. When the other side refuses to compromise, progress can stall. People are hurt by the inaction. Supporters can grow impatient and worry that you're not trying hard enough, that you've maybe sold out.

But I promise you, when we keep at it, when we change enough minds, when we deliver enough votes, then progress does happen. And if you doubt that, just ask the 20 million more people who have health care today. Just ask the Marine who proudly serves his country without hiding the husband that he loves.

Democracy works, America, but we gotta want it, not just during an election year, but all the days in between.

So if you agree that there's too much inequality in our economy, and too much money in our politics, we all need to be as vocal and as organized and as persistent as Bernie Sanders' supporters have been during this election.

We all need to get out and vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, and then hold them accountable until they get the job done.

That's right, feel the Bern!

If you want more justice in the justice system, then we've all got to vote, not just for a president, but for mayors and sheriffs and state's attorneys and state legislators. That's where the criminal law is made. And we've got to work with police and protesters until laws and practices are changed. That's how democracy works.

If you want to fight climate change, we've got to engage not only young people on college campuses, we've got to reach out to the coal miner who's worried about taking care of his family, the single mom worried about gas prices.

If you want to protect our kids and our cops from gun violence, we've got to get the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, who agree on things like background checks to be just as vocal and determined as the gun lobby that blocks change through every funeral that we hold. That's how change happens.

Look, Hillary's got her share of critics. She has been caricatured by the right and by some on the left. She has been accused of everything you can imagine and some things that you cannot.

But she knows that's what happens when you're under a microscope for 40 years.

She knows that sometimes during those 40 years she's made mistakes, just like I have, just like we all do. That's what happens when we try. That's what happens when you're the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described, not the timid souls who criticize from the sidelines, but someone "who is actually in the arena, who strives valiantly, who errs, but who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement."

Hillary Clinton is that woman in the arena. She's been there for us, even if we haven't always noticed.

And if you're serious about our democracy, you can't afford to stay home just because she might not align with you on every issue. You've got to get in the arena with her, because democracy isn't a spectator sport. America isn't about "yes he will." It's about "yes we can." And we're going to carry Hillary to victory this fall, because that's what the moment demands.

Yes, we can! Not yes, she can; not yes, I can; yes, we can!

You know, there's been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America's lost, people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control. They tell voters there's a "real America" out there that must be restored.

This isn't an idea, by the way, that started with Donald Trump. It's been peddled by politicians for a long time, probably from the start of our republic. And it's got me thinking about the story I told you 12 years ago tonight about my Kansas grandparents and the things they taught me when I was growing up.

See, my grandparents, they came from the heartland. Their ancestors began settling there about 200 years ago. I don't know if they had their birth certificates, but they were there.

They were Scotch-Irish mostly, farmers, teachers, ranch hands, pharmacists, oil rig workers. Hardy, small-town folks. Some were Democrats, but a lot of them, maybe even most of them were Republicans, the party of Lincoln. And my grandparents explained that folks in these parts, they didn't like show-offs, they didn't admire braggarts or bullies.

They didn't respect mean-spiritedness or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, they valued traits like honesty and hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility; helping each other out. That's what they believed in. True things, things that last, the things we try to teach our kids.

And what my grandparents understood was that these values weren't limited to Kansas. They weren't limited to small towns. These values could travel to Hawaii.

They could travel even the other side of the world, where my mother would end up working to help poor women get a better life trying to apply those values. My grandparents knew these values weren't reserved for one race; they could be passed down to a half- Kenyan grandson, or a half-Asian granddaughter; in fact, they were the same values Michelle's parents, the descendants of slaves, taught their own kids living in a bungalow on the south side of Chicago.

They knew these values were exactly what drew immigrants here, and they believed that the children of those immigrants were just as American as their own, whether they wore a cowboy hat or a yarmulke, a baseball cap or a hijab.

America has changed over the years. But these values that my grandparents taught me, they haven't gone anywhere. They're as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots is what's in here. That's what matters.

And that's why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries and blend it into something uniquely our own. That's why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That's why our military can look the way it does, every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.

That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection, that common creed. We don't fear the future; we shape it, embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.

That's what Hillary Clinton understands. This fighter, this stateswoman, this mother and grandmother, this public servant, this patriot, that's the America she's fighting for.

And that is why I have confidence, as I leave this stage tonight, that the Democratic Party is in good hands. My time in this office, it hasn't fixed everything. As much as we've done, there's still so much I want to do. But for all the tough lessons I've had to learn, for all the places I've fallen short, I've told Hillary, and I'll tell you what's picked me back up, every single time: It's been you, the American people.

It's the letter I keep on my wall from a survivor in Ohio who twice almost lost everything to cancer, but urged me to keep fighting for health care reform, even when the battle seemed lost. Do not quit.

It's the painting I keep in my private office, a big-eyed, green owl with blue wings, made by a 7-year-old girl who was taken from us in Newtown, given to me by her parents so I wouldn't forget, a reminder of all the parents who have turned their grief into action.

It's the small-business owner in Colorado who cut most of his own salary so he wouldn't have to lay off any of his workers in the recession because, he said, that wouldn't have been in the spirit of America.

It's the conservative in Texas who said he disagreed with me on everything, but appreciated that, like him, I try to be a good dad.

It's the courage of the young soldier from Arizona who nearly died on the battlefield in Afghanistan, but who has learned to speak again and walk again, and earlier this year, stepped through the door of the Oval Office on his own power, to salute and shake my hand.

It is every American who believed we could change this country for the better, so many of you who'd never been involved in politics, who picked up phones and hit the streets and used the internet in amazing new ways that I didn't really understand, but made change happen. You are the best organizers on the planet, and I am so proud of all the change that you made possible.

Time and again, you've picked me up. And I hope sometimes I've picked you up, too.

And tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me.

I ask you to carry her the same way you carried me. Because you're who I was talking about 12 years ago, when I talked about hope. It's been you who've fueled my dogged faith in our future, even when the odds were great, even when the road is long. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope!

America, you have vindicated that hope these past eight years.

Keeping up with politics is easy now.

And now I'm ready to pass the baton and do my part as a private citizen. So this year, in this election, I'm asking you to join me, to reject cynicism and reject fear and to summon what is best in us; to elect Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States and show the world we still believe in the promise of this great nation.

Thank you for this incredible journey. Let's keep it going. God bless you. God bless the United States of America.

John Howard: "All of the doomsday predictions, were not realised", In defence of Iraq invasion - 2003

14 May 2003, House of Representatives, Canberra, Australia

I again take the opportunity of reaffirming the correctness of the government’s assessment in predeploying our forces, and I record the bitter opposition of the Australian Labor Party when that decision was taken. Not only was the military operation completed quickly and successfully but it is also worth recording that all of the doomsday predictions, particularly the many that came from those who sit opposite, were not realised.

The oilwells were not set on fire; there were not millions of refugees; the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were not breached to bring on catastrophic flooding; and there was no long, drawn out, bloody, Stalingrad style street-to-street fighting in Baghdad. For all of this we must be immensely grateful, but it is a reminder of the hysteria and the doomsday predictions that often accompany operations of this kind. And, just as many of the predictions about a Western Front style holocaust that were made in 1991 when the land war commenced were proved wrong, so the predictions on this occasion have been proved wrong.

The decisive victory of the American led coalition reflects enormous credit on the strength and the determination of the leadership of President Bush. Again I remind the House of the way in which his role was vilified and traduced by many of those who sit opposite and of the way in which speaker after speaker from the Australian Labor Party impugned his integrity, assaulted his judgment and called into question his ability to lead the United States in this very difficult conflict. History has proved them wrong.

The performance of the President has illustrated how infantile their protests were, and the leadership that he has given on this occasion, I believe, will bring about a permanent change in attitudes in the Middle East.

Bill Clinton: "In the spring of 1971 I met a girl,", DNC - 2016

26 July 2016, Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

In the spring of 1971, I met a girl.

The first time I saw her we were, appropriately enough, in a class on political and civil rights. She had thick blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup, and she had a sense of strength and self- possession that I found magnetic. After the class I followed her out, intending to introduce myself. I got close enough to touch her back, but I couldn’t do it. Somehow I knew this would not be just another tap on the shoulder, that I might be starting something I couldn’t stop.

And I saw her several more times in the next few days, but I still didn’t speak to her. Then one night I was in the law library talking to a classmate who wanted me to join the Yale Law Journal. He said it would guarantee me a job in a big firm or a clerkship with a federal judge. I really wasn’t interested, I just wanted to go home to Arkansas.

Then I saw the girl again, standing at the opposite end of that long room. Finally she was staring back at me, so I watched her. She closed her book, put it down and started walking toward me. She walked the whole length of the library, came up to me and said, look, if you’re going to keep staring at me…

…and now I’m staring back, we at least ought to know each other’s name. I’m Hillary Rodham, who are you?

I was so impressed and surprised that, whether you believe it or not, momentarily I was speechless.

Finally, I sort of blurted out my name and we exchanged a few words and then she went away.

Well, I didn’t join the Law Review, but I did leave that library with a whole new goal in mind.

A couple of days later, I saw her again. I remember, she was wearing a long, white, flowery skirt. And I went up to her and she said she was going to register for classes for the next term. And I said I’d go, too. And we stood in line and talked — you had to do that to register back then — and I thought I was doing pretty well until we got to the front of the line and the registrar looked up and said, Bill, what are you doing here, you registered morning?

I turned red and she laughed that big laugh of hers. And I thought, well, heck, since my cover’s been blown I just went ahead and asked her to take a walk down to the art museum.

We’ve been walking and talking and laughing together ever since.

And we’ve done it in good times and bad, through joy and heartbreak. We cried together this morning on the news that our good friend and a lot of your good friend, Mark Weiner, passed away early this morning.

We’ve built up a lifetime of memories. After the first month and that first walk, I actually drove her home to Park Ridge, Illinois…

…to meet her family and see the town where she grew up, a perfect example of post World War II middle-class America, street after street of nice houses, great schools, good parks, a big public swimming pool, and almost all white.

I really liked her family. Her crusty, conservative father, her rambunctious brothers, all extolling the virtues of rooting for the Bears and the Cuba.

And for the people from Illinois here, they even told me what “waiting for next year” meant.

It could be next year, guys.

Now, her mother was different. She was more liberal than the boys. And she had a childhood that made mine look like a piece of cake. She was easy to underestimate with her soft manner and she reminded me all over again of the truth of that old saying you should never judge a book by its covers. Knowing her was one of the greatest gifts Hillary ever gave me.

I learned that Hillary got her introduction to social justice through her Methodist youth minister, Don Jones. He took her downtown to Chicago to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak and he remained her friend for the rest of his life. This will be the only campaign of hers he ever missed.

When she got to college, her support for civil rights, her opposition to the Vietnam War compelled her to change party, to become a Democrat.

And then between college and law school on a total lark she went alone to Alaska and spent some time sliming fish.

More to the point, by the time I met her she had already been involved in the law school’s legal services project and she had been influenced by Marian Wright Edelman.

She took a summer internship interviewing workers in migrant camps for Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee.

She had also begun working in the Yale New Haven Hospital to develop procedures to handle suspected child abuse cases. She got so involved in children’s issues that she actually took an extra year in law school working at the child studies center to learn what more could be done to improve the lives and the futures of poor children.

So she was already determined to figure out how to make things better.

Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens. In the summer of 1972, she went to Dothan, Alabama to visit one of those segregated academies that then enrolled over half-a-million white kids in the South. The only way the economics worked is if they claimed federal tax exemptions to which they were not legally entitled. She got sent to prove they weren’t.

So she sauntered into one of these academies all by herself, pretending to be a housewife that had just moved to town and needed to find a school for her son. And they exchanged pleasantries and finally she said, look, let’s just get to the bottom line here, if I enroll my son in this school will he be in a segregated school, yes or know? And the guy said absolutely. She had him!

I’ve seen it a thousand times since. And she went back and her encounter was part of a report that gave Marian Marian Wright Edelman the ammunition she needed to keep working to force the Nixon administration to take those tax exemptions away and give our kids access to an equal education.

Then she went down to south Texas where she met…she met one of the nicest fellows I ever met, the wonderful union leader Franklin Garcia, and he helped her register Mexican- American voters. I think some of them are still around to vote for her in 2016.

Then in our last year in law school, Hillary kept up this work. She went to South Carolina to see why so many young…

…she went to South Carolina to see why so many young African- American boys, I mean, young teenagers, were being jailed for years with adults in men’s prisons. And she filed a report on that, which led to some changes, too. Always making things better. (APPLAUSE)

Now, meanwhile, let’s get back to business. I was trying to convince her to marry me.

I first proposed to her on a trip to Great Britain, the first time she had been overseas. And we were on the shoreline of this wonderful little lake, Lake Ennerdale. I asked her to marry me and she said I can’t do it.

So in 1974 I went home to teach in the law school and Hillary moved to Massachusetts to keep working on children’s issues. This time trying to figure out why so many kids counted in the Census weren’t enrolled in school. She found one of them sitting alone on her porch in a wheelchair. Once more, she filed a report about these kids, and that helped influence ultimately the Congress to adopt the proposition that children with disabilities, physical or otherwise, should have equal access to public education.

You saw the results of that last night when Anastasia Somoza talked.

She never made fun of people with disabilities; she tried to empower them based on their abilities.

So the second time I tried a different tack. I said I really want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it.

And she smiled and looked at me, like, what is this boy up to? She said that is not a very good sales pitch. I said I know, but it’s true. And I meant it, it was true.

I said I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people’s lives. (APPLAUSE)

So I suggested she go home to Illinois or move to New York and look for a chance to run for office. She just laughed and said, are you out of you mind, nobody would ever vote for me.

So I finally got her to visit me in Arkansas.

And when she did, the people at the law school were so impressed they offered a teaching position. And she decided to take a huge chance. She moved to a strange place, more rural, more culturally conservative than anyplace she had ever been, where she knew good and well people would wonder what in the world she was like and whether they could or should accept her.

Didn’t take them long to find out what she was like. She loved her teaching and she got frustrated when one of her students said, well, what do you expect, I’m just from Arkansas. She said, don’t tell me that, you’re as smart as anybody, you’ve just got to believe in yourself and work hard and set high goals. She believed that anybody could make it.

She also started the first legal aid clinic in northwest Arkansas, providing legal aid services to poor people who couldn’t pay for them. And one day I was driving her to the airport to fly back to Chicago when we passed this little brick house that had a for sale sign on it. And she said, boy, that’s a pretty house. It had 1,100 square feet, an attic, fan and no air conditioner in hot Arkansas, and a screened-in porch.

Hillary commented on what a uniquely designed and beautiful house it was. So I took a big chance. I bought the house. My mortgage was $175 a month.

When she came back, I picked up her up and I said, you remember that house you liked? She said yeah. I said, while you were gone I bought it, you have to marry me now.

The third time was the charm.

We were married in that little house on October the 11th, 1975. I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.

A little over a year later we moved to Little Rock when I became attorney general and she joined the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi. Soon after, she started a group called the Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children.

It’s a group, as you can hear, is still active today.

In 1979, just after I became governor, I asked Hillary to chair a rural health committee to help expand health care to isolated farm and mountain areas. They recommended to do that partly by deploying trained nurse practitioners in places with no doctors to provide primary care they were trained to provide. It was a big deal then, highly controversial and very important.

And I got the feeling that what she did for the rest of her life she was doing there. She just went out and figured out what needed to be done and what made the most sense and what would help the most people. And then if it was controversial she’d just try to persuade people it was the right thing to do.

It wasn’t the only big thing that happened that spring my first year as governor. We found out we were going to be parents.

And time passed. On February 27th, 1980, 15 minutes after I got home from the National Governors Conference in Washington, Hillary’s water broke and off we went to the hospital. Chelsea was born just before midnight.

And it was the greatest moment of my life. The miracle of a new beginning. The hole it filled for me because my own father died before I was born, and the absolute conviction that my daughter had the best mother in the whole world.

For the next 17 years, through nursing school, Montessori, kindergarten, through T-ball, softball, soccer, volleyball and her passion for ballet, through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations and Chelsea’s own very ambitious excursions, from Halloween parties in the neighborhood, to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother.

She became, as she often said, our family’s designated worrier, born with an extra responsibility gene. The truth is we rarely disagreed on parenting, although she did believe that I had gone a little over the top when I took a couple of days off with Chelsea to watch all six “Police Academy” movies back-to-back.

When Chelsea was 9 months old, I was defeated for reelection in the Reagan landslide. And I became overnight, I think, the youngest former governor in the history of the country. We only had two-year terms back then.

Hillary was great. Immediately she said, OK, what are we going to do? Here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to get a house, you’re going to get a job, we’re going to enjoy being Chelsea’s parents. And if you really want to run again, you’ve got to go out and talk to people and figure out why you lost, tell people you got the message and show them you’ve still got good ideas.

I followed her advice. Within two days we had a house, I soon had a job. We had two fabulous years with Chelsea. And in 1982, I became the first governor in the history of our state to be elected, defeated and elected again.

I think my experience is it’s a pretty good thing to follow her advice. The rest of the decade sort of flew by as our lives settled into a rhythm of family and work and friends.

In 1983, Hillary chaired a committee to recommend new education standards for us as a part of and in response to a court order to equalize school funding and a report by a national expert that said our woefully underfunded schools were the worst in America.

Typical Hillary, she held listening tours in all 75 counties with our committee. She came up with really ambitious recommendations. For example, that we be the first state in America to require elementary counselors in every school because so many kids were having trouble at home and they needed it.

So I called the legislature into session hoping to pass the standards, pass a pay raise for teachers and raise the sales tax to pay for it all. I knew it would be hard to pass, but it got easier after Hillary testified before the education committee and the chairman, a plainspoken farmer, said looks to me like we elected the wrong Clinton.

Well, by the time I ran for president nine years later, the same expert who said that we had the worst schools in America said that our state was one of the two most improved states in America. And that’s because of those standards that Hillary developed.

Now, two years later, Hillary told me about a preschool program developed in Israel called HIPPY, Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters. The idea was to teach low-income parents, even those that couldn’t read, to be their children’s first teachers.

She said she thought it would work in Arkansas. I said that’s great, what are we going to do about it? She said, oh, I already did it. I called the woman who started the program in Israel, she’ll be here in about 10 days and help us get started.

Next thing you know I’m being dragged around to all these little preschool graduations. Now, keep in mind, this was before any state even had universal kindergarten and I’m being dragged to preschool graduations watching these poor parents with tears in their eyes because they never thought they’d be able to help their kids learn.

Now, 20 years of research has shown how well this program works to improve readiness for school and academic achievement. There are a lot of young adults in America who have no idea Hillary had anything to do with it who are enjoying better lives because they were in that program.

CLINTON: She did all this while being a full-time worker, a mother and enjoying our life. Why? Well, she’s insatiably curious, she’s a natural leader, she’s a good organizer, and she’s the best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life.

Look, this is a really important point. This is a really important point for you to take out of this convention. If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people’s lives are better, you know it’s hard and some people think it’s boring. Speeches like this are fun.

Actually doing the work is hard. So people say, well, we need to change. She’s been around a long time, she sure has, and she’s sure been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better.

I can tell you this. If you were sitting where I’m sitting and you heard what I have heard at every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, on every lone walk, you would say this woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything. She always wants to move the ball forward. That is just who she is.

When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn’t break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one. The most important goal was to get more children with health insurance.

In 1997, Congress passed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, still an important part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. It insures more than 8 million kids. There are a lot of other things in that bill that she got done piece by piece, pushing that rock up the hill.

In 1997, she also teamed with the House Minority Leader Tom DeLay, who maybe disliked me more than any of Newt Gingrich’s crowd. They worked on a bill together to increase adoptions of children under foster care. She wanted to do it because she knew that Tom DeLay, for all of our differences, was an adoptive parent and she honored him for doing that.

Now, the bill they worked on, which passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, led to a big increase in the adoption of children out of foster care, including non-infant kids and special-needs kids. It made life better because she’s a change-maker, that’s what she does.

Now, when you’re doing all this, real life doesn’t stop. 1997 was the year Chelsea finished high school and went to college. We were happy for her, but sad for us to see her go. I’ll never forget moving her into her dorm room at Stanford. It would have been a great little reality flick. There I was in a trance just staring out the window trying not to cry, and there was Hillary on her hands and knees desperately looking for one more drawer to put that liner paper in.

Finally, Chelsea took charge and told us ever so gently that it was time for us to go. So we closed a big chapter in the most important work of our lives. As you’ll see Thursday night when Chelsea speaks, Hillary’s done a pretty fine job of being a mother.

And as you saw last night, beyond a shadow of a doubt so has Michelle Obama.

Now, fast forward. In 1999, Congressman Charlie Rangel and other New York Democrats urged Hillary…

…urged Hillary to run for the seat of retiring Senator Pat Moynihan. We had always intended to go to New York after I left office and commute to Arkansas, but this had never occurred to either one of us. Hillary had never run for office before, but she decided to give it a try.

She began her campaign the way she always does new things, by listening and and learning. And after a tough battle, New York elected her to the seat once held by another outsider, Robert Kennedy.

And she didn’t let him down. Her early years were dominated by 9/11, by working to fund the recovery, then monitoring the health and providing compensation to victims and first and second responders. She and Senator Schumer were tireless and so were our House members.

In 2003, partly spurred on by what we were going through, she became the first senator in the history of New York ever to serve on the Armed Services Committee.

So she tried to make sure people on the battlefield had proper equipment. She tried to expand and did expand health care coverage to Reservists and members of the National Guard. She got longer family leave, working with Senator Dodd, for people caring for wounded service members.

And she worked for more extensive care for people with traumatic brain injury. She also served on a special Pentagon commission to propose changes necessary to meet our new security challenges. Newt Gingrich was on that commission, he told me what a good job she had done.

I say that because nobody who has seriously dealt with the men and women in today’s military believes they are a disaster. They are a national treasure of all races, all religions, all walks of life.

Now, meanwhile, she compiled a really solid record, totally progressive on economic and social issues. She voted for and against some proposed trade deals. She became the de facto economic development officer for the area of New York outside the ambit of New York City.

She worked for farmers, for winemakers, for small businesses and manufacturers, for upstate cities in rural areas who needed more ideas and more new investment to create good jobs, something we have to do again in small-town and rural America, in neighborhoods that have been left behind in our cities and Indian country and, yes, in coal country.

When she lost a hard-fought contest to President Obama in 2008, she worked for his election hard. But she hesitated to say yes when he asked her to join his Cabinet because she so loved being a senator from New York.

So like me, in a different context, he had to keep asking.

But as we all saw and heard from Madeleine Albright, it was worth the effort and worth the wait.

As secretary of state, she worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. And in what The Wall Street Journal no less called a half-court shot at the buzzer, she got Russia and China to support them. Her team negotiated the New START Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and reestablish inspections. And she got enough Republican support to get two-thirds of the Senate, the vote necessary to ratify the treaty.

She flew all night long from Cambodia to the Middle East to get a cease-fire that would avoid a full-out shooting war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza to protect the peace of the region.

She backed President Obama’s decision to go after Osama bin Laden.

She launched a team, this is really important today, she launched a team to fight back against terrorists online and built a new global counterterrorism effort.

We’ve got to win this battle in the mind field.

She put climate change at the center of our foreign policy.

She negotiated the first agreement ever — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions. And as she had been doing since she went to Beijing in 1995 and said women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights…

…she worked to empower women and girls around the world and to make the same exact declaration on behalf of the LGBT community in America and around the world.

And nobody ever talks about this much, nobody ever talks about this much, but it’s important to me. She tripled the number of people with AIDS in poor countries whose lives are being saved with your tax dollars, most of them in Africa, going from 1.7 million lives to 5.1 million lives and it didn’t cost you any more money. She just bought available FDA-approved generic drugs, something we need to do for the American people more.

Now, you don’t know any of these people. You don’t know any of those 3.4 million people, but I’ll guarantee you they know you. They know you because they see you as thinking their lives matter. They know you and that’s one reason the approval of the United States was 20 points higher when she left the secretary of state’s office than when she took it.

Now, how does this square? How did this square with the things that you heard at the Republican convention? What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up.

You just have to decide. You just have to decide which is which, my fellow Americans.

The real one had done more positive change-making before she was 30 than many public officials do in a lifetime in office.

The real one, if you saw her friend Betsy Ebeling vote for Illinois today…has friends from childhood through Arkansas, where she has not lived in more than 20 years, who have gone all across America at their own expense to fight for the person they know.

The real one has earned the loyalty, the respect and the fervent support of people who have worked with her in every stage of her life, including leaders around the world who know her to be able, straightforward and completely trustworthy.

The real one calls you when you’re sick, when your kid’s in trouble or when there’s a death in the family.

The real one repeatedly drew praise from prominent Republicans when she was a senator and secretary of state.

So what’s up with it? Well, if you win elections on the theory that government is always bad and will mess up a two-car parade…a real change-maker represents a real threat.

So your only option is to create a cartoon, a cartoon alternative, then run against the cartoon. Cartoons are two- dimensional, they’re easy to absorb. Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard. And a lot of people even think it’s boring.

Good for you, because earlier today you nominated the real one.

Listen, we’ve got to get back on schedule. You guys calm down.

Look (INAUDIBLE) a long, full, blessed life, it really took off when I met and fell in love with that girl in the spring of 1971. When I was president, I worked hard to give you more peace and shared prosperity, to give you an America where nobody is invisible or counted out.

But for this time, Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face. And she is still the best darn change-maker I have ever known.

You could drop her into any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way she will have made it better. That is just who she is.

There are clear, achievable, affordable responses to our challenges. But we won’t get to them if America makes the wrong choice in this election. That’s why you should elect her. And you should elect her because she’ll never quit when the going gets tough. She’ll never quit on you.

She sent me in this primary to West Virginia where she knew we were going to lose, to look those coal miners in the eye and say I’m down here because Hillary sent me to tell you that if you really think you can get the economy back you had 50 years ago, have at it, vote for whoever you want to. But if she wins, she is coming back for you to take you along on the ride to America’s future.

And so I say to you, if you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes and you’re obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back.

If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you.

If you’re a young African American disillusioned and afraid, we saw in Dallas how great our police officers can be, help us build a future where nobody is afraid to walk outside, including the people that wear blue to protect our future.

Hillary will make us stronger together. You know it because she’s spent a lifetime doing it. I hope you will do it. I hope you will elect her. Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows tend to care more about our children and grandchildren. The reason you should elect her is that in the greatest country on earth we have always been about tomorrow. You children and grandchildren will bless you forever if you do.

God bless you. Thank you.

Malcolm Turnbull: "The Labor Party ran some of the most systematic, well-funded lies ever peddled in Australia",Election night speech - 2016

3 July 2016, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Malcom Turnbull is current Prime Minister of Australia. More information at Museum of Australian Democracy entry.

My friends, I can report that based on the advice I have from the party officials, we can have every confidence that we will form a Coalition majority Government in the next Parliament.

It is a very, very close count. It is a very close count, as you know. And right now, right now, right now nearly 30% of the votes are yet to be counted. The pre-poll will continue to be counted until 2am.

But I don’t suggest we should wait around for that. And then the commissioner advises us there will be no more carding tomorrow or on Monday and they will count the postal votes on Tuesday.

And we may, the final results in terms of seats may not be known until then. So we will have a wait a few days. But as my distinguished predecessor, mentor, former boss John Howard well remembers ...

We have seen this before in 1998. And this is an experience not unknown in the parliamentary history of the Liberal Party. And of course the really critical thing is this, my friends — the values that we have and the policies that we brought to this election meet the challenges of our times.

The Labor Party, the Labor Party ran some of the most systematic, well-funded lies ever peddled in Australia.

We have never, the mass ranks of the union movement and all of their millions of dollars, telling vulnerable Australians that Medicare was going to be privatised or sold, frightening people in their bed and even today, even as voters went to the polls, as you would have seen in the press, there were text messages being sent to thousands of people across Australia saying that Medicare was about to be privatised by the Liberal Party.

And the message, the message, the SMS message came from Medicare. It said it came from Medicare. An extraordinary act of dishonesty. No doubt the police will investigate. But this is, but this is the scale of the challenge we faced. And regrettably more than a few people were misled. There’s no doubt about that.

But, the circumstances of Australia cannot be changed by a lying campaign from the Labor Party. The challenges, the fact that we live in times of rapid economic change, of enormous opportunity, enormous challenges, a time when we need to be innovative, when we need to be competitive, when we need to be able to seize those opportunities, those times are there.

No politician can give a speech, can write a policy, can send a message and change the reality of the circumstances in which we live and the policies that will enable us to meet those times with success.

And they are the values of our parties because they are the values of freedom, of business, of enterprise and entrepreneurship. And the alternative, the idea, the idea, the idea that the answer to Australia’s economic challenges, as Labor would have it, Labor with the second lowest primary vote in its history, but Labor would say that the answer is more debt, more deficit and higher taxes.

Seriously. Seriously. So, my friends, I’m sure that as the results are refined and come in over the next few days with all of the counting, we will be able to form that majority government. But, let me say this, let me say this without any fear of contradiction.

The Labor Party has no capacity in this parliament to form a stable majority government. That is a fact. Now, I want to thank the millions of Australians who have placed their trust in us, in our party, in our policies, in our candidates. I want to thank them for believing in the policies that we brought to this election.

And we will continue to deserve that trust, and seek to deliver those policies because they are the right ones for our times, because the alternative, my friends, is that we just fall off the back of the pack of leading nations. That is where Labor would have us. That is where Labor would have us.

Higher debt, higher deficits, higher taxes. That’s their formula and that’s a formula for failure. Now, I want to thank all of my colleagues, all of my parliamentary colleagues, my cabinet, I wants to thank Barnaby Joyce, the Deputy PM, the Leader of the National Party, I want to thank my own Deputy, Julie Bishop, the Foreign Minister.

Nobody covered more miles than her. The Treasurer and all the other cabinet ministers and all of my parliamentary colleagues, I want to thank all of our candidates right across the …

(Applause interrupts)

want to thank all of our candidates right across the country and I want to give a shout out to Julia Banks in Chisholm in Victoria for her extraordinary efforts.

I want to acknowledge the great work and leadership shown by the Federal campaign direct, Tony Nutt, and our whole campaign team, and all the Liberal and National Party workers in every electorate and every polling booth often having to stand up to intimidation and threats in there.

I want to thank every single one of them. I want to thank my own team. I want to thank them, thank them for the team and the Prime Minister’s Office for the remarkable work they’ve done over this long campaign.

And then, above all, I want to thank Lucy and my family who, apart from the youngest ones, are here tonight. I want to thank them so much, because, as you all know, as you all know; this political business is a challenging one.

And you cannot do it without the love and the commitment and the passion and the loyalty and the support of your family and I salute you, Lucy. My children, their partners for all of the love and support you’ve given me.

Now, I want to also address a matter that I know has been raised earlier today or this evening about the calling of the double-dissolution election. Let me remind everybody of why that occurred.

That was not a political tactic. It was not designed to remove senators or get a new Senate because new senators are better than old senators or whatever.

It was simply this. We need to restore the rule of law to the construction industry. At the moment the CFMEU has over 100 officials before the courts on more than 1,000 charges of breaching industrial law or agreements.

There is a culture of thuggery and intimidation, and bullying in the construction sector, which John Howard recognised years ago and set up the ABCC.

Bill Shorten and Julia Gillard abolished it. The Hayden royal commission investigated again and made it perfectly clear that the same problems were there, only worse.

And we had no choice — we did have a choice — we could have walked away and said it was all too hard and we weren’t committed to our principles of cleaning up the construction industry and ensuring the rule of law applied. We could have done that.

I don’t think that’s consistent with the values and the principles we share and our party have or I have or the alternative was to take the matter to a double-dissolution so you could present it to a joint sitting. That is the only alternative we had.

For those that say we shouldn’t have called a double-dissolution election are saying we should have just let the CFMEU with getting on with doing what they like and never challenge them. And that is not in Australia’s interests. It’s not right. It’s weak.

We have to stand up for what is right to restore the rule of law in an industry that employs over a million Australians.

So the hour is late. And I don’t expect us to be waiting till 2am, until the final pre-polls are counted. But, as I said, based on the advice I have from our officials and advisers and strategists within the party, I am confident that we will be able to form a majority government.

And certainly, certainly we are the only parties that have the ability or the possibility of doing that. All will depend on the counting.

And we await the completion of that. In the meantime, I want to say to all Australians those that voted for us, those that voted for other parties or candidates, this is a time when we must come together.

We must stick together. We face enormous challenges. We face, we face challenges in a rapidly evolving global economy that we do not anticipate that will surprise us, the opportunities will surprise us, but so will the headwinds.

We need have a common purpose. We need to have a commitment to the economic plan that sets us up for success. We have that plan and we will in Government be seeking the support of all Australians, all members of the parliament, to the program that alone can deliver us success in the years ahead.

Because it is a program, a policy, a plan that is based on what is best in us, that is based on our confidence, optimism, on our courage, on our entrepreneurship, the alternative is hiding under the doona and pretending the world is not what it is.

It’s form of political escapism that you can only continue for as long as you can keep on running up more and more debt. We have got to stop that. This is a time for clear-eyed assessment of our challenges, our opportunities and a plan that enables us to meet them.

We have that plan. All Australians we will seek their support, their commitment to support us in Government, all of us, we will reach out to unite Australians with that common purpose of ensuring that we can compete, that we can succeed, because without that, my friends, there is a road to debt, to deficit, to higher taxes, to stagnation.

That is what our opponents offered. They offered it under the guise of some scare campaigns, so dishonest. But yet in some quarters so effective, that they boasted about it how skilfully they had lied and how effectively they had deceived.

A pretty shameful episode in Australian political history.

Well, the election is over. Only the counting remains. And now is the time to unite in Australia’s aid, in Australia’s service to ensure that we can have truly the very best years for our country ahead of us. Thank you all very much.

Donald Trump: "Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation", Republican National Convention - 2016

21 July 2016, Republican National Convention, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

Friends, delegates and fellow Americans: I humbly and gratefully accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Who would have believed that when we started this journey on June 16, last year, we — I say we because we are a team — would have received almost 14 million votes, the most in the history of the Republican party?

And that the Republican Party would get 60 percent more votes than it received eight years ago. Who would have believed it? The Democrats on the other hand, received 20 percent fewer votes than they got four years ago, not so good.

Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace. We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.

Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.

Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally. Some have even been its victims.

I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation. I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.

So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies, and the media myths — the Democrats are holding their convention next week. Go there.

But here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.

These are the facts:

Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration's rollback of criminal enforcement.

Homicides last year increased by 17% in America's fifty largest cities. That's the largest increase in 25 years.

In our nation's capital, killings have risen by 50 percent. They are up nearly 60 percent in nearby Baltimore.

In the president's hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And almost 4,000 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office.

The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year.

Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.

The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total of 2015.

They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.

One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years old and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 grade point average. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law. I've met Sarah's beautiful family. But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn't worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders.

What about our economy? Again, I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper:

Nearly four in 10 African-American children are living in poverty, while 58% of African-American youth are now not employed.

2 million more Latinos are in poverty today than when the president took his oath of office eight years ago.

Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.

Household incomes are down more than $4,000 since the year 2000. That is 16 years ago.

Our trade deficit in goods reached — think of this — our trade deficit is $800 hundred billion dollars. Think of that. $800 billion last year alone. We will fix that.

The budget is no better. President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing.

Yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in third world condition, and 43 million Americans are on food stamps.

Now let us consider the state of affairs abroad. Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another. One after another.

We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint. This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us absolutely nothing. It will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever negotiated.

Another humiliation came when President Obama drew a red line in Syria and the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing.

In Libya, our consulate, the symbol of American prestige around the globe was brought down in flames.

America is far less safe and the world is far less stable than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America's foreign policy. I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets.

Her bad instincts and her bad judgment, something pointed out by Bernie Sanders are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let's review the record.

In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map. Libya was stable. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq had seen a big reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was somewhat under control.

After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region and the entire world. Libya is in ruins, and our ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After 15 years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: Death, destruction and terrorism and weakness.

But Hillary Clinton's legacy does not have to be America's legacy. The problems we face now — poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad — will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them. A change in leadership is required to produce a change in outcomes.

Tonight, I will share with you for action for America. The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America first. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.

As long as we are led by politicians who will not put America first, then we can be assured that other nations will not treat America with respect. The respect that we deserve. The American people will come first once again.

First, my plan will begin with safety at home which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. There can be no prosperity without law and order.

On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.

A number of these reforms that I will outline tonight will be opposed by some of our nation's most powerful special interests. That is because these interests have rigged our political and economic system for their exclusive benefit. Believe me. It is for their benefit. For their benefit.

Big business, elite media and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They are throwing money at her because they have total control over every single thing she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. That is why Hillary Clinton's message is that things will never change. Never ever.

My message is that things have to change and they have to change right now. Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation that had been ignored, neglected and abandoned.

I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they will not be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.

I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agendas before the national good.

I have no patience for injustice. No tolerance for government incompetence. When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws, or worse still, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash I am not able to look the other way. And I won't look the other way.

And when a Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can't see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no no consequence — I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.

When the FBI director says that the Secretary of State was "extremely careless" and "negligent" in handling our classified secrets, I also know that these terms are minor compared to what she actually did. They were just used to save her from facing justice for her terrible, terrible crimes.

In fact, her single greatest accomplishment may be committing such an egregious crime and getting away with it, especially when others who have been far less have paid so dearly.

When that same Secretary of State rakes in millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers, I know the time for action has come.

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves.

Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders. He never had a chance.

But his supporters will join our movement, because we will fix his biggest issue: Trade deals that strip our country of jobs and the distribution of wealth in the country.

Millions of Democrats will join our movement, because we are going to fix the system so it works fairly and justly for each and every American.

In this cause, I am proud to have at my side the next Vice President of the United States: Governor Mike Pence of Indiana. And a great guy. We will bring the same economic success to America that Mike brought Indiana, which is amazing. He is a man of character and accomplishment. He is the right man for the job.

The first task for our new administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their — our communities.

America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were so brutally executed. Immediately after Dallas, we have seen continued threats and violence against our law enforcement officials. Law officers have been shot or killed in recent days in Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan and Tennessee.

On Sunday, more police were gunned down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three were killed, and three were very badly injured. An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans.

I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country.

I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate.

The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than frankly, I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seeing.

This administration has failed America's inner cities. Remember, it has failed America's inner cities. It's failed them on education. It's failed them on jobs. It's failed them on crime. It's failed them in every way and on every single level.

When I am president, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally, and protected equally. Every action I take, I will ask myself: Does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Ferguson who have really come in every way, have the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America?

To make life safe in America, we must also address the growing threats from outside the country. We are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS. And we are going to defeat them bad.

Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic terrorism. Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in mourning. The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been proven over and over. At the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And many other locations.

Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. This time, the terrorist targeted LGBTQ community.

No good. And we're going to stop it. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology. Believe me. And I have to say as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. Thank you.

To protect us from terrorism, we need to focus on three things.

We must have the best, absolutely the best, gathering of intelligence anywhere in the world. The best.

We must abandon the failed policy of nation- building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, in Egypt, and Syria.

Instead, we must work with all of our allies who share our goal of destroying ISIS and stamping out Islamic terrorism and doing it now, doing it quickly. We're going to win. We're going to win fast. This includes working with our greatest ally in the region, the state of Israel.

Recently I have said that NATO was obsolete. Because it did not properly cover terror. And also that many of the member countries were not paying their fair share. As usual, the United States has been picking up the cost. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that NATO will be setting up a new program in order to combat terrorism. A true step in the right direction.

Lastly, and very importantly, we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place. We don't want them in our country.

My opponent has called for a radical 550 percent increase — think of this, this is not believable, but this is what is happening — a 550 percent increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country already under the leadership of president Obama.

She proposes this despite the fact that there's no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people. Anyone who endorses violence, hatred or oppression is not welcome in our country and never ever will be.

Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers. We are going to have an immigration system that works, but one that works for the American people.

On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and my friend Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands who have suffered so greatly.

Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more, nothing even close than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our borders, which we can solve. We have to solve it. These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protect them and none too protest on their behalf.

My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Believe me. Instead, my opponent wants sanctuary cities. But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann, Sabine and Jamiel? Is so sad to even be talking about this. We can solve it so quickly. Where was sanctuary for all the other Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly? These wounded American families have been alone. But they are not alone any longer.

Tonight, this candidate and this whole nation stand in their corner to support them, to send them our love, and to pledge in their honor that we will save countless more families from suffering the same awful fate.

We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.

I have been honored to receive the endorsement of America's Border Patrol agents, and will work directly with them to protect the integrity of our lawful, lawful, immigration system.

By ending catch-and-release on the border, we will stop the cycle of human smuggling and violence. Illegal border crossings will go down. We will stop it. It will not be happening very much anymore. Believe me.

Peace will be restored by enforcing the rules for the millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve.

Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied and every politician who has denied them to listen very closely to the words I am about to say: On on January 20 of 2017, the day I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.

We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone. But my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens.

My plan is the exact opposite of the radical and dangerous immigration policy of Hillary Clinton. Americans want relief from uncontrolled immigration. Which is what we have now. Communities want relief. Yet Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness.

Her plan will overwhelm your schools and hospitals, further reduce your jobs and wages, and make it harder for recent immigrants to escape from the tremendous cycle of poverty they are going through right now and make it almost impossible for them to join the middle class.

I have a different vision for our workers. It begins with a new, fair trade policy that protects our jobs and stands up to countries that cheat — of which there are many.

It's been a signature message of my campaign from day one, and it will be a signature feature of my presidency from the moment I take the oath of office. I have made billions of dollars in business making deals. Now I'm going to make our country rich again. Using the greatest businesspeople of the world, I'm going to turn our bad trade agreements into great trade agreements.

America has lost nearly-one third of its manufacturing jobs since 1997, following the enactment of disastrous trade deals supported by bill and Hillary Clinton. Remember, it was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA, one of the worst economic deals ever made by our country. Or frankly, any other country. Never ever again.

I am going to bring our jobs back our jobs to Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and Michigan and all of America and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences. Not going to happen anymore.

My opponent, on the other hand, has supported virtually every trade agreement that has been destroying our middle class. She supported NAFTA, and she supported China's entrance into the world trade organization. Another one of her husband's colossal mistakes and disasters. She supported the job killing trade deal with South Korea. She she supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership which will not only destroy our manufacturing but it will make America subject to the rulings of foreign governments. And it is not going to happen.

I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and Independence. We will never ever sign bad trade deals. America first again. American first.

Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries. No longer will we enter into these massive transactions with many countries that are thousands of pages long and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations against any country that cheats. This includes stopping China's outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. They are the greatest that ever came about, they are the greatest currently manipulators ever.

Our horrible trade agreements with China, and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America and will walk away if we don't get that kind of a deal. Our country is going to start building and making things again.

Next comes the reform of our tax laws, regulations and energy rules. While Hillary Clinton plans a massive, and I mean massive, tax increase, I have proposed the largest tax reduction of any candidate who has run for president this year, Democrat or Republican. Middle-income Americans will experience profound relief, and taxes will be greatly simplified for everyone. I mean everyone.

America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world. Reducing taxes will cause new companies and new jobs to come roaring back into our country. Believe me. It will happen and it will happen fast.

Then we are going to deal with the issue of regulation, one of the greatest job killers of them all. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion a year, and we will end and it very quickly.

We are going to lift the restrictions on the production of American energy. This will produce more than $20 trillion in job-creating economic activity over the next four decades.

My opponent, on the other hand, wants to put the great miners and steelworkers of our country out of work and out of business. That will never happen with Donald J trump as president. Our steelworkers and are miners are going back to work again.

With these new economic policies, trillions of dollars will start flowing into our country. This new wealth will improve the quality of life for all Americans. We will build the roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, and the railways of our tomorrow. This, in turn, will create millions of more jobs.

We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice. My opponent would rather protect education bureaucrats than serve American children. That is what she is doing and that is what she has done.

We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare. You will be able to choose your own doctor again.

And we will fix TSA at the airports, which is a total disaster. Thank you.

We are going to work with all of our students who are drowning in debt to take the pressure off these young people just starting out in their adult lives. Tremendous problems.

We will completely rebuild our depleted military. And the countries that we protecting at a massive cost to us will be asked to pay their fair share.

We will take care of our great veterans like they have never been taken care of before. My just-released 10 point plan has received tremendous better support. We will guarantee those who serve this country will be able to visit the doctor or hospital of their choice without waiting five days in a line and dying.

My opponent dismissed the VA scandal, one more sign of how out of touch she really is.

We are going to ask every department head and government to provide a list of wasteful spending projects that we can eliminate in my first 100 days. The politicians have talked about this for years, but I'm going to do it.

We are also going to appoint justices to the United States Supreme Court who will uphold our laws and our constitution. The replacement of our beloved Justice Scalia will be a person of similar views, principles and judicial philosophies. Very important. This will be one of the most important issues decided by this election.

My opponent wants to essentially abolish the 2nd Amendment. I, on the other hand, received the early and strong endorsement of the National Rifle Association. And will protect the right of all Americans to keep their families safe.

At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical community because, I will tell you what, the support they have given me — and I'm not sure I totally deserve it — has been so amazing. And has been such a big reason I'm here tonight. They have much to contribute to our policies.

Yet our laws prevent you from speaking your mind from your own pulpits. An amendment, pushed by Lyndon Johnson, many years ago, threatens religious institutions with a loss of their tax-exempt status if they openly advocate their political views. Their voice has been taken away. I will work hard to repeal that language and to protect free speech for all Americans.

We can accomplish these great things and so much more. All we need to do is start believing in ourselves a in our country again. Start believing. It is time to show the whole world that America is back, bigger and better and stronger than ever before.

In this journey, I'm so lucky to have at my side my wife Melania and my wonderful children Don, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany, and Barron: You will always be my greatest source of pride and joy. And by the way, Melania and Ivanka, did they do a job?

My dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew. I wonder sometimes what he'd say if he were here to see this tonight. It's because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people.

He was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers, carpenters, and electricians and I have a lot of that in me also. I love those people.

Then there's my mother, Mary. She was strong, but also warm and fair-minded. She was a truly great mother. She was also one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known, and a great, great judge of character. She could pick them out from anywhere.

To my sisters, Mary Anne and Elizabeth, my brother Robert and my late brother Fred, I will always give you my love. You are most special to me. I have loved my life in business.

But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country, to go to work for you. It is time to deliver a victory for the American people. We don't win anymore, but we are going to start winning again. But to do that, we must break free from the petty politics of the past.

America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics. Remember: All of the people telling you you can't have the country you want, are the same people, that would not stand, I mean they said Trump does not have a chance of being here tonight, not a chance, the same people. We love defeating those people, don't we? Love it.

No longer can we rely on those same people. In the media and politics who, will say anything to keep a rigged system in place. Instead, we must choose to believe in America.

History is watching us now. It's we don't have much time. We don't have much time. It's waiting to see if we will rise to the occasion, and if we will show the whole world that America is still free and independent and strong.

I am asking for your support tonight so that I can be year champion in the White House. And I will be a champion.Your champion.

My opponent asks her supporters to recite a three-word loyalty pledge. It reads: "I'm with her."

I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads: "I'm with you the American people."

I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I'm with you, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.

To all Americans tonight, in all our cities and towns, I make this promise:

We will make America strong again.

We will make America proud again.

We will make America safe again.

And we will make America great again!

God bless you and goodnight! I love you!

Michelle Obama: "I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters", Democratic National Convention keynote - 2016

25 July 2016, DNC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Thank you all, thank you so much. It is hard to believe that it has been eight years since I first came to this convention to talk with you about why I thought my husband should be president. Remember how I told you about his character and his conviction? His decency and grace? The traits we have seen every day as he has served our country in the White House.

I also told you about our daughters, how they are the heart of our hearts, the center of our world, and during our time in the White House we have had the joy of watching them grow from bubbly little girls into poised young women.

A journey that started soon after we arrived in Washington when they set off for their first day at their new school. I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just 7 and 10 years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those men with guns. And with all their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, 'What have we done?'

At that moment, I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation of who they would become. And how well we manage this experience could truly make or break them.

That is what Barack and I think about every day as he tried to guide and protect our girls from the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight. How we urged them to ignore those who question their father's citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don't stoop to their level. Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents are the most important role-model.

Let me tell you, Barack and I take that same approach to our jobs as president and first lady because we know that our words and actions matter, not just to our girls but the children across this country. Kids who say, "I saw you on TV," "I wrote the report on you for school." Kids like the little black boy who looked up at my husband, his eyes wide with hope, and he wondered, 'Is my hair like yours?'

Make no mistake about it, this November, when we get to the polls, that is what we are deciding. Not Democrat or Republican, not left or right. In this election, and every election, it is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives. I am speaking to you tonight because in this election, there is only one person who I trust with that responsibility, only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be president of the United States, and that is our friend Hillary Clinton.

I trust Hillary to lead this country because I have seen her lifelong devotion to our nation's children. Not just her own daughter, who she has raised to perfection, but every child who needs a champion: kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs. Kids who wonder how they will ever afford college. Kids whose parents don't speak a word of English, but dream of a better life; who look to us to dream of what they can be.

Hillary has spent decades doing the relentless work to actually make a difference in their lives. Advocating for kids with disabilities as a young lawyer, fighting for children's health care as first lady, and for quality child care in the senate.

And when she did not win the nomination eight years ago, she did not get angry or disillusioned. Hillary did not pack up and go home because ... Hillary knows that this is so much bigger than her own disappointment. She proudly stepped up to serve our country once again as secretary of state, traveling the globe to keep our kids safe. There were moments when Hillary could have decided that this work was too hard, that the price of public service was too high, that she was tired of being [torn] apart for how she looked, or how she talked, or even how she laughed.

But here's the thing: What I admire most about Hillary is that she never buckles under pressure. She never takes the easy way out. And Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life. And when I think about the kind of president that I want for my girls and all our children, that is what I want. I want someone with the proven strength to persevere.

Somebody who knows this job and takes it seriously. Somebody who understands that the issues of our nation are not black or white. It cannot be boiled down to 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can't make snap decisions. You can't have thin skin or a tendency to lash out. You need to be steady and measured and well informed.

I want a president with a record of public service. Someone whose life's work shows our children that we don't chase fame and fortune for ourselves; we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed. And we give back even when we are struggling ourselves because we know that there is someone worse off. There but for the grace of God, go I. I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters.

A president that truly believes that our founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story. When crisis hits, we don't turn against each other, we listen to each other. We lean on each other. We are always stronger together. I am here tonight because I know that that is the kind of president Hillary Clinton will be and that is why in this election, I'm with her.

You see, Hillary understands that the presidency is about one thing and one thing only. It is about leaving something better for our kids. That is how we have always moved this country forward by all of us coming together on behalf of our children. Volunteering to coach the team, teach the Sunday school class, because they know it takes a village.

Heroes of every color and creed who wear the uniform and risk their lives to pass on those blessings of liberty; police officers and protesters in Dallas who all that really want to keep our children safe; people who lined up in Orlando to donate blood because it could have been their son, or their daughter in the club.

Leaders like Tim Kaine, who show our kids what decency and devotion look like. Leaders like Hillary Clinton, who have the guts and the grace to keep coming back and putting those cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling until they finally break through, lifting all of us along with her.

That is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters — two beautiful intelligent black young women — play with the dog on the White House lawn.

And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all of our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

Don't let anyone ever tell you that this country is not great. That somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on Earth.

And as my daughters set out on the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth, a leader worthy of my girls' promise and all of our kids' promise. A leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children.

In this election, we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best, we cannot afford to be tired or frustrated or cynical. Hear me: Between now and November, we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago. We need to knock on every door, we need to get out every vote, we need to pour every last ounce of passion into electing Hillary Clinton as president of the United States of America. Let's get to work.

Thank you all and God bless.

Malcolm Turnbull: "Fighting for the republic in John Howard’s Australia has been gruelling and heartbreaking", ARM concession, Referendum defeat - 1999

6 November 1999, Sydney, Australia

Malcom Turnbull is current Prime Minister of Australia. More information at Museum of Australian Democracy entry.

Future Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was chair of the Australian Republican Movement at the time of the unsuccessful referendum for Australia to become a republic. The 'YES' movement was divided between ARM republicans who wanted a parliamentary elected President, and direct election supporters.

All of us who voted Yes can be proud tonight. We did what was right. And when in years to come, our children or our grandchildren ask us why Australia has the Queen or the King of England as our head of state, we can look them in the eye truthfully and say, ‘on November 6th 1999, I voted Yes for our Republic’.

I thank every Australian who voted Yes. I thank you for your patriotism, your optimism and your pride.

The republic will come back. Not as soon as we’d like it to come. But it will return, and I hope we all live to see it.

To those Republicans who voted No, thinking they will soon get another chance to vote, I’m afraid you have been had. Nothing would please me more than for there to be another early chance to vote for a republic, but the people who made those promises to you will do nothing to keep them.

As the years roll on without a republic, do not forget, never forget, who told you to vote No, with the promise of a referendum for a directly elected president.

A promise they never ever intended to keep.

Now today’s referendum was the culmination of a nine year campaign. The Australian Republican Movement should be proud of its achievements. We didn’t win this vote today in the republic debate, but without your tireless efforts, there would have been no republic debate.

There would have been no constitutional convention, no referendum.

Because of our struggle, the republic is indelibly on the Australian political agenda. Together we put it there.

Fighting for the republic in John Howard’s Australia has been gruelling and heartbreaking. But are we further ahead today than we were in 1996? Yes!

Our republican cause united Australians in a way we have never seen before. Who would have imagined we’d have had Peter Costello, Kim Beasley and Natasha Stott-Despoja wearing the same campaign badge. What else but such a great objective could united Fraser and Whitlam, Doug Anthony and Bob Hawke.

Simon Crean: 'As I speak, we are a nation on the brink of war', National Press Club - 2003

20 March 2003, National Press Club, Canberra,. Australia

As I speak, we are a nation on the brink of war.

A war we should not be in.

A war to which 2000 of our fighting men and women were committed many months ago but were told about last Tuesday.

A war to which we are one of only four countries prepared to join the U.S. in putting troops on the ground, despite claims of a coalition of up to thirty.

A war which, for the first time in our history, Australia has joined as an aggressor.

Not because we are directly threatened.

Not because the UN has determined it.

But because the U.S. asked us to.

A war our troops will engage in when Commander Tommy Franks of the United States gives the order.

A war which exposes them to great risk.

A war which will cause great humanitarian damage to innocent men, women and children in Iraq.

A war unnecessary to achieve the disarmament of Iraq because there remained an alternate way.

Saddam Hussein must be disarmed, but this is not the way.

Letter from parents of serviceman in the Gulf

I speak to you today, not only as Labor leader and Leader of the Opposition, but on behalf of millions of Australians who share opposition to this war.

People such as these Australians who wrote me this very moving and powerful letter just a few weeks ago:

Just a short note from us to thank you for at least trying to stop Australian troops from going to war until the United Nations resolution is decided, if at all. Mr Howard is still committing our troops with or without UN approval. He seems to have his mind made up regardless of what the Australian people want or hope…

…sadly ….. he has now been sent away. We just never thought that this might happen so soon. So far as Mr Howard saying no Australians have been committed to the Middle East, we know that is not true. We feel very scared for our son and for all the sons and husbands who have also been deployed.

Thank you again for helping to support the views of most Australians.

The only thing different about this letter from the thousands of other letters, e-mails and phone calls that I have received since the threat of this war became real is that it is from the parents of one of our servicemen in the Gulf.

They, like me, support our troops but not the war.

They don’t just express opposition, they express fear for their son in action and they are dismayed that they have not been told the truth.

The troops should be returned to Australia

I believe the troops should not have been sent and should now be brought home.

I’m not the first Labor leader to say that.

John Curtin did it in 1942 when he fought with Churchill to have Australian troops returned from the Middle East to defend Australia from possible invasion by the Japanese.

And Gough Whitlam did it when he called, from Opposition, for Australian troops to be pulled out of Vietnam.

On both occasions, Labor leaders had the courage to stand up for Australia’s interests.

Australian troops can be brought home, even at this late stage.

It has been done before.

The decision to go to war is wrong. It is reckless and unnecessary.

I will always support our troops

There’s one important thing I want to stress: I oppose the deployment of the troops but my argument is with the Government, not the troops themselves.

I will always support our troops.

And I will speak out against anyone who seeks to blame them for this Government’s decisions.

That’s another of the lessons of the Vietnam War.

I learnt those lessons through personal experience. I have many friends who came back. They came back as pariahs because the demonstrators targeted them. They had no say in it. They did their duty. Then, as now, the demonstrators should have targeted just the Government of the day. Never the troops.

If we’re going to learn anything from these experiences, we can’t repeat the mistakes. That’s why I made the speech on the Kanimbla; that’s why I’ve repeated it on every occasion; and that’s why I’m prepared to put my signature to a letter that restates it so they know and their families know. It’s important.

A strong UN is crucial to Australian Security

If the 21st Century is to be a world where what is right and what is wrong and who is to have weapons of mass destruction and who is to keep them is determined by the great and powerful, a medium-sized power like Australia must ultimately be the loser.

Whether it be disarmament or trade or the environment or combating drug trafficking, Australia’s national interest can only ever be served by us acting through international bodies like the United Nations to ensure a just outcome for all.

If might becomes right, Australia loses.

That’s why we must make our stand for peace on the Charter of the United Nations and never simply follow the great and powerful.

Labor’s commitment to the US Alliance remains strong

I am a strong supporter of our alliance with America.

The alliance is deeply valued by all Australians but nothing in our alliance relationship with the US requires that we join them in this war.

Article 1 of the ANZUS Alliance commits both Australia and America to resolving international conflict through the UN.

I don’t care what commitments John Howard has made to President Bush - his overriding commitment must only ever be to the Australian people.

And if he won’t make that commitment, he should not be our Prime Minister.

The war is wrong because resolution 1441 does not allow a unilateral attack

One of John Howard’s excuses for this war is the claim that Resolution 1441 authorises a unilateral attack on Iraq.

It does no such thing.

Resolution 1441 was passed on the specific promise that the matter would be returned to the Security Council for decision about any military action to enforce it.

It unanimously set out a process for disarming Iraq through the UN. It said that:

Any breach reported by Hans Blix of Mohamed El Baradei would be reported back to the Security Council.

The Security Council would then decide what action would be taken.

The resolution would never have received unanimous approval if it gave authorised military action without a further resolution.

US Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, said the following:

This resolution (1441) contains no hidden triggers and no automaticity with respect to the use of force… If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the [Security] Council by UMNOVIC, the IAEA, or a member state, the matter will return to the [Security] Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12.

I asked our Prime Minister on November 12 last year whether Resolution 1441 rules out the US taking unilateral action against Iraq before this matter is referred back to the UN Security Council.

He replied that: It certainly requires a reporting back to the Security Council - there is no argument about that.

Our commitment is wrong because it compromises our national independence…

Our commitment to the war in Iraq is also wrong because it compromises our national independence.

The decision to go to war was taken in the Azores by three of the fifteen Security Council members - the UK, the US, and Spain.

Of those countries, Spain has committed no ground troops. Yet their decision committed ours.

The Prime Minister was not consulted. He was told by a phone call from George Bush flying home on Airforce One.

John Howard had signed up months ago, he was always just waiting for the phone call. That’s a disgraceful way to run our foreign policy.

Australia wants a Prime Minister who acts in Australia’s national interests, not just one who responds to whatever the United States wants.

Instead of asking `what about the US?’, he should be asking `what about us?’

Three assurances to the Australian people

I give these three assurances to the Australian people:

1. As Prime Minister I will never allow our foreign policy to be determined by another country.
2. I will never commit to an unnecessary war while peace is possible.
3. And I will never send Australia’s young men and women to war without telling them the truth.

The war is illegal, but our troops have nothing to fear….

Today I am releasing the Legal advice Labor has received on the Government’s decision to commit us to a war in Iraq.

This advice is consistent with the overwhelming weight of legal opinion from international law experts from around the world and here in Australia.

Based on that advice, John Howard’s decision to go to war is not in accordance with international law - but John Howard’s decision does not expose Australian troops to legal action, either at home or abroad.

Labor’s legal advice is important for two reasons.

First, it is clear from recent days that the Prime Minister is trying to use his Government’s legal advice to imply that the decision to go to war has been authorised by the United Nations.

This is simply not true.

And second, because the Government has raised this issue to set up a false argument that those who question the legality of its actions are also questioning the legality of the actions of our troops.

Labor’s legal advice makes it clear that this is an absurd proposition.

The Government is acting illegally, our troops are not.

The decision to go to war is reckless because it exposes us to a heightened threat of terrorism…

The decision to go to war is reckless because it exposes us to a heightened threat of terrorism.

On Tuesday, the Homeland Security Secretary in the United States, Tom Ridge, told his country that the US intelligence agencies had credible information that Al Qaeda will attempt multiple attacks against US and Coalition targets worldwide in the event of a US-led military campaign against Saddam Hussein.

In response, the US Homeland Affairs Department has raised the warning to the American people to the second highest level possible.

And it has initiated a comprehensive set of domestic protection measures - ranging from increased Coast Guard patrols, tighter border security, upgraded airport security and increased public health preparedness.

Today the UK reduced a global terror alert warning the ‘the risk of indiscriminate terrorist attacks… will be especially high during military action in Iraq.’

Bob Carr has responded as a leader should - by telling his citizens about the threat they face and acting to protect them.

John Howard says he doesn’t need to do anything.

Two days ago Tony Abbott gave the game away when he admitted that: there is the increased risk of terrorist attack here in Australia…

Tony Abbott has now confirmed what John Howard has always been too frightened to say to the Australian people - that Australia will become a greater terrorist threat than we would otherwise be - as a result of Howard’s policy on Iraq.

The Prime Minister is still in denial. He’s turning his back on the Australian people.

We all have to be alarmed because the Prime Minister is not alert.

The perversity of the situation is obvious. In the name of fighting terrorism, he has made us more of a target.

He has done nothing to address the heightened risk of terrorism to Australia.

The Prime Minister must come out of denial and be honest with the Australian people. What is the risk?

He’s increased security for himself and other Government offices but what has he done for the Australian people?

No briefing for the Leader of the Opposition…

I still have not been able to get a security briefing. He’s hiding it from me, just as he’s hiding it from the Australian people.

Despite Howard’s declaration two days ago that Australia has been committed to war and repeated attempts by my office, the Prime Minister continues to refuse to provide me with immediate security and intelligence briefings.

When Bush declared his moment of truth, Howard went into his bunker of deceit.

ASIO Bill

On the very day Australia may go to war the Government is planning to throw its ASIO Bill back on the table.

We have seen this tactic before.

The Prime Minister would rather play on the fears of Australians than protect them.

If this Government wants tough new powers on terrorism, it should pass Labor’s ASIO Bill today.

Labor will protect Australians and the Australian way of life.

I believe that the best defence against the threats to the Australian way of life lie in the Australian way of life itself - questioning authority, refusing to live in fear, and refusing to sacrifice our rights or our democratic freedoms, which we’re currently being asked to do.

Labor’s plan for improved national security

Because of this heightened fear of terrorism Labor has put together a comprehensive plan to improve the security of our nation and its people.

We have announced new measures to find and track terrorists through better intelligence gathering and assessment.

Labor will establish a Department of Home Affairs, and an Office of National Security, with a new National Security Adviser to plan and direct the national intelligence effort against terrorism.

Labor will make a major new commitment to establishing a Coast Guard - with dedicated new ships - to protect our borders from terrorism, people smuggling and the full range of transnational crimes that threaten our borders.

We believe that more should be done on domestic preparedness, including better training and resources for frontline workers such as police, firefighters and health professionals.

A Regional Summit of Leaders on terrorism

But making Australia more secure at home is only the first step.

We must again make Australia secure in the region, and the world.

Australia faces two key challenges: the war on terrorism and eliminating the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Howard has tried to conflate the two threats, with his erroneous argument that Saddam Hussein could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

He fails to provide any evidence of such a link. He thinks his assertion is enough.

No one believes him. He has no credibility on this issue.

But the regional terrorism threat is real - as the horrific events in Bali last year showed.

Groups like Jemaah Islamiyah, Laskar Jihad and others are determined to use terrorism as a weapon against both Western interests and moderate, secular Islam.

But only 12 months after building a major coalition of countries against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan through the United Nations, the US-led coalition has been reduced to just four.

They failed to get a moral majority then settled for an immoral minority.

We must re-commit to fighting global terrorism.

Labor has been pushing the Government to organise a Regional Summit of Leaders, to come together to discuss and decide on a region-wide response to the terrorism threat.

Howard has done nothing to advance this idea.

Reactivating the Canberra Commission on Non-Proliferation

Eliminating weapons of mass destruction begins with strengthening the existing arms control regimes, under the authority of the United Nations.

We must work ever harder to ensure that countries like North Korea and Iran abide by their international obligations to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Howard has never made non-proliferation a strategic objective of his government.

He has offered not a single new initiative or idea to progress disarmament.

He said nothing last year when the Bush Administration decided to walk away from negotiations on the Biological Weapons Convention.

He never talks about the Canberra Commission - Labor’s 1995 initiative to build international consensus to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

Howard’s one answer to the threat from Weapons of Mass Destruction is go to war in Iraq.

He completely ignores the growing proliferation threats in our region, including the nuclear crisis in South Asia.

Instead of returning to a position of leadership on these issues, as was the case under Labor, Howard has turned Australia into a follower.

Labor has said we will re-convene the Canberra Commission, with a new mandate to look at the full range of proliferation threats from nuclear, chemical, biological weapons and their ballistic missile delivery systems.

Conclusion

The Australian people do not believe the PM’s claim that he did not commit our troops until Tuesday.

They do not believe he was sincere about getting UN approval for action to disarm Iraq.

And they don’t believe that this war can now be justified or that Australia should be part of it.

I agree with the Australian people.

For the first time our servicemen and women have been committed to a war without the support of the majority of the Australian people.

John Howard has turned his back on them in the same way that he turned it on me in the Parliament on Tuesday.

In doing so I believe he has made a grave mistake.

The Australian people are right, the war is wrong.

Robin Cook: "if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way, we would not now be about to commit British troops' , Resignation speech - 2003

17 March 2003, House of Commons, United Kingdom

This is the first time for 20 years that I have addressed the House from the back benches.

I must confess that I had forgotten how much better the view is from here.

None of those 20 years were more enjoyable or more rewarding than the past two, in which I have had the immense privilege of serving this House as Leader of the House, which were made all the more enjoyable, Mr Speaker, by the opportunity of working closely with you.

It was frequently the necessity for me as Leader of the House to talk my way out of accusations that a statement had been preceded by a press interview.

On this occasion I can say with complete confidence that no press interview has been given before this statement.

I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.

Backing Blair

The present Prime Minister is the most successful leader of the Labour party in my lifetime.

I hope that he will continue to be the leader of our party, and I hope that he will continue to be successful. I have no sympathy with, and I will give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace him.

I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.

I do not think that anybody could have done better than the foreign secretary in working to get support for a second resolution within the Security Council.

But the very intensity of those attempts underlines how important it was to succeed.

Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.

French intransigence?

France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days.

It is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution.

We delude ourselves if we think that the degree of international hostility is all the result of President Chirac.

The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.

To end up in such diplomatic weakness is a serious reverse.

Only a year ago, we and the United States were part of a coalition against terrorism that was wider and more diverse than I would ever have imagined possible.

'Heavy price'

History will be astonished at the diplomatic miscalculations that led so quickly to the disintegration of that powerful coalition.

The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.

Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules.

Yet tonight the international partnerships most important to us are weakened: the European Union is divided; the Security Council is in stalemate.

Those are heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired.

I have heard some parallels between military action in these circumstances and the military action that we took in Kosovo. There was no doubt about the multilateral support that we had for the action that we took in Kosovo.

It was supported by NATO; it was supported by the European Union; it was supported by every single one of the seven neighbours in the region. France and Germany were our active allies.

It is precisely because we have none of that support in this case that it was all the more important to get agreement in the Security Council as the last hope of demonstrating international agreement.

Public doubts

The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis.

Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.

The threshold for war should always be high.

None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will "shock and awe" makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands.

I am confident that British servicemen and women will acquit themselves with professionalism and with courage. I hope that they all come back.

I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.

It is entirely legitimate to support our troops while seeking an alternative to the conflict that will put those troops at risk.

Nor is it fair to accuse those of us who want longer for inspections of not having an alternative strategy.

For four years as foreign secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment.

Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes.

Iraq's military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war.

Threat questioned

Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days.

We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?

Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?

Israeli breaches

Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted.

Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.

That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.

Presidential differences

What has come to trouble me most over past weeks is the suspicion that if the hanging chads in Florida had gone the other way and Al Gore had been elected, we would not now be about to commit British troops.

The longer that I have served in this place, the greater the respect I have for the good sense and collective wisdom of the British people.

On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain.

They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.

Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies.

From the start of the present crisis, I have insisted, as Leader of the House, on the right of this place to vote on whether Britain should go to war.

It has been a favourite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics.

Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support.

I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.

John Gorton: 'We bought your freedom with our lives', Welcome Home post WW2, Kerang RSL- 1946

3 April 1946, Kerang, Victoria, Australia

The Australian dubbed this 'Australia's best unknown political speech'. Gorton was an RAAF pilot who twice crash landed his plane. He later served as the country's 19th Prime Minister, from 1968-71. Photo above is from this era.

There has been a good deal of confusion of thought  as to why we went to war, and as to what we can reasonably expect as the result of our military victory.

We did not go to war to make a new and better world. We cannot expect to make a new and better world as the result of the exercise of brute military force. We can only expect to achieve the kind of world we want by the use of brains and effort during peace.

We fought only to preserve for ourselves and our children, that concept of political freedom and justice which was attacked by a tyrannous power. We succeed in that defence. Yet, I have heard not only civilians but returned soldiers say that because the world is not better, but worse, therefore the war was fought in vain. That it was a futile thing  without reason or result, and that all the suffering which it entailed was wasted.

It was not wasted. We got what we went after. We retained a system of government in which we, the people, choose our governors, dismiss them when we wish, and have a voice in our own destiny. We retained a conception of justice in which the humblest one amongst us has equal rights before the law with the head of the State. We believed those principles were worth defending, not because in themselves they provided all that could be desired for human happiness, but because we believed that we could only advance to a full and satisfying life for all if we retained the freedom on which to build.

A foundation is not a house, but without a foundation you cannot build an enduring structure. That we have retained the foundation is the answer to those who claim that the war was futile.

It is now, in the peace, that we must make our advances. I believe that the returned serviceman wishes us to secure for all men that economic freedom which we have never had, and to which all who are willing to work are surely entitled. We must remove from the minds of men the fear of poverty as the result of illness, or accident, or old age. We must turn our schools into institutions which will produce young men and women avid for further education and increased knowledge.

We must raise the material standard of living so that all children can grow up with sufficient space and light and proper nourishment; so that women may be freed from domestic drudgery; and so that those scientific inventions which are conducive to a more gracious life may be brought within the means of all. We must raise the spiritual standard of living so that we may get a spirit of service to the community and so that we may live together without hate, even though we differ on the best road to reach our objectives. And we must do all this without losing that political freedom which has cost us so dearly, and without which these tasks cannot be accomplished.

Outside Australia peace has set us tasks as hard. All around us we see a world living in the gloom of half peace, in the immediate agony of starvation and disease, and in the shadow of a future atomic world, whether we like it or not.

And what affects the world, will affect us. We must do our most to alleviate the immediate suffering, and we must take our place in the world, not as a self-sufficient, sealed-off unit, but as a member of a family, the members of which are dependent the one upon the other.

We must do this. For no person of susceptibility , no soldier who has seen his comrades killed, no Christian,  above all no mother with grown children can stand idly by and see the chance which we have once more won, once more wasted.

This is why I demand of you, in the name of the dead and the returned, that you do not consider this war a tasked finished, that you do not regard this celebration as the last chapter in the book. Look at it rather as half time.  A joyful occasion, certainly, but only a break in the continuous task. For tomorrow we must carry on again, and the tasks that lie in front of us are immense and urgent as never before.

What can we do? Individually it may not be much. But we can at least think on the problems which are in front of us, and be ready to act on our thoughts if the opportunity arises. We can try to best reason out how we may best take our place in the family of nations, and how we may best provide a full and satisfactory life for all our citizens.

We can practise tolerance and understanding. And we can be ready always to defend against attacks, either from within or without, the political freedom, the measure of freedom which we already have.

It will be hard. Without the spur and urgency of a war, it will mean a constant effort from all of us. But I am going to call on your imaginations.

I want you to forget it is I who am standing here. And I want you to see instead Bob Davey. And behind him I want you to see an army; regiment on regiment of young men, dead. They say to you, burning in tanks and aeroplanes, drowning in submarines, shattered and broken by high explosive shells, we gave t he last full measure of devotion.We bought your freedom with our lives. So take this freedom. Guard it as we have guarded it, use it as we can no longer use it, and with it as a foundation, build. Build a world in which meanness and poverty, tyranny and hate, have no existence. If you see and hear these men behind me - do not fail them.

Jo Cox: 'Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration', maiden speech - 2015

Jo Cox was murdered on 16 June 2016, while campaigning on the street . Her accused killer, Thomas Mair, gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" at his first court appearance.

3 June 2015, House of Commons, London, United Kingdom

Thank you, Mr Speaker; it is a great privilege to be called to make my maiden speech in this most important of debates, and I congratulate many others who have made outstanding maiden speeches today.

I am sure that many right hon. and hon. Members will claim that their constituencies consist of two halves or numerous parochial parts; I am another in that respect, and Batley and Spen is very much that kind of constituency. It is a joy to represent such a diverse community.

Batley and Spen is a gathering of typically independent, no-nonsense and proud Yorkshire towns and villages. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel round the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.

My constituency is also home to Fox’s Biscuits and Lion Confectionery, so I am sure you will not think it an indulgence, Mr Speaker, if I describe Batley and Spen as a constituency with an industrial heart wrapped in a very rich and pleasant Yorkshire landscape—geographical, historical and cultural.

The spirit of non-conformity is as prevalent now in my part of west Yorkshire as it was in the time of my two immediate predecessors, Mike Wood and Elizabeth Peacock. They were both known for offering their own brand of independent, non-conformist service, albeit in very different ways. I intend to maintain that established tradition in my own unique style.

Of course, Batley is a town that has sent Labour MPs to this place for the best part of a hundred years. One of them, Dr Broughton, is of course famously credited with bringing down a Government, so I respectfully put the right hon. Members on the Front Bench opposite on notice. The Spen valley has a far more chequered political history, alternately sending Labour and Conservative MPs here to Westminster for much of the 20th century. Nothing made me prouder on 8 May than to be sent to this place with an increased Labour majority, proving again that in my neck of the woods non-conformity is what we do best.

As I have already alluded to, we make things in Batley and Spen; we do so now, just as we did historically. Batley and Spen has a high proportion of people working in manufacturing, and we can boast the full range of industries, including high-skilled, precision engineering. We manufacture all sorts, from beds to biscuits, and from carpets to lathes. We also have some of the best fish and chips in the country, and some of the best curries in the world.

However, what many of our businesses are lacking is confidence: confidence to expand; confidence to borrow; confidence to grow; and the confidence to fuel a real economic recovery that benefits everybody, offering decent jobs, paying decent wages and bridging the skills gap. Key to changing that situation is a fundamental shift in attitude towards regional economic regeneration. It is time to give city and county regions the powers and resources they need to promote growth, and I will happily work with all of those who are genuinely committed to building an economic powerhouse in the north. This agenda has to have at its centre a commitment to connect towns and villages in constituencies like mine to thriving city hubs, and to deliver a financial offer in the forthcoming July Budget that gives this worthy goal a real chance of success. Yorkshire folk are not fools: talk about devolving power to cities and regions, while simultaneously stripping them of the resources to deliver and subjecting northern councils such as Kirklees to the harshest of cuts, is not compatible with a worthy commitment to building a northern powerhouse to drive growth and prosperity.

Businesses in my constituency want help to address the skills mismatch at local level which leaves employers with staff shortages and young people without jobs. They want access to reliable sources of finance, including a network of local banks. They want to connect to a regional infrastructure that works for them, not rail price hikes of more than 126% and endless delays to key ransport projects such as the electrification of the line from Manchester to Leeds. Many businesses in Yorkshire want the security and stability of Britain’s continued membership of the European Union, a cause I look forward to championing passionately in this place and elsewhere.

The key question is: will the Government’s actions match their northern powerhouse rhetoric? HS2 is not the only acid test. There are two bigger challenges. First, will the Government really devolve all the powers and decisions that could and should be taken locally and regionally? My test will be this: if there is a compelling reason for this to be a national decision then so be it; if not, it should be devolved. Secondly, will the Government really take the whole range of their decisions—on transport, research and development, planning, education and skills—in the interests of rebalancing the economy and growing the north?

I am Batley and Spen born and bred, and I could not be prouder of that. I am proud that I was made in Yorkshire and I am proud of the things we make in Yorkshire. Britain should be proud of that, too. I look forward to representing the great people of Batley and Spen here over the next five years.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal', Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Conference - 1848

19 July 1848. Seneca Falls, New York, USA

This is the founding moment of American feminism that Hillary Clinton referred to in her victory speech accepting the Democratic nomination.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer. while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyrranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizedn, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master--the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardles of the happiness of women--the law, in all cases, going upon a flase supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most homorable to himself. As a teacher of theoloy, medicine, or law, she is not known.

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.

He allows her in church, as well as state, but a suborinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.

He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her conficence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation--in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

Hillary Clinton: 'We are all standing under a glass ceiling right now', Taking Democratic Party Nomination - 2016

7 June 2016, Brooklyn, New York, USA

[…] one that you have taken with me and I am so grateful to you. It is wonderful to be back in Brooklyn, here in this […]. And it may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one.

Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone – the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee for president of the United States.

Tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848. When a small but determined group of women, and men, came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights, and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments, and it was the first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred.

So we all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you.

I want to thank all the volunteers, community leaders, the activists, and organizers who supported our campaign in every state and territory. And thanks especially to our friends in New Jersey for such a resounding victory tonight. Thanks for talking to your neighbors, for making contributions. Your efforts have produced a strong majority of the popular vote, victories in a majority of the contests, and after tonight, a majority of pledged delegates.

I want to thank all the people across our country who have taken the time to talk with me. I’ve learned a lot about you and I’ve learned about those persistent problems and the unfinished promise of America that you are living with. So many of you feel like you are out there on your own, that no one has your back. Well, I do. I hear you, I see you.

And as your president, I will always have your back. I want to congratulate Senator Sanders for the extraordinary campaign he has run. He has spent his long career in public service fighting for progressive causes and principles, and he’s excited millions of voters, especially young people. And let there be no mistake: Senator Sanders, his campaign, and the vigorous debate that we’ve had about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, increase upward mobility have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America.

This has been a hard-fought, deeply-felt campaign. But whether you supported me, or Senator Sanders, or one of the Republicans, we all need to keep working toward a better, fairer, stronger America.

Now, I know it never feels good to put your heart into a cause or a candidate you believe in – and to come up short. I know that feeling well. But as we look ahead to the battle that awaits, let’s remember all that unites us.

We all want an economy with more opportunity and less inequality, where Wall Street can never wreck Main Street again. We all want a government that listens to the people, not the power brokers, which means getting unaccountable money out of politics. And we all want a society that is tolerant, inclusive, and fair.

We all believe that America succeeds when more people share in our prosperity; when more people have a voice in our political system; when more people can contribute to their communities. We believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls

It’s a simple but powerful idea. We believe that we are stronger together. And the stakes in this election are high. And the choice is clear.

Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander-in-chief. And he’s not just trying to build a wall between America and Mexico – he’s trying to wall off Americans from each other. When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,’ that is code for, ‘Let’s take America backwards.’ Back to a time when opportunity and dignity were reserved for some, not all, promising his supporters an economy he cannot recreate.

We, however, we want to write the next chapter in American greatness, with a 21st century prosperity that lifts everyone who’s been left out and left behind, including those who may not vote for us but who deserve their chance to make a new beginning.

When Donald Trump says a distinguished judge born in Indiana can’t do his job because of his Mexican heritage – or he mocks a reporter with disabilities – or calls women ‘pigs’– it goes against everything we stand for. Because we want an America where everyone is treated with respect and where their work is valued.

It’s clear that Donald Trump doesn’t believe we are stronger together. He has abused his primary opponents and their families, attacked the press for asking tough questions, denigrated Muslims and immigrants. He wants to win by stoking fear and rubbing salt in wounds. And reminding us daily just how great he is.

Well, we believe we should lift each other up, not tear each other down. We believe we need to give Americans a raise – not complain that hardworking people’s wages are too high. We believe we need to help young people struggling with student debt – not pile more on to our national debt with giveaways to the super-wealthy. We believe we need to make America the clean energy superpower of the 21st century – not insist that climate change is a hoax.

To be great, we can’t be small. We have to be as big as the values that define America. And we are a big-hearted, fair-minded country. We teach our children that this is one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Not just for people who look a certain way or worship a certain way or love a certain way. For all. Indivisible.

This election is not, however, about the same old fights between Democrats and Republicans. This election is different. It really is about who we are as a nation. It’s about millions of Americans coming together to say: We are better than this. We won’t let this happen in America.

And if you agree – whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent – I hope you’ll join us.

In just a few weeks, we will meet in Philadelphia, which gave birth to our nation – back in that hot summer of 1776. Those early patriots knew they would all rise or fall together. Well, today that’s more true than ever.

Our campaign will take this message to every corner of our country. We’re stronger when our economy works for everyone, not just those at the top, with good-paying jobs and good schools in every ZIP code, and a real commitment to all families and all regions of our nation.

We’re stronger when we work with our allies around the world to keep us safe. And we are stronger when we respect each other, listen to each other, and act with a sense of common purpose.

We’re stronger when every family in every community knows they’re not on their own, because we are in this together. It really does ‘take a village’ to raise a child – and to build a stronger future for us all.

I learned this a long time ago, from the biggest influence in my life: my mother. She was my rock, from the day I was born till the day she left us. She overcame a childhood marked by abandonment and mistreatment, and somehow managed not to become bitter or broken. My mother believed that life is about serving others. And she taught me never to back down from a bully, which, it turns out, was pretty good advice.

This past Saturday would have been her 97th birthday, because she was born on June 4th, 1919. And some of you may know the significance of that date. On the very day my mother was born in Chicago, Congress was passing the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment finally gave women the right to vote. And I really wish my mother could be here tonight. I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become, and could meet our beautiful granddaughter Charlotte. And of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States.

So yes, yes, there are still ceilings to break – for women and men, for all of us. But don’t let anyone tell you that great things can’t happen in America. Barriers can come down. Justice and equality can win. Our history has moved in that direction – slowly at times, but unmistakably – thanks to generations of Americans who refused to give up or back down.

Now you are writing a new chapter of that story. This campaign is about making sure there are no ceilings – no limits – on any of us. And this is our moment to come together.

So please, join our campaign. Volunteer. Go to hillaryclinton.com. Contribute what you can. Text Join, J-O-I-N, to 4-7-2-4-6. Help us organize in all 50 states. Every phone call you make, every door you knock on will move us forward.

Now, I’m going to take a moment later tonight and the days ahead to fully absorb the history we’ve made here. But what I care about most is the history our country has yet to write. Our children and grandchildren will look back at this time, at the choices we are about to make, the goals we will strive for, the principles we will live by. And we need to make sure that they can be proud of us.

The end of the primaries is only the beginning of the work we’re called to do. But if we stand together, we will rise together, because we are stronger together. Let’s go out and make that case to America.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.