Bill > Bill's Quotes

“These are but two, telling examples of the sad priorities in Australian affairs. The leaders entrusted to protect the country’s place in the world are the same people who have to protect their own positions in power. High policy must compete for time and attention with low politics, as well as domestic policy. The big matters are commonly crowded out by the small. International policy is used for domestic point-scoring.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“faction warfare erupted in Victoria. They do politics differently there. Wars are fought in the name of peace. Explosives are packed under the foundations of the Labor Party in the name of stability. They call the wreckage left after these brawls rejuvenation. The wonder is that Victoria delivers any Labor talent to Canberra and remains, decade after decade, a stronghold of the party.”
― David Marr, Faction Man: Bill Shorten's Path to Power

“Many fine keyboard players could and did emulate and recreate his parts, but nobody else other than Rick had the ability to create them in the first place.”
― Nick Mason, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd

“Rudd was scathing on the provincial reflex: ‘It’s like so many of the debates in Australia, it’s couched as a zero-sum game – you can’t have an activist foreign policy at the same time as an activist domestic reform policy,’ he said in an interview for this paper shortly before returning to the prime ministership in 2013. Zero-sum-ism is a deep malady in Australian politics. But foreign policy becomes domestic and external becomes internal. For God’s sake, in a country with a million people overseas at any given time, we have a deep interest in engaging. The truth is that foreign policy and what we sell to the world are core national interests and anybody who pretends otherwise is engaging in a tawdry political exercise. Zero-sum-ism is not only analytically flawed – you can be active on both fronts, domestic and foreign – it also undermines Australia’s national interests.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“Rudd claims to have had an ambitious five-part plan that he had wanted to take to the G20, whose members encompass 80 per cent of the world economy. The G20 had arrested the collapse of the world economy in 2009; now Rudd wanted it to restore it to health. The five points according to Rudd? Coordinate a green energy revolution, instigate a new agricultural revolution, increase efforts to raise people from poverty, boost the participation of women in the workforce, and urgently revive the long-paralysed new round of global trade liberalisation.”
― Peter Hartcher, The Adolescent Country: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special

“There’s little room for moral qualms. After all, why should a dirt-poor Afghan farmer struggling to keep his family above the poverty line give a shit about a smack freak in the States who has thrown away more wealth than the farmer’s village is likely to see all year? Others rationalise that it may – just possibly – be used for medicine.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“George Bush summed it up in his inimitable style: the Taliban, he explained, ‘have no disregard for human life’.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“Even Human Rights Watch has accused some leading members of this parliament of war crimes. But this parliament, in a unique move, granted warlords an amnesty against crimes committed during the war. Even [spiritual leader of the Taliban] Mulla Umar can benefit after this amnesty.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“Opium is commonly used as a cure-all in the regions. If the baby is crying, a little lump of opium will calm it, if grandpa is sick and the donkey trip to get help takes six days, he may as well do it stoned senseless.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“The anti-narcotic agencies have long understood that discouraging poppy cultivation is best achieved by putting the crop at constant risk, so that farmers take a safer option. This has been proven around the world. By far the most effective way to achieve this is by using crop-dusters to dump herbicide. But the president has always opposed this, arguing that it would be misunderstood and cause an uprising, and, ultimately, loss of power. That’s why the international narcs had to scrap their way in to appallingly dangerous areas with ‘tractors and weed-whackers’. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work much at all.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“Tajiks are Afghan Persians, who speak the language of culture and education, Dari. Many suspect the Pashtun government is plotting against them, while Pashtuns accuse Karzai of capitulating to the Tajiks.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“The Anticorruption Commission established by the president is headed by Izzatulla Wasifi, a convicted heroin dealer.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“alone.Illiteracy is a misunderstood indicator. The great mass is largely illiterate, yet there is a rich oral tradition and many Afghans are informally educated, articulate and comfortable in society. Many, despite not reading, know the Koran and a number of ahadith by heart.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“Then the conspiracy of incompetence, misunderstanding and indifference that is the External Relations Department kicked in.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“They welcome us, they despise us; they want our protection, they want to kill us; they need us, they don’t. They want freedom and choice for themselves, but often not for others. They are people; people are difficult.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“The motivations of suicide bombers may seem hard to understand, but they are largely under-educated kids, turbocharged with carefully crafted religious mumbo-jumbo, and driven by brainwashing and a promise of paradise for them and their family.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“After ’96 Massoud retreated in the face of a Taliban bombardment, but he addressed the European Parliament in April 2001, warning that the Taliban had connections to al-Qaeda, and that a major terror attack was imminent.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“They each explained their roles, finishing with Conrad, who, indicating the others, said, ‘I get their advice on a piece of paper, shit on it, then make up my own mind.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“Only a small number of them pump out suicide bombers, but you don’t need too many to cause havoc. The madrassas exist because state schools don’t, so poor people have no choice if they want their children to be schooled. They teach Wahhabism, an austere, warped variant of Islam, and often mix this with military skills.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“We talked about issues and what I’m finding. They all agreed the chair of the IEC should go, and suggested that parliament may help with this, although Karzai could well keep him anyway. Their second strategy might be to make him irrelevant, possibly by suggesting that operational involvement is undignified for a man of his power and status. That may work.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“There’s a discussion about acronyms, or TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), as Jamie from security calls them.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“The catch with arresting him is that his million-strong tribe was helping bring stability to a violent region, and without his criminal influence things are likely to tumble much further out of control. A triumph for the DIA may prove a mid-term disaster for Afghanistan.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“They do not believe the Independent Electoral Commission is truly independent, citing numerous examples of deficiencies: staff bias and incompetence, lack of planning and communication, lack of security for observers and lack of action on alleged electoral breaches, regional staff who show people who to vote for, and washable ink for forefingers so people can vote multiple times.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“There was a discussion about success, and broad agreement that qualitative results were more significant than quantitative ones. Success should be defined by three questions: did centres open, did people vote and did it become ‘ordinary’ for people to do so?”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“I’m told that an easy way to identify Taliban, at least, is to look for people wearing tennis shoes. I have no idea if this is due to status-seeking, desert cool or simple idiocy.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“Are they in it for the money? Well, yes, to a degree. But these are good people, genuinely trying to make a difference, and if they are going to give up their Western comforts is it a moral imperative to earn the US$1.90 a day that locals get, or walk everywhere, eat badly and behave in ways that increase the risk of getting killed? I think not, but if you disagree, keep two bucks a day from what you earn and send the rest to Hamid, here at 444 Butcher Street. Oh, and play Russian roulette every week, to help get that local flavour.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“The public don’t know the IEC and some ministers don’t even know why we are here either. They say “we have had the election”. It is difficult. ‘You come from a democratic, ordered community. Here, everything is displaced and disordered. Since being here I have done my best to justify the IEC to people. When the chairman of the Indian Electoral Commission was here the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of External Affairs had forgotten the issue, but Karzai cancelled everything to make a meeting. ‘At this time, the IEC has not reached a place where it can conduct an election.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“I expressed astonishment that someone as important as him seeks involvement in something as mundane as press conferences, when most significant chairmen at his level leave that tedious detail to staff – a first crack at getting him out of the picture if we can’t get him sacked.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“It has been an extraordinary opportunity to get up close and personal with the ‘War on Terror’ and the attempts to portray it as a religious schism, which it isn’t.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special

“The West is running for the exit door of Afghanistan, tired of losing lives, money and political support, just as the Taliban predicted we would. Negotiations have been held with the Taliban to sort out a vision of future governance. We are all but abandoning this beleaguered nation and its oppressed people whom we suggested we’d help. We should be ashamed, but we’re relieved.”
― Toby Ralph, Ballots, Bullets & Kabulshit: An Afghan Election: Penguin Special