George Megalogenis > Quotes

“journalists fea their loss of authority in the digital age will undermine their ability to hold government to account. Yet the government has much more to worry about because the internet has empowered vested interests, and Oppositions, in a way that effectively cancel an election result within weeks of the final ballot being counted. p236”
― George Megalogenis, Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal

“They were like two landowners in Pompeii arguing over who had the better view of Vesuvius.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“More ships sailed to Melbourne in 1852 than to any other port in the world.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Among the first to land was the 22-year-old Hieu Van Le, a future governor of South Australia.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“The argument that mining already paid its fair share [of tax] was also wrong.... On the figures the [Minerals] council supplied, mining enjoyed the fourteenth-lowest effective company-tax rate out of nineteen sectors. It paid a lower rate than manufacturing and construction, the very sectors it was crowding out. p196”
― George Megalogenis, Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal

“A 6 per cent unemployment rate after twenty-four years of uninterrupted growth is a poor return for those who have been left on the margins of society.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Migration is the greatest compliment that can be paid to a nation,”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Before the news and polling cycles accelerated, leaders assumed that the electorate understood reform was a long game. Not anymore. The digital age has shrunk the public attention span and lured government into making each thing it says appear to be a big idea. p225”
― George Megalogenis, Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal

“At Howard’s election campaign launch on 28 October, he delivered his most memorable phrase in politics: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“aliens in blood, aliens in language, and aliens in religion,” as Lord Lyndhurst said of the Irish”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“At the Evian conference in July 1938, which failed to offer help to Germany’s persecuted Jews, it was the Australian representative Thomas White who made the most callous remark: ‘As we have no racial problem we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.’ A short version of the quote is displayed at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Australia’s narrow-mindedness juxtaposed with the souls of six million dead.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Curtin had been too sick to announce German’s surrender on 9 May 1945. He passed away on 5 July, less than two months before Japan’s surrender on 2 September. An estimated hundred thousand people attended his funeral in Perth: one-third of the city’s entire population. Among the pallbearers were Liberal Party leader Robert Menzies and Country Party leader Arthur Fadden, testament to a rare Australian leader who was admired across the political spectrum.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Genuine change, in the national interest, comes about only when a government forces its rusted-on supporters to give something up — as the coalition did on guns, and Labor did on protection.”
― George Megalogenis, The Longest Decade

“Rudd proved to be too conservative for the nation he led, while Gillard's campaign for re-election was too cynical. But the problem goes deeper than any individual's failure. Labor in office suffered a return of the identity crisis that has plagued it in its wilderness years in Opposition... the party had given up its soul to the machine. p208”
― George Megalogenis, Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal

“Labor provoked the nation’s first race-based election in November 1928 by accusing Bruce of putting ‘dagoes before heroes’. That election slogan belonged to Ben Chifley, the Labor candidate for the Blue Mountains electorate of Macquarie. ‘[The government] had allowed so many Dagoes and aliens in Australia that today they are all over the country taking work which rightly belongs to all Australians,’ he said.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“And that year Australians officially became the richest people in the world, overtaking the British and the Dutch on the measure of GDP per person.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Government is weaker today because the public it serves is quicker to anger, and because the Opposition has realised the safest way back to power is opposition, not policy renewal. No mandate need be respected because the Opposition can trust the media to set impossible standards for government to meet. p237”
― George Megalogenis, Balancing Act: Australia Between Recession and Renewal

“Ever wonder why voters never thank governments for giving them tax cuts? Because it’s their money, and it doesn’t buy what it used to.”
― George Megalogenis, The Longest Decade

“The White Australia policy, drafted at the top of the boom, became the wrong answer to almost every problem the colonies confronted once growth ended, and then the wrong message to send the world when they finally formed a federation in 1901.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“The boom has not secured social cohesion. Instead, it has encouraged a mass outbreak of social climbing. Deregulation has taught Australians to see their self-worth through bricks-and-mortar and the size of the bribe they can extract from government. Avarice is the new black, and the political system has sanctified it with the term ‘aspirational voting’.”
― George Megalogenis, The Longest Decade

“In the POW camps, Australian soldiers shared their rations with a fastidious egalitarianism, and reportedly had a higher survival rate than the class-conscious British and the individualistic Americans.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future

“Democracy was a terrifying concept for the old world of Europe, and even the new world of North America, where income inequality was rife. The finest minds of the nineteenth century warned against giving the vote to the workingman, for fear of mob rule or the tyranny of the majority.”
― George Megalogenis, Australia's Second Chance: What our history tells us about our future