EX PM Bob Hawke on the America’s Cup victory in 1983: “It was very funny. I sat up all night.
“And we were pretty whacked, of course, and Cabinet the next day got postponed.
“But I went down to the yacht squadron and I said then that anyone who sacked a worker who was late today was a bum.
“I still get regaled pleasurably with that.”
And on that “white trash” comment: “It was perhaps best put by Lee Kuan Yew in 1980 when he said that if Australia went on the way it was, it would finish up becoming the ‘poor white trash of Asia’.
“This was true, I’d had the opportunity of studying the economy very closely.”