THE HON. PAUL KEATING
PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA

Mr Keating, thanks for joining us.

Pleasure.

You don’t seem to like Alexander Downer very much.

There’s nothing personal about my hatred for Mr Downer. I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood on this matter.

What? He might be a perfectly nice fellow?

Yes, but I don’t think he’s representative of the Australian people.

So who does he represent?

A lot of tweedy agrarian plutocrats with tusks sitting around in a hallowed hall getting some wrinkled old retainer to bring them another tray of larks’ uvulas. This is not the experience of ordinary people.

And who do you represent?

We represent the ordinary Australians, we’re in touch with the lives of ordinary folk.

The ones with the Italian suits?

Yes.

And their abiding interest in English cutlery?

Yes.

Yes, and their knighthoods from Thailand?

Yes.

With the eighteenth-century French chronometers?

I think a lot of people are interested in clocks.

Yes. Chronos metros, from the Greek.

Well, you can get them from Sotheby’s, but you’ll need a quid. They cost an arm and a leg.

So I take it you wouldn’t agree with the idea that the Labor Party is a bunch of socialists who are taking orders from Moscow?

Come on. Do you think Moscow would have told us to deregulate the financial market? Get the biggest newspaper empire you can find and give it away to a Canadian? Ten per cent unemployment and company profits going up all the time? Do you think the comrades figured that one out? Come on, that argument’s not going to work, is it?

So why are you hammering away at them with a lot of old class-war rhetoric from the same period?

This guy is a member of a club fifty per cent of the Australian population can never join. They’re just not allowed in.

They’re ineligible?

It doesn’t matter what they are pal. They’re not allowed to join the outfit. They’re not allowed in because they’re women. If he is going to mount any pretence to being in some way representative of the Australian people, he should get the rules of that club changed, now.

So that women can join the club?

So that women constitute fifty per cent of the membership of the club. Fifty per cent is the minimum requirement. That’s the position we’ve got. Women as fifty per cent of the Australian community, they should have fifty per cent women members. Not just let them in. Fifty per cent, please.

Change the rules?

Yes, or stop pretending. One or the other.

So you’ll be preparing the new legislation over the weekend, will you?

No, no, these people can fix up their own clubs, that’s not up to me. I can’t do that.

No, I meant the Parliament. Fifty per cent women in the Parliament.

You’ll be changing the rules immediately.

In what Parliament?

The Australian Parliament.

Fifty per cent women in the Parliament? (He looks off.) Can we have another tray of larks’ uvulas, please?