Top 35 David Marr Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The AWU had polled its own members and he knew the men and women of the union overwhelmingly supported Howard blocking the Tampa. That election proved a life lesson for Shorten: he saw the power of wedge politics. At the Press Club a few months later, he called on unions to act as a conservative check on the rank and file. Unions represent 2 million workers and who, he asked, do Labor’s branches represent?”

— David Marr

2. “Turnbull is sharp with Jones once or twice, asking to be heard, reminding him his heroes Margaret Thatcher and John Howard wanted action on global warming: “Don’t you think,” asks the leader of the Opposition, “you sound like the old lady who says the whole world is mad except for thee and me, and I have my doubts about thee?”

— David Marr

3. “He hasn’t reneged on Catholicism entirely. Pope Francis he thinks impressive: “A remarkable guy. A breath of fresh air.” Catholic social teaching is still in his head, along with the “golden rule” every boy was taught at Xavier: “It was at the heart of the Jesuit call to be a ‘man for others.’ And I have spent my working life, both representing workers and as parliamentarian, trying to measure up to this standard of compassion and empathy.”

— David Marr

4. “He stumbled and told the truth one night: workers had lost protections under WorkChoices.”

— David Marr

5. “I fundamentally believe that if you empower people, you can move mountains. I fundamentally believe that if people are given a fair go, the world’s a better place, people are happier individually and society progresses.”

— David Marr

6. “Heydon’s account of how he got himself into this pickle was so like Shorten’s evidence: he hadn’t read the documents; matters were left to his staff; he wasn’t across the detail; one or two crucial facts had slipped his mind; and no matter how bad things might appear, his integrity remained absolute.”

— David Marr

7. “While he was in the neighbourhood he went to New York for the – surely redundant by now – ceremonial visit of the next prime minister to Rupert Murdoch. Back home in the Spectator Australia he laid it on thick again: “Along with the commander of the First AIF, Sir John Monash, and the penicillin inventor, Lord Florey, he is one of the Australians who have made the most difference in the world.”

— David Marr

8. “Standing to one side watching the politicians and the journalists and the cameras is one of the factory’s owners, John Kernahan, who tells me Sulo’s annual turnover is $85 million. So the carbon tax? “It’s not a biggie.”

— David Marr

9. “They see a lot of pit bull pups at the RSPCA, her handler tells me. Why? “Because young guys have pit bulls and they are idiots and they don’t desex their dogs.”

— David Marr

10. “A first bill for the abolition of compulsory student union fees failed in 2004 but it was back as soon as the government won control of the Senate.”

— David Marr

11. “He invaded the Women’s Room with a Channel Ten news crew and cub reporter Mike Munro. The issue was voluntary fees. The point was ridicule. When asked to leave the room, Abbott declared for the cameras: “This is a man’s room for the moment.”

— David Marr

12. “Even those on the executive supporting his right to take office thought his behaviour “senseless, futile and provocative.”

— David Marr

13. “What he’s about is destroying a government. Looking like a prime minister in waiting is a second-order consideration.”

— David Marr

14. “Abbott joined the union, the Australian Journalists’ Association. He led a little strike at the Bulletin and opposed a big strike at the Australian.”

— David Marr

15. “Abbott was running a one-man campaign to wreck his own organisation.”

— David Marr

16. “He doesn’t see private health insurance rebates or support for private school education as middle-class welfare. He sees it as backing family aspiration, sound public policy encouraging people to do more for themselves. And help should not be cut off simply because a family is earning a hundred thousand dollars or more a year.”

— David Marr

17. “From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott’s mantra has been: “If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government.” But for that to keep working in his favour, it’s best the boats keep coming.”

— David Marr

18. “Abbott was all over the shop on emissions trading. He feared destruction at the ballot box if the Opposition blocked Rudd. “The government’s emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public’s fears,” he had said in late July 2009.”

— David Marr

19. “Though he went about the task with a will, he clearly did not share the ideological conviction that the jobless were better off without help from the public service. Abbott’s default position is that governments are there to act, to solve problems, not to withdraw and leave things to the cut and thrust of market forces. He was clearly not one of those conservatives who loved the market. His loyalty was to government and what government could achieve through intervention.”

— David Marr

20. “While he was pilloried for enforcing a severe regime of punishment to force them to look for jobs, he was trying behind the scenes to persuade the government to take another course entirely. He wanted tax breaks for those on welfare to encourage them to take work. This was his one big idea in the portfolio and he has cited it since as evidence that somewhere inside the Liberal Party the DLP was alive and well. But not very alive: the plan was killed off by Howard.”

— David Marr

21. “He wanted the assurance from the department that nothing was going wrong underneath. But as long as that was the case, he didn’t really want to get into all the detail of how the Job Network was actually running. He was not hands-on. He was generally interested in employment but he was not one of those ministers who run their department.”

— David Marr

22. “The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn’t really deserve.”

— David Marr

23. “He knows the cruel truth that the baiter is never blamed when victims lose their cool.”

— David Marr

24. “He acknowledges that endorsing push-backs at the National Conference in July was only the latest in a long line of catch-ups with the Coalition’s refugee policies. But he is confident Labor won’t be forced to go any further: the worst has been reached. But isn’t that what Labor always says? “Time will tell but I know that if we want more humanity in our system, I’ll do a better job than the other fellow.”

— David Marr

25. “This champion of self-reliance, the man who made the unemployed work for the dole, has no doubt that families like his deserve a great deal of help from the government.”

— David Marr

26. “Shorten is one of that interesting pack of politicians born of determined mothers and largely absent fathers. There are so many: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are distinguished alumni. Among recent Labor leaders in Australia are Rudd, Albanese and Shorten. Among the qualities these men share are self-discipline, boundless ambition and an appetite for approval on a national scale.”

— David Marr

27. “A happy Hickie verdict on Abbott: “He’s not a reformer; he’s a great opportunist.”

— David Marr

28. “Where Abbott was most himself, Shorten beat a retreat. “For Labor, national security is – and always will be – above politics,” he says but what he means is that Labor will buckle whenever the government declares security is at stake.”

— David Marr

29. “Misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the parliament as a political crime.”

— David Marr

30. “But the bill was also loathed by the National Party because it would drain university sporting clubs of cash. Out in the bush, those clubs and that money mattered.”

— David Marr

31. “Bill ran the box office for the 1983 Romeo and Juliet, played the piano, endured elocution lessons, fenced and played cards: bridge at Xavier but later five hundred. Shorten’s love of cards – of bluff and bidding – is a key to the boy and the man. Only in his final year did he outshine his brother as a debater; he was chosen for the state team in the national championships of 1984.”

— David Marr

32. “The press has given up saying so but these two men are denouncing what they once supported: a price on carbon and an emissions trading scheme.”

— David Marr

33. “Abbott has always had a knack of sidestepping blame for his own hyperbole. Even wild exaggerations are rarely held against him. He retracts a little and is forgiven a lot. “What you’ve got is constant colour and movement,” says his old boss John Hewson. “He gets right in your face. He exaggerates; he grabs the headlines, even if he knows that the next day he’s gonna have to back that off.”

— David Marr

34. “There was no factional discipline in the drift towards Rudd. Individuals were making up their own minds. In some worlds, that’s how politics works.”

— David Marr

35. “We all thought Tony would be a force to be reckoned with when he grew up and we’re still waiting.”

— David Marr