Well I think all I would say on that is, when we were in opposition in Britain and Hawke and then Keating were in power here, Labor was in power here, we learnt a huge amount from the ALP's experience here.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Labor is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action - ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.
And it seems to me in that experience may lie at least some of the clues for policy development perhaps constitutional changes as well that Labour will need to make at the national level too.
So there clearly is a sense in which the Labour Party here, certainly at State level is reaching out and connecting with people and reflecting the aspirations and needs of, you know the mass of ordinary Australians.
I get cross about 13 years of Labour government that brought the country to the state it did.
Americans have always been able to handle austerity and even adversity. Prosperity is what is doing us in.
In the U.S. the powerful critics of austerity such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich rightly identify the decline of 'labor' as a problem, and renewing trade unionism part of the solution. Our opportunity is to make the same case in the UK.
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.
There is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn't have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.
When I joined Labour in 1982, I didn't feel I belonged to a party born to power. My repeated experience was of bitter and repeated defeats.
We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.