Former PM Paul Keating had plenty to say on Lateline last night, and as usual he wasn’t holding anything back.
On Workchoices:

The great lie of the Howard Government in respect of workplace changes, they are simply a set of arrangements to keep unions out of workplaces. They’ve got nothing to do with productivity and the quicker we move away from that kind of discriminatory structure to a truly trust based co operative sharing of work and workloads, then we get back to reasonable levels of productivity and again, reasonable rates of growth in real wages.

On Labor’s top advisors:

They’ll do him no good. Because in the end those kind of conservative tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types who I think led Kim into nothingness, he’s got his life to repent in leisure now at what they did to him. They’re back, they’re back. Gary Gray lost the ’96 election with me and then lost ’98. He’s been given Kim Beazley’s best seat in Western Australia.

The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won’t get out of bed in the morning unless they’ve had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.

and

They don’t have the structure or the creativity or the passion or the belief to go and grab the prize. They don’t understand a victory.

and

I know it’s happening again, but the current Federal secretary is the author of “don’t fight them on interest rates” at the last election. You wouldn’t put much faith in him, would you?

On AWAs:

AWAs as they are now have to be scrapped because they have a bias against the right of an individual to talk to another individual about their wages. I mean, show me any democracy worth having Tony and I’ll show you one where people can meet freely and talk about conditions at work and be represented by a union. That’s the poison in the AWA. That’s the only point of the AWA. It’s got to go.

On Joe Hockey:

Silly what’s his name, the “Shrek” whoever he was on the television this morning. What’s his name?

On the economy & Peter Costello:

Everything in those national accounts yesterday, everything, that is the growth in the economy and the low unemployment, the reason the system is not blowing, the tinder box has not taken off is because of the float, because of the tariff changes and because of the IR changes, structural changes. That’s why they’re there. Not because of any superior management by Mr Costello. You know this pat line tonight about you wouldn’t put an L plater. God, he’s the greatest L plater of all time.

Full interview here