PK

This is the former Prime Minister Paul Keating giving a speech on urban renewal at Sydney University at a conference called the Mayor's Forum. Sadly perhaps, he is best remembered for his line of invective. "You're nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up" was one of my favourites. He took over from his still pretty popular predecessor Bob Hawke after years of white anting. Like many of the disloyal, once he got to power he didn't know what to do with it; isolating in natural autocracy.

They were good years in some ways. At first the nation, or at least the left, well at least a few journalists, were captured by the blizzard of words, the fireworks that he promised. Dazzled by his own intelligence, the ideas whirled fruitlessly round and round, with a mounting contempt for the ordinary man. The people sensed it instinctively, and his approval ratings were always dismal, half the present Prime Minsiter's on a good day. The Zvegna suits, the knife edge suits, the well groomed face, the patrician nose, women loved him for a long time. Excuse me, Mr Keating, a female academic stammered, I agree with every word you said, could I just ask...?

The blokes were far more sceptical. Now everyone is more sceptical. As you got closer to the blizzard of words, the less the dreams were true. But in those years, with a young blonde partner and picture perfect young blonde children and a job that others regarded as having some cache, those benighted years, it didn't seem wrong that Keating lived in the big house and strutted the stage. The Domingo of Australian politics and the streams of dreams. The kids were young and I was off the eternal bar stool and all was right with the world; until it all fell apart.