My first girlfriend was a Filipina. I remember we were in a shoe shop one day and I paid for two pairs of shoes for her. The shop assistant said, and I knew there was a racist undercurrent, "Don't let her spend all your money." She said that she loved me.

People have asked me if I believe Australia is a racist country and I say, "Yes". Basically, what happened was the British colonized it and then, despite Johnny Howard's denials, they had a program of genocide. Okay, they might not have put them on trains and said, "Okay, we're going to let you out to have a shower," and sent sarin or mustard gas through the roses, but they distributed TB infected blankets, poisoned waterholes and the like. They also had a program where they tried to get the First Nations Peoples to intermarry with the European settlers (and those who say had one First Nations Parent or grandparent, and one European parent, they tried to get them to intermarry with the Europeans. And many people who have been scorned by the likes of Mark Latham are people who have become interested in their ancestry and found that their great-great-grandmother was employed as a station domestic and she married a Chinese man who was a station cook (George Sing, a native of Katherine, is the son of a Chinese cook and a First Nations domestic, and there were many others like him). One thing I say to people is, I can understand why the First Nations Peoples can be offended if they say had, one First Nations great-grandparent, and they give them a label, but if a person has diverse ancestry and is proud of it all, is that wrong? I mean, I would never see it as wrong if a person had, say, a Chinese great-great-grandfather and a First Nations great-great-grandmother, and their great-grandmother was born in the Northern Territory and she married a second-generation German Australian and they had a son who married the daughter of a Welsh-Norwegian father and an English mother, and he married the daughter of an Irish-Australian man and a Norwegian-British-First Nations mother and they said, "I go out to the Northern Territory every year; I've been to China to see my great-great-grandfather's birthplace in Fujian; I've been to Wales and Ireland, and England, and I'm proud to be a First Nations, Chinese, Irish, Norwegian, English, German Australian."