I think leadership is knowing what you want to achieve and then purposefully and sensibly taking steps to achieve it, remembering always that you have got to bring people with you if you are seeking to be a successful political leader.
Middle income families with children are Australia’s new poor.
What I would like to see is sufficiently good education and health services being delivered to Aboriginal people so that they are prepared and ready to leave and join the economic mainstream if that’s their choice.
Faith is important to me. It’s important to millions of Australians. It helps to shape who I am. It helps to shape my values. But it must never, never dictate my politics.
There are no factions in the Liberal Party.
I am in favour of the notion of Australia as an immigrant society.
I’m confident that there are plenty of people who have the strength of character and the presence of mind to warn me of difficulties and alert me to opportunities.
I don’t think my religious convictions should be held against me.
Oppositions are not there to get legislation through. Oppositions are there to hold the government to account.
I’m a politician. I’m not going to get into a whole range of scientific argument with scientists.
Like the Governor-General, when asked what you enjoy most about the job my tendency is to say “today”, because of the insights you get into our nation and because of the privileged contact you have with so many people.
Most of the people who are coming to Australia by boat have passed through several countries on the way, and if they simply wanted asylum they could have claimed that in any of the countries through which they’d passed.
I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.
I want to run a government, Barnaby wants to be part of a government, which is characterized by the motto if you like, no surprises, no excuses. That will be the motto of an incoming Coalition government. No surprises, no excuses.
Why isn’t the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community?
While I think men and women are equal, they are also different and I think it’s inevitable and I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework.
We are looking at what more we can do. As well as a strong security response we need a strong humanitarian one.
Well, I’m not saying that an emissions tax is ever going to be good policy.
This is a government which is proposing to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of households right around Australia. And for what? To make not a scrap of difference to the environment any time in the next 1000 years.
The smart way to improve broadband is not to junk the existing network but to make the most of it. It’s to let a competitive market deliver the speeds that people need at an affordable price with government improving infrastructure in the areas where market competition won’t deliver it.