You will never find a better friend to the United States than Australia.
Honest people, knowledgeable people, really well-informed people can have very different views about what the right measures are on national security.
What you've got to do is recognize that you don't control everything for a start, you've got to play the cards you're dealt, the hand of cards you're dealt, as best you can, and that's what I always seek to do.
Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.
I try to talk about policy issues intelligently, I try very hard to avoid thought bubbles. I make sure my speeches are well researched and footnoted. I make sure I am not talking through my hat.
I'm sick of the cover-ups, I'm sick of the lies, and so are the bloody veterans, that come out daily of the department's mouth.
To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise, and we are sorry.
I love radio - its immediacy and especially its intimacy... it is part of your life, whispering into your ear. You can't see it, but equally importantly it can't see you.
If Margaret Thatcher took climate change seriously and believed that we should take action to reduce global greenhouse emissions, then taking action and supporting and accepting the science can hardly be the mark of incipient Bolshevism.
Everyone's got different views. I think you're better off staying within the party and prosecuting those views than stepping out of it.
The proliferation of outlets that digital technology has enabled has itself contributed to the changing nature of what we regard as 'news' and the way in which many citizens perceive politics.
Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.
In economics, one of the most important concepts is 'opportunity cost' - the idea that once you spend your money on something, you can't spend it again on something else.
you cannot maintain popular support for immigration policy, multiculturalism, unless you can control your borders.
Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.
On balance, after weighing the arguments, I believe that the time has come for Australia to create a new sovereign wealth fund.
Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?
You cannot keep on saying oh, you know, talking about disrespecting women as just being politically correct or it's not a big deal or brushing things off. You've got to be aware of it.
Do the bishops seriously imagine that legalising gay marriage will result in thousands of parties to heterosexual marriages suddenly deciding to get divorced so they can marry a person of the same sex?
The question of whether or to what extent human activities are causing global warming is not a matter of ideology, let alone of belief. The issue is simply one of risk management.
China and India will take the global leadership on climate change: they are suffering for it.
Nobody looks at opinion polls with more attention than politicians, but of course you've got to remember that a single poll is a snapshot in time.
If consulted by friends about marital dramas, I always encourage the singles to marry, the married to stick together, the neglectful and wayward to renew their loving commitment and the wronged to forgive.
The royal commissions are successful and effective when they have a focused terms of reference and can do the job quickly and report. And then action can be taken.
Those who condemn gay marriage, yet are silent or indifferent to the breakdown of marriage and divorce, are, in my view, missing the real issue.
