Quotes from Tony Abbott

I think my wife and my kids are incredibly good to allow me to stay in public life given that they have to cop a whole lot of collateral attention that, being human, they'd rather not get.

I think that marriage is, dare I say it, between a man and a woman, hopefully for life and there are all sorts of other relationships which should be acknowledged and recognised, but I don't know that they can be recognised as marriage.

I think that it's high time that the Prime Minister stopped making excuses for bad policy and started listening to the forgotten families of Australia.

I would not want to see any relaxation of the law prohibiting human cloning.

For small business people, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family.

I think that people should come to Australia through the front door, not through the back door. If people want a migration outcome, they should go through the migration channels.

The truth is I try to take people as I find them.

I see myself as a social conservative, but I think that there are lots of social institutions that produce beneficial reforms, like public hospitals, for instance, and schools.

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

I want to see an end to sovereign risk questions over Australia.

What is time anyway but a small word for a vast and inexplicable phenomenon? What are past, present, and future but vague points on an endlessly coiling thread?

Pish-posh, just doing my lot for the future of the world, you know. I'll sign off by saying, you know where to find me...

It's not surprising that the Rudd Government is slowly turning Work for the Dole into a training program. The idea that 'the world owes people a living' is strong inside the Labor Party. This is why even a normally sensible frontbencher like Martin Ferguson once called Work for the Dole 'almost evil'.

Rick Starmover and Hal Sono in Space Wars: The Return.

ebb and flow

Quite soon, the Rudd Government's attempts to stave off a recession by fiscal sugar hits and propping up uncompetitive businesses will come to seem like putting off the inevitable at unsustainable cost. The public, if not the government, will come to appreciate, in former British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's words, that 'you can't spend your way out of a recession'. It

7, 1, 9, 3, 2, 4, 0. For NC.

No one, however smart, however well-educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.

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.

The choice made by families not to immunize their children is not supported by public policy or medical research nor should such action be supported by taxpayers in the form of child care payments.

My mum and mad were both very generous, encouraging parents.

For small business men and women, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family.

Certainly, my uni days involved some statements that I wouldn't make today.

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.