Quotes from David Marr

This champion of self-reliance, the man who made the unemployed work for the dole, has no doubt that families like his deserve a great deal of help from the government.

He doesn't see private health insurance rebates or support for private school education as middle-class welfare. He sees it as backing family aspiration, sound public policy encouraging people to do more for themselves. And help should not be cut off simply because a family is earning a hundred thousand dollars or more a year.

Abbott was all over the shop on emissions trading. He feared destruction at the ballot box if the Opposition blocked Rudd. "The government's emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public's fears," he had said in late July 2009.

He knows the cruel truth that the baiter is never blamed when victims lose their cool.

We all thought Tony would be a force to be reckoned with when he grew up and we're still waiting.

While he was in the neighbourhood he went to New York for the – surely redundant by now – ceremonial visit of the next prime minister to Rupert Murdoch. Back home in the Spectator Australia he laid it on thick again: "Along with the commander of the First AIF, Sir John Monash, and the penicillin inventor, Lord Florey, he is one of the Australians who have made the most difference in the world.

Bill ran the box office for the 1983 Romeo and Juliet, played the piano, endured elocution lessons, fenced and played cards: bridge at Xavier but later five hundred. Shorten's love of cards – of bluff and bidding – is a key to the boy and the man. Only in his final year did he outshine his brother as a debater; he was chosen for the state team in the national championships of 1984.

From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott's mantra has been: "If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government." But for that to keep working in his favour, it's best the boats keep coming.

The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn't really deserve.

Misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the parliament as a political crime.

Abbott has always had a knack of sidestepping blame for his own hyperbole. Even wild exaggerations are rarely held against him. He retracts a little and is forgiven a lot. "What you've got is constant colour and movement," says his old boss John Hewson. "He gets right in your face. He exaggerates; he grabs the headlines, even if he knows that the next day he's gonna have to back that off.

Standing to one side watching the politicians and the journalists and the cameras is one of the factory's owners, John Kernahan, who tells me Sulo's annual turnover is $85 million. So the carbon tax? "It's not a biggie.

He wanted the assurance from the department that nothing was going wrong underneath. But as long as that was the case, he didn't really want to get into all the detail of how the Job Network was actually running. He was not hands-on. He was generally interested in employment but he was not one of those ministers who run their department.

Even those on the executive supporting his right to take office thought his behaviour "senseless, futile and provocative.

Though he went about the task with a will, he clearly did not share the ideological conviction that the jobless were better off without help from the public service. Abbott's default position is that governments are there to act, to solve problems, not to withdraw and leave things to the cut and thrust of market forces. He was clearly not one of those conservatives who loved the market. His loyalty was to government and what government could achieve through intervention.

Abbott was running a one-man campaign to wreck his own organisation.

While he was pilloried for enforcing a severe regime of punishment to force them to look for jobs, he was trying behind the scenes to persuade the government to take another course entirely. He wanted tax breaks for those on welfare to encourage them to take work. This was his one big idea in the portfolio and he has cited it since as evidence that somewhere inside the Liberal Party the DLP was alive and well. But not very alive: the plan was killed off by Howard.