It is our job, as members of parliament, to legislate with an eye to the long term future, to look over the horizon beyond the next election and ensure that as far as we can what we do today will make Australia a better place, a safer place, for future generations to live in.
I will go to the next election saying to Australians, vote for me, vote for the Liberal Party, and I will become your PM. So I'm offering myself as the alternative PM - that's one way people describe the Leader of the Opposition - but I'm not in politics for myself to realize a personal ambition.
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.
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.
Anyone who thinks it's smart to cut immigration is sentencing Australia to poverty.
There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.
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.
My commitment to the Republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia... a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian.
Greece is an extreme case: a country where both the level of spending and the level of taxation were unsustainable!
On balance, after weighing the arguments, I believe that the time has come for Australia to create a new sovereign wealth fund.
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.
