Tony Abbott

“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.”

“It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or th...”

“Both Mum and Dad were converts to Catholicism, and normally if you convert to Catholicism you have thought about it more than someone who just grew up with it, taking it for granted.”

“I instinctively try to protect people from filth.”

“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...”

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

“There are no factions in the Liberal Party.”

“I think that the best things that governments can do for productivity is not whack on new taxes and, if we can get institutions like schools and hospitals functioning better, well that's obv...”

“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...”

“The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' - we fly in, scratch around...”

“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.”

“A tax cut to compensate for a tax increase is not a cut - it's a con.”