Malcolm Turnbull

“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.”

“It is our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them, and have the honesty to say to people, 'There are no easy solutions here.'”

“Greece is an extreme case: a country where both the level of spending and the level of taxation were unsustainable!”

“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?”

“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.”

“So the proposition that the ideal parents for any child are its biological parents is a statement with which we can all agree in the generality, but which does not apply, for one reason or another, in many particular circumstances.”

“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.”

“We need to recognise that the whole edifice of our fifth estate, of our journalism, has been built on a foundation of newspaper journalism and that that foundation is crumbling. The management of the media companies will deny that the end is nigh. I hope they are right.”

“Study after study has demonstrated that people are better off financially, healthier, happier if they are married, and indeed, I repeat, if they are formally married as opposed to simply living together.”

“It's really corny to say, but if you are happily married and have good kids, that is about 98 per cent of what you should be seeking to achieve.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels, to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires.”

“Anyone who thinks it's smart to cut immigration is sentencing Australia to poverty.”

“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.”

“We are already experiencing the symptoms of climate change, especially with a hotter and drier climate in southern Australia - the rush to construct desalination plants is an expensive testament to that.”

“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.”

“But who knows, some years from now if there's a global emissions trading scheme agreement, as many have hoped for, then I'm sure Australia would be part of it.”

“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.”

“Look at countries like China, they are determined to dominate all clean technology areas, putting lots of money into wind, solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. America's political impotence, caused by their terrible partisanship, will see them left behind.”