I'm confident as a supporter of same sex marriage, I'm confident that there'll be a yes vote in that plebiscite, and that the parliament will then move very swiftly to implement the will of the people.

Malcolm Fraser, in the marrow of his bones, despised racism. He despised people who discriminated against other people because they were different and in particular because of the colour of their skin, and I don't think there has been a time in Australian politics where there has been more attention to the importance of that value.

There always are a basket of issues in any federal election campaign, but in this part of Australia [Capricornia] I can assure you having as you know a fairly frequent visitor to Rockhampton, that the issue of jobs and employment and where the jobs of the future are coming from, is the biggest single issue on people's minds.

Opera Australia has a mix - it produces new work, it produces from the classical repertoire and, particularly in more recent years, it's done those blockbuster musicals which are very lucrative for it and reach an audience that classic opera or a new opera perhaps wouldn't reach, like South Pacific for example.

The tyranny of distance is such an important element of policy and the allocation of resources.

I've always been a lover of classical music ever since I was an early teenager I suppose. I remember the very first piece of classical music that grabbed me was I bought an LP of Daniel Barenboim performing Mozart's piano concertos and I would have been about 14 or 15 at the time and I remember I played it over and over again.

There wasn't a lot of music in the home when I was growing up. We didn't have a piano or anything like that but my grandmother, had been a well-known piano teacher.