I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.

I was President of the Queensland Young Liberals in 1981.

I am the enemy of anything parochial.

Abdul Nacer Benbrika's sentence doesn't expire, I'm told, until 2021, but I think it would be invidious for me as the Attorney-General to talk about individual cases or to anticipate the way in which a court, because it would be a judicial decision, might at some unspecified future time dispose of an application under a law that hasn't even yet been enacted.

We must break out of this mindset in Australia that we are a small nation on the other side of the world from the main, great Western nations. Australia is the twelfth largest economy in the world. We are a not insignificant player in commerce, in geopolitics and we must be in culture as well and we are.

I think it's important to have a blend just as we need to have by the way a mix of different opera companies and different arts companies.

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.