Something my mum taught me years and years and years ago, is life's just too short to carry around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatreds and all that sort of stuff.

If you accept it to be natural and normal to be gay then it follows it is not right for two folk who love each other to be denied marriage.

In your telephone call, you [Malcolm Turnbull]said that neither you nor the Cabinet would be supporting my nomination. When I asked the reasons for this, you said that neither you nor the Cabinet has the view that I had the qualifications for the position [of UN's secretary-general].

Australia is a nation of compassion. Courage and compassion. And the third of these great values: resilience.

We have seen this complete right wing takeover of modern liberalism, and it is an ugly spectacle to behold.

The alternatives [to the stimulus packages] were to do nothing or, worse, effectively replicate the Premiers' Plan of 1931 when governments cut expenditure, thereby compounding the problems created by a private sector already in retreat. The result, of course, was an economic rout, appalling unemployment and a decade of negligible growth through the 1930s

Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot.