I think that it's high time that the Prime Minister stopped making excuses for bad policy and started listening to the forgotten families of Australia.

I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.

No country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself and this is the risk that the countries of Europe run through misguided altruism.

Look, good government doesn't look for excuses, good government gets on with the job.

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.

Every prime minister has a whole series of networks, and there are official formal networks and there are unofficial informal networks. I'm lucky in that I have good official formal networks, starting with my own office, the leadership group, the cabinet and the party room.

I was a very senior minister in the Howard government and I sat around this particular table [in the prime ministerial office] in many discussions. The difference between being a senior minister and the prime minister is that ultimately the buck does stop with the prime minister and in the end the prime minister has to make those critical judgement calls and that's the big difference.