Here we go again, a government which is making yet more excuses for yet more failure when it comes to getting our budgetary situation right.

It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.

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.

Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage

What we are determined to do is to take more people from Syria and that war-torn part of the world as a response to this particular crisis, but again I stress we are taking people from camps because the last thing we want to do is to encourage and reward people smuggling.We are taking people from camps and we are taking family groups; our focus will be on family groups, from persecuted minorities.

This is a government which is proposing to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of households right around Australia. And for what? To make not a scrap of difference to the environment any time in the next 1000 years.

If we boost productivity, we can improve economic growth.