It is the duty of the government to guarantee maximum security, and this is not an easy task.

You have got to sit down and talk to people. You can't understand people from a distance.

I'm not saying Christopher Pyne and all them are my enemies, they're great blokes, shouted me a few beers a couple of times which I like, it's - we have got to sit down with the people like that. We have got to sit down with people like that and negotiate and work our way through. If we don't do that then we're just going to continue the sins of the past.

One of my theories about why we've been cranky is Australians have been forced to focus on politics or party politics a little bit more than they normally would.

If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem. Maybe it's a fact.

I have been interested in the 12th century since my 20s when it was very fashionable to say of anybody with whom you disagreed, which was basically anybody over the age of 30, "One of the great minds of the 12th century", and one day I thought, "I don't know anything about the 12 century." So I started buying books, reading about it, and I discovered it was a period of great flowering, it was a Renaissance before what we think is the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century.

Steps toward a rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states create a process that turns economics into the moving force that shapes the regional relations instead of nationalist interests that were dominant in the past.