Malcolm Turnbull Quotes

I try to talk about policy issues intelligently, I try very hard to avoid thought bubbles. I make sure my speeches are well researched and footnoted. I make sure I am not talking through my hat.

What every prime minister struggles with and every leader struggles with is how to balance the two objectives; firstly that of ensuring that all asylum seekers are treated generously and humanely in accordance with the convention and secondly doing everything you can to eliminate or at least discourage people smuggling. And it's a very, very difficult balance.

I do not believe we can effectively move Australia to a lower emission economy, which is what we need to do if we're going to make a contribution to a global reduction in greenhouse gases, without putting a price on carbon.

The question of whether or to what extent human activities are causing global warming is not a matter of ideology, let alone of belief. The issue is simply one of risk management.

The biggest review of taxation ever undertaken in this country, is now dead in the water.

People learn from failure or from lack of success.

It is our job, as members of parliament, to legislate with an eye to the long term future, to look over the horizon beyond the next election and ensure that as far as we can what we do today will make Australia a better place, a safer place, for future generations to live in.

The most effective check and balance on government has been an independent press which maintains its credibility by ensuring that its criticism is balanced and based on fact - based indeed on solid journalistic work.

The Liberal Party is and always has been an amalgam between the conservative and the liberal with a small L traditions. And so from time to time people will see it emphasising one more than the other. I think it is genuinely an amalgam between the two.

What we're seeing at the moment is people being radicalised or adopting Islamist, murderous Islamist ideology very, very quickly so that you have people that are not on the counterterrorism radar screen who then often, as a result of mental illness, will then attach themselves to this murderous ideology and then act very quickly.

So the proposition that the ideal parents for any child are its biological parents is a statement with which we can all agree in the generality, but which does not apply, for one reason or another, in many particular circumstances.

In terms of our region, what we need to ensure is that the rise of China [is] conducted in a manner that does not disturb the security and the relative harmony of the region upon which China's prosperity depends. Now - now, that requires careful diplomacy, it requires balancing.

You cannot keep on saying oh, you know, talking about disrespecting women as just being politically correct or it's not a big deal or brushing things off. You've got to be aware of it.

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.

We need to recognise that the whole edifice of our fifth estate, of our journalism, has been built on a foundation of newspaper journalism and that that foundation is crumbling. The management of the media companies will deny that the end is nigh. I hope they are right.

I've been around in public life for a long time. I think people know what I stand for. They know that I have strong convictions, committed principles and I'm prepared to stand up for them.

The way to lose weight is to eat less, so I ate a lot less for a month and lost a lot of weight pretty quickly.

To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise, and we are sorry.

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

I believe politicians should aim to be accurate and truthful in what they say at all times. You can be truthful and inaccurate but what you shouldn't be doing at any time is saying things that are untrue or making commitments that you have no intention of honouring.

I will go to the next election saying to Australians, vote for me, vote for the Liberal Party, and I will become your PM. So I'm offering myself as the alternative PM - that's one way people describe the Leader of the Opposition - but I'm not in politics for myself to realize a personal ambition.

Many Liberals are rightly dismayed that on this vital issue of climate change we are not simply without a policy, without any prospect of having a credible policy but we are now without integrity. We have given our opponents the irrefutable, undeniable evidence that we cannot be trusted.

We will certainly have to rethink the way in which we design and protect places where large numbers of Australians and indeed this will happen around the world.

Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.

Do the bishops seriously imagine that legalising gay marriage will result in thousands of parties to heterosexual marriages suddenly deciding to get divorced so they can marry a person of the same sex?

The only reason to be in politics is public service. There's no other reason. Frankly, if that's the best job you can get in terms of money, that's too bad, you know. Because frankly, it's not well paid, everyone knows that. So for most people it's a big sacrifice.

People invest in companies in order to get a share of the profit that company will make. If the Government increases its share of the profits, potential profits, at the expense of the owners of the company, the shareholders, then that makes investment in that company less attractive.

It is our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them, and have the honesty to say to people, 'There are no easy solutions here.'

Mitt Romney speaking to a $50,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser says he doesn't have to worry about the 47 per cent of Americans who don't pay tax. He was not counting on the smart phone recording his speech and then posting it on YouTube.

Study after study has demonstrated that people are better off financially, healthier, happier if they are married, and indeed, I repeat, if they are formally married as opposed to simply living together.

Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.

It's not a 24-hour news cycle, it's a 60-second news cycle now, it's instantaneous. It has never been easier to get away with telling lies. It has never been easier to get away with the glib one liner.

Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?

My commitment to the Republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia ... a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian.

I am an ambitious person, but I am not ambitious in the sense that I want jobs only for the sake of them ... I am here to do things I think are worthwhile. I am always careful that the political positions I take are consistent with good policy. I would not want to be prime minister of Australia at any price.

I believe that politicians should speak the truth all the time. Invariably there will be occasions when you make statements that are factually incorrect due to an error.

It is unmanly. It is not some expression of macho virtue. It is the absolute antithesis of this. Real men don't bully women and children. Respect for women ... is so important.

There's the occasion when politicians will say things that are simply not true or that they make commitments that they have no intention of fulfilling. That is something that I think should not happen. That's a no-no. That's a third rail that you shouldn't touch.

But who knows, some years from now if there's a global emissions trading scheme agreement, as many have hoped for, then I'm sure Australia would be part of it.

In economics, one of the most important concepts is 'opportunity cost' - the idea that once you spend your money on something, you can't spend it again on something else.

Anyone who thinks it's smart to cut immigration is sentencing Australia to poverty.

This is a very tough business, politics. It's easy to get resentful or full of bitterness ... (but) I think hatred hurts the hater more than the hated. So I'm looking back on my time positively.

Greece is an extreme case: a country where both the level of spending and the level of taxation were unsustainable!

China and India will take the global leadership on climate change: they are suffering for it.

You've got to remember that it's a two horse race. So when the Government is doing badly the Opposition is doing better and vice versa.

Nobody looks at opinion polls with more attention than politicians, but of course you've got to remember that a single poll is a snapshot in time.

I don't find myself in moral turmoil. I'm not given to turmoil of any kind.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels, to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires.

I love radio - its immediacy and especially its intimacy ... it is part of your life, whispering into your ear. You can't see it, but equally importantly it can't see you.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

On balance, after weighing the arguments, I believe that the time has come for Australia to create a new sovereign wealth fund.

We are already experiencing the symptoms of climate change, especially with a hotter and drier climate in southern Australia - the rush to construct desalination plants is an expensive testament to that.