Tony Abbott Quotes

I also think that if you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax? Why not ask motorists to pay more, why not ask electricity consumers to pay more and then at the end of the year you can take your invoices to the tax office and get a rebate of the carbon tax you've paid

The climate change argument is absolute crap

I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.

What will most certainly happen is that there will be very clear and full communication between the government and independents and minor parties. The precise mechanisms will evolve over time, but we certainly intend to keep the minor parties and the independents very much in the loop. We have to if we want our legislative agenda to have a reasonable chance of success and that's what we intend to do.

No cuts to health , no cuts to education, no cuts to pensions

The problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother's convenience.

I think that marriage is, dare I say it, between a man and a woman, hopefully for life and there are all sorts of other relationships which should be acknowledged and recognised, but I don't know that they can be recognised as marriage.

While I think men and women are equal, they are also different and I think it's inevitable and I don't think it's a bad thing at all that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework.

You cannot win an election without a fight.

Climate change is crap.

Abortion is the easy way out. It's hardly surprising that people should choose the most convenient exit from awkward situations.

We are a very like-minded group, the senior members of this government. The outliers are not very far away from the mainstream.

Like the Governor-General, when asked what you enjoy most about the job my tendency is to say "today", because of the insights you get into our nation and because of the privileged contact you have with so many people.

We've got to get the system right. That's why we've got this root-and-branch reform under way.

No one, however smart, however well-educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.

Well, Michael, we will be telling the people of Australia in good time before the next election exactly what they can expect from us. No surprises, no excuses. They will be our watch words going into the election and afterwards, should we form a government.

Political parties don't work when people just announce what they are doing and expect everyone else to follow.

I can't promise that I won't continue to embarrass people.

I want to see an end to sovereign risk questions over Australia.

A bit of body contact never hurt anyone.

I'm not running for canonisation.

I think anything which improves services is in principle a good thing.

Mates help each other; they do not tax each other.

I want to be a very good friend to Indonesia, but there are some things which are non-negotiable. Border protection is just non-negotiable. Maintaining a strong security network is just non-negotiable. I think the Indonesians understand that.

We accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.

Although our powers are great, they are not unlimited they are bounded by some lines of demarcation.

I know politicians are going to be judged on everything they say but sometimes in the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark. The statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth are those carefully prepared scripted remarks.

They've changed the salesman but they haven't changed the product.

We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. Thank you so much, Malcolm Turnbull.

I think that people should come to Australia through the front door, not through the back door. If people want a migration outcome, they should go through the migration channels.

Australia will take more refugees from Syria in response to the growing international crisis but it will not increase the total number of asylum seekers it accepts.

In respect of Indonesia, I am determined to be the best possible friend of Indonesia that I can be, consistent with my overriding duty to protect our country. We would never do anything that was damaging to Indonesia, because we want Indonesia to flourish. We want Indonesia to take its rightful place as one of the really important countries of the world, as it will, sooner or later.

Taxes will always be lower under a Coalition government

It is very important for our long-term economic future that the relationship with Japan, Korea and China, who are our three biggest trading partners, be ever stronger.

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.

I don't think my religious convictions should be held against me.

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've always avoided those sorts of self-assessments because if you give yourself a 10 out of 10 people think you're a big head, if you give yourself a 6 out of 10 they think you're plagued with self-doubt, so I'm just not going to rate myself.

The fact is that I'm interested in getting on with my job of holding the Government to account and I think that the Government should get on with the job of effectively running the country and not making excuses for poor performance, not lowering expectations. Their job is to deliver on their election commitments.

What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.

There is one fundamental message that we want to go out from this place to every nook and cranny of our country: There should be no new tax collection without an election.

I'm confident that there are plenty of people who have the strength of character and the presence of mind to warn me of difficulties and alert me to opportunities.

In Australia's biggest cities, public transport is generally slow, expensive, not especially reliable and still hideous drain on the public purse. Part of the problem is inefficient, overmanned, union-dominated government run train and bus systems. Mostly though, ... there just aren't enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car, and cars need roads

Why isn't the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community?

I've always been very wary of debates involving women.

On the outside it doesn't look like very much happened. A burned girl was in my class for a while. Once I brought her some homework. In class she said my name. Then she was gone. That's pretty much all that happened.

The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good.

My mum and mad were both very generous, encouraging parents.

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.

When the world is in trouble, Australia responds. Australia is a good, global citizen.

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

Middle income families with children are Australia's new poor

There will be no surprises and no excuses from a Coalition government, Barrie.

I think that political marriages are subject to more strain than most precisely because of the nature of politics.

I think my wife and my kids are incredibly good to allow me to stay in public life given that they have to cop a whole lot of collateral attention that, being human, they'd rather not get.

Most of the people who are coming to Australia by boat have passed through several countries on the way, and if they simply wanted asylum they could have claimed that in any of the countries through which they'd passed.

There may not be a great job for [Aboriginal people] but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it's picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done.

The thing about social media is that it is anonymous, so it can be much more vitriolic and extreme than normal media and yet it is there for everyone to see. It is kind of like electronic graffiti. The political process is accelerated and intense in a way that I don't believe it ever really has been before.

And the commitment that I've been giving to the Australian people is that there'll be no surprises and no excuses under a Coalition government.

There are tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and danger who might readily seek to enter a Western country if the opportunity is there.

We cannot suffer a person by his affidavit to arraign the whole justice of the country and its administration.

I instinctively try to protect people from filth.

I see myself as a social conservative, but I think that there are lots of social institutions that produce beneficial reforms, like public hospitals, for instance, and schools.

No senior politician can expect to have work-life balance. I'm afraid there are some jobs for which work-life balance inevitably goes out the window. If you want work-life balance you just have to accept that you can't be a senior member of a government, or for that matter a senior member of an opposition.

A government that understands the limits of power as well as its potential.

We have already provided a strong humanitarian response to the problems in the Middle East and that response will be stronger within coming days.

Tony Abbott's books are so amazing!

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

Voluntary paid maternity leave: yes; compulsory paid maternity leave: over this Government's dead body, frankly. It just won't happen.

The only party which is going to increase taxes after the election is the Labor Party.

In the era of mobile phones and emails, you're no more out of the loop in China than you are in Sydney.

The Liberal Party has dealt with the spill motion and now this matter is behind us, we think that when you elect a government, when you elect a prime minister, you deserve to keep that government and that prime minister until you have a chance to change your mind.

It is a very heavy responsibility [to be a prime-minister] to make, but someone has to make it for our country and I am thrilled and honoured to have that opportunity and that responsibility.

I'm a politician. I'm not going to get into a whole range of scientific argument with scientists.

If you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax.

We are naturally reluctant as a peace-loving people to reach out to far-away conflicts but, as we know, this conflict has been reaching out to us for months now.

Well, I'm not saying that an emissions tax is ever going to be good policy.

We shouldn't be willy-nilly creating potential human life just to satisfy the urges of the scientific community.

We will act to build a better world. We always have, we always will. We will act to lend a helping hand, not just here but wherever we humanly can.

I am extremely unwilling that we should take upon ourselves to exercise a jurisdiction which the law does not vest in us.

There is much to be said for an emissions trading scheme. It was, after all, the mechanism for emission reduction ultimately chosen by the Howard government.

She had been forced to accept the idea that what was true, and what couldn't possibly be, were ideas that depended on which life you lived - on which lives you lived.

The only thing I wouldn't do is sell my arse.

Deep down, the boringly pragmatic Liberal Party has a sunnier view of human nature than the passionately idealistic Labor Party because we are prepared to put more trust in the common sense and decency of our fellow Australians.

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.

The one thing that has changed dramatically when you talk to the people of New Zealand and people from Ireland? They feel a darned-sight better about themselves because they made the decision to do what they've done, and I can say to you, we would feel a bloody darned sight better about ourselves once we get an opportunity to put this [vote on same-sex marriage] out there.

Putting labels on people is so counter-productive. Most of us on some issues could be considered conservative, on other issues could be considered progressive, on other issues might be thought of as being moderate, on other issues might be thought of as being rather forthright.

The role of CO2 is not nearly as clear as the climate catastrophists would suggest.

We are about getting things done. We are not about the blame game. We are not about making excuses.

I understand that government should live within its means, value the money it holds in trust from you the taxpayer, avoid waste and, above all else, observe the first maxim of good government: namely, do no avoidable harm.

I'm getting my exercise at five o'clock in the morning, that's good. So far I've managed to hold on to a bike ride on Saturday or Sunday morning, probably at least two weekends out of three.

Even potential human life needs to be treated with great respect.

The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' - we fly in, scratch around and fly out.

Another big problem with any Australian emissions reduction scheme is that it would not make a material difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations unless the big international polluters had similar schemes.

The last thing Australia needs right now is instability and uncertainty.

Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it's not necessarily everyone's place to come to Australia.

For small business people, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family.

I am a model of positivity compared to the kinds of vitriol, the kinds of destructive criticisms that Labor members of parliament have been making of each other.

Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world.

The the relationship between the prime minister and the monarch is very much a personal one and when it comes to the constitution of the Order of Australia, which is headed by the monarch, this is governed by letters patent, which are a matter between the prime minister and the monarch.