Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am the enemy of anything parochial.
I was interested in politics since the age of 14.
I was President of the Queensland Young Liberals in 1981.
I think the cultural programming on the ABC is one of the glories of the ABC.
There have been 44 constitutional referenda in Australia and only eight have succeeded.
I've never been one of those people, who subscribe to this notion that the book is dead.
One of the things about federal politics is that it has been remarkably free of corruption.
The political bug first bit me was Malcolm Fraser's resignation from the Gorton Government.
The great works belong to no one nation, no one cultural tradition even. They are universal.
The crime of bribery of foreign officials is an offence under the Commonwealth Criminal Code.
I think it would be frankly a retrograde thing for Pauline Hanson to be elected to the Senate.
The tyranny of distance is such an important element of policy and the allocation of resources.
Historically, it's very unusual after a change of government for the new government not to be returned.
I decided few years ago to leave the bar to pursue a career in politics because I wanted to make a contribution in Parliament.
Capricornia is one of the most marginal seats in the country. So naturally the electoral battle is fought in the marginal seats.
I think it's important to have a blend just as we need to have by the way a mix of different opera companies and different arts companies.
It is a necessary precondition for the success of a referendum that there should be broad community consensus and bipartisan support for it.
She is not being preferenced - she's not on our preference card because Pauline Hanson's view of Australia is basically a very - it's a very old view.
I don't really know a lot about these 'anti-protest' laws. I'm only vaguely aware of them, but I don't have enough detailed knowledge about them to comment.
There wasn't a lot of music in the home when I was growing up. We didn't have a piano or anything like that but my grandmother, had been a well-known piano teacher.
I joined the Young Liberals when I was 16 and it was a good way for me to understand how the Liberal Party worked and to learn basic political skills and techniques.
I'd say about Malcolm Fraser, as he said about himself, is that he was always, from the day he entered Parliament in 1955 until the day he died today, was a Liberal.
I think it displayed what the Australia Council does so well, the awarding of artists who at various steps in their career had been encouraged by the Australia Council.
As a Liberal of course I am very strongly committed to the notion of artistic freedom and very hostile to the idea of there being a single view of cultural policy dictated from on high.
The modern Australia, the Australia of the 21st Century, Malcolm Turnbull's Australia has nothing to do with the kind of protectionist and xenophobic attitudes that Pauline Hanson represents.
I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.
The [Maicolm] Turnbull government's position on this is perfectly clear. We believe that there should be a plebiscite so that all Australians can have their say, and that is what Australians want.
The arts are part of a nation's identity, they are part of a nation's soul and when we look at a country from the eyes of people overseas they are part of a nations branding in the world as it were.
I'm confident as a supporter of same sex marriage, I'm confident that there'll be a yes vote in that plebiscite, and that the parliament will then move very swiftly to implement the will of the people.
We have a great literary tradition in Australia. I think the book is very much alive and the more people who are encouraged to read books the better our society will be and the wiser our society will be.
We need to tell Australian stories,we need to encourage and fund and present Australian work but we also need to understand that for a sophisticated, educated, culturally aware, modern nation we can't be parochial.
The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life.
If there were to be a Labor-Greens government, that would be the end of the Adani mine, that would be the end of coal mining in central Queensland, and that would be the end of their best shot at economic prosperity in the future.
I am a very, very strong advocate of the notion that we shouldn't equate the arts with other aspects of infrastructure. They have a unique role in any civilised society and that requires appropriate and targeted government support.
Michelle Landr is a fabulous member of Parliament. She is a true representative of that community. She's a classic middle-of-the-road Australian who represents the interests of her community with passion and with a lot of common sense.
I think there has only ever been one member of the Federal Parliament from either side found to have been corrupt in the whole history of Australia. I don't think we should create the architecture to solve a problem which barely exists.
Well everyone's careers is a series of steps, but being the President of the Young Liberals or the President of a Liberal society at university is an important step in the Liberal Party in terms of being noticed and making your name known.
You can't be selective about freedom of speech. If you say you believe in freedom of speech you have to acknowledge the people whose views you disagree with, people whose views you may detest, nevertheless have the right to freedom of speech.
The Coalition's message of jobs and growth is resonating very, very strongly in North and Central Queensland and one thing they're particularly fearful of is the possibility of a Green-Labor government, a government in which the Green tail wags the Labor dog.
I think it's very, very important that people outside the capital cities, not just Sydney and Melbourne but also Brisbane Perth Adelaide and so on, have the greatest access to the best cultural experiences they can in both the performing arts and the visual arts.
Bill Shorten should - either knows that or at least he should know it and for him to change the conversation by proposing - by suggesting a proposal significantly more adventurous than where the conversation has been up until now was a very unhelpful intervention.
You asked me about Queensland in particular and regional Queensland where our message of jobs and growth is resonating strongly because that's what is on people's mind, and when the election results are in on 2nd July, I'm confident that that message will be translated into the ballot box.
We must break out of this mindset in Australia that we are a small nation on the other side of the world from the main, great Western nations. Australia is the twelfth largest economy in the world. We are a not insignificant player in commerce, in geopolitics and we must be in culture as well and we are.
Opera Australia has a mix - it produces new work, it produces from the classical repertoire and, particularly in more recent years, it's done those blockbuster musicals which are very lucrative for it and reach an audience that classic opera or a new opera perhaps wouldn't reach, like South Pacific for example.
A dining club which I was involved in at Oxford University invited Sir Isaiah Berlin to dinner, who I believe was probably the greatest liberal philosopher in the 20th century. I sat beside him and we spoke about liberal philosophy and the events of the 20th century all night over dinner - it was unforgettable!
There always are a basket of issues in any federal election campaign, but in this part of Australia [Capricornia] I can assure you having as you know a fairly frequent visitor to Rockhampton, that the issue of jobs and employment and where the jobs of the future are coming from, is the biggest single issue on people's minds.
Capricornia there is a particular regional particularity and that is the Adani mine. We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine... And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine.
I've always been a lover of classical music ever since I was an early teenager I suppose. I remember the very first piece of classical music that grabbed me was I bought an LP of Daniel Barenboim performing Mozart's piano concertos and I would have been about 14 or 15 at the time and I remember I played it over and over again.
If you were a person in Rockhampton who is wondering where your next job was coming from, and you had the prospect of one of Australia's largest ever coal projects with a very, very long life span being developed and reviving the regional economy. And you saw the Greens in particular doing their little best to stop it happening.
Malcolm Fraser, in the marrow of his bones, despised racism. He despised people who discriminated against other people because they were different and in particular because of the colour of their skin, and I don't think there has been a time in Australian politics where there has been more attention to the importance of that value.