Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For years I have made the point that progress in winding back economic slack is made not by high growth in any individual year, but by maintaining an expansion over a sustained period.
In particular, Australia, because of its ancient geography, soil profile and distinctive weather patterns, is more adversely affected by climate variability than some other continents.
This is the rollcall of evolution happening in the space of a few generations, the greatest loss of living things that make up our biodiversity since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
And given that there's been probably a ten-fold amount of information about terrorism through the media than there has about climate change; I think that's quite an interesting statistic.
When the Australian Government looked at how to meet the challenges, and the opportunities, presented by our ageing population, it saw that an all-encompassing approach was a prerequisite.
I realised early on that there were two groups of people in the world: those who made the decisions and those who had the decisions made for them. I wanted to be one of the decision-makers.
We know that so many of the conditions and diseases that we associate with ageing can often be prevented or in fact their onset delayed if we just took preventative steps earlier in our lives.
There is a very strong deal for our farmers to start with. So from the export of farming, which is being looked at to make up some of the lost ground from the resources boom, to just about every area.
The core strands of my involvement in public life are a belief in the need to strive wherever possible for equality of treatment and opportunity, to ensure all people have the means to a decent livelihood.
There is job growth in renewables, there is job growth in energy efficiency and there is job growth in developing innovative industries and technologies to successfully meet the challenge of climate change.
All economies are structured differently - the tax systems, the regulatory systems, the federal systems - and that is as true of Australia and the United States as it is of Australia and Germany and the U.K.
My approach in life is very clear: if there is an error, I tend to apologise and indeed most mornings I'll apologise in advance to my wife for the inevitable errors I'm going to make during the course of a day.
My point is this, the Government made this decision to ban totally beef exports into Indonesia, even to compliant abattoirs and this will have enormous consequences for the beef cattle industry across Australia.
I can understand that people who have a very different view to mine are motivated by the purest of motives. All I ask is that they might give the same benefit of the doubt to those with whom they might disagree with.
The forces that are in play on climate change essentially revolve around the generation of power, the transportation of goods and services and people, and the sorts of materials that we use to fuel the whole of our civilisation.
Tobacco companies are legally operating entities in Australia. If the Government thinks that they should not make donations to political parties, well then they should ban them operating as legally structured entities in Australia.
There are a range of associated impacts related to increasing temperatures which affect both evaporation rates and river systems, which are already over stressed, and these will hit farming communities and the health of crop lands.
Our job... as we take forward this mantle of leadership as a new generation is to ensure that we not only bring our party back together, which has been bruised and battered this week, but that... we bring the parliament back together.
Our career path has tended to be the most perverse and contrary approach to the entertainment industry imaginable, while at the same time doing the kinds of things that you have to do, the videos, the photos and all that sort of stuff.
Overall, the work of rebuilding and transforming government for the digital age is only just beginning. Governments remain organized according to political and bureaucratic imperatives, not according to what makes the most sense to citizens.
Look, very clearly there are things that need to be done urgently in relation to climate change, and of those the most obvious is to have an enforceable and equitable arrangement delivering deep cuts in emissions into the middle of the century.
Most of us at the Reserve Bank come from a background in economics and hence have a predisposition in favour of free markets and a sceptical attitude towards intervention in those markets unless there is a clearly defined economic rationale for it.
A government cannot be expected to allow independence to its central bank unless that bank is also accountable to it and to the wider public. That is, the central bank must be able to be judged on whether or not it has achieved its agreed objective.
Trying to get a common set of trading rules right down to very simple things like paperless customs arrangements and telecommunications services and all those things that will help lower the cost and increase the ease of doing business across the region.
I remember when we came in, in 2013, and I was implementing our border protection policy, people threw their hands up - and I said, 'I'm doing what I said I would do in the way I said I'd do it' - and guess what: I'm now getting the results I said I'd get.
An effective leader creates specific, achievable goals, initiates action and enlists the participation of others. They remove distractions; grasps the bigger picture, focuses on one task at a time; completes the task competently and organizes for the future.
Well they're very, very genuine concerns at present as to the status of the 800 people who are to be sent by Australia to Malaysia. There's concern about the status of asylum seekers in Malaysia generally, but there's concern about the status of the 800 to be sent.
The concepts of community and community life, have since the Dreaming, always held special significance for Aboriginal people because both provided the physical, cultural, spiritual and social environments, which supported children, young people, families and the aged.
I think it is true that, post the global financial crisis initially - and for some period after that and particularly with how the mining investment boom and commodity prices played out - there was a dislocation that occurred in some of the more traditional mechanisms.
Where I think people are being offensive to religion in this country - whichever religion that might be, but particularly the one I and many other Christians subscribe to - well, we will just call it out, and we will demand the same respect that people should provide to all religions.
The way of awakening and freedom requires that we ask ourselves, with all of the earnestness, honesty, and humility at our command, just this one fundamental question: 'Am I willing to live this moment with as much attention and affection as possible, or am I going to do something else?'
I call on the Australian Government to set out the conditions upon which they will provide a taxpayer funded backing for wholesale term funding for Australian deposit taking institutions. I call on the Government it make clear the conditions upon which taxpayer funds will be used in this way.
Pope Benedict is an amazingly visionary person. What he has done is establish an evolutionary process that will help undo the Reformation. The Anglican Church has been hijacked by modernism, with synods trying to amend the faith and this process will allow traditional Anglicans to be themselves.
But it's not just the cattle producers, it's all the attendant industries like transport and shipping and feed producers and the like. There will be enormous ramifications across the beef industry generally as a result of the Government's decision to ban all exports to all of the abattoirs in Indonesia.
Banks and other providers of credit to households have been competing vigorously to expand or protect their market share. In the process, lending standards have been progressively eroded so that lenders are now engaging in practices that would have been regarded as out of the question five or ten years ago.
Climate change is so big that people who study it.. and many do.. need to speak to it. They must present scientific papers, they must appear in public, they must speak to the media and we must hear their voices. In order to get policy right, policymakers.. governments.. need to make decisions based on sound science.
Firms gain comparative advantage from how good their people are. Retaining and attracting talent is a key point of competitive advantage in the global economy. We are seeing that play out, and there are implications for Australia, too. The idea that companies now compete on who can pay their workers the lowest - that's all changing.
For equity markets, the combination of low interest rates, strong economic growth and low inflation has proved very beneficial, with global share markets rising solidly in each of the past three years. This has been underpinned by strong growth in profits so that, notwithstanding the rise in share prices, P/E ratios have been declining on average.
But no matter how big the effort to push a propaganda line might be, climate change is bigger. This, undoubtedly and regrettably, is the biggest immediate long-term environmental challenge we face. A failure to concretely come to some policy outcome on climate change has not only a negative environmental impact but also social and economic consequences for us.
We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith. And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem. You can't wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others. Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia.
We had a level of tariffs of about five per cent. Now a lot of those will go, most of them will go over time, some of them immediately. Now that means that electronic goods and other things, white goods, coming into Australia, will be cheaper for our community. It also means in many cases that the inputs used by our high-end manufacturers to make a final product are also coming in cheaper than they otherwise would - so it makes those manufacturers more competitive.