Political parties don’t work when people just announce what they are doing and expect everyone else to follow. – Tony Abbott
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. – Tony Abbott
All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotels rooms doing their work, they’re all using wireless technology, and we shouldn’t assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable. – Tony Abbott
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. – Tony Abbott
I’m a politician. I’m not going to get into a whole range of scientific argument with scientists. – Tony Abbott
For small business people, less paperwork means higher profits, boosted sales and more time with the family. – Tony Abbott
My commitment to the forgotten families of Australia is to ease your cost of living pressure. – Tony Abbott
What I would like to see is sufficiently good education and health services being delivered to Aboriginal people so that they are prepared and ready to leave and join the economic mainstream if that’s their choice. – Tony Abbott
The Australian public are very fair and they are always prepared to give the leader of a major political party a fair go. – Tony Abbott
If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I’d want to come to Australia. – Tony Abbott
I’m not saying that people on welfare don’t contribute in their own way, but as many as possible should be encouraged to be economically active as well as socially and culturally active. – Tony Abbott
I think leadership is knowing what you want to achieve and then purposefully and sensibly taking steps to achieve it, remembering always that you have got to bring people with you if you are seeking to be a successful political leader. – Tony Abbott
The smart way to improve broadband is not to junk the existing network but to make the most of it. It’s to let a competitive market deliver the speeds that people need at an affordable price with government improving infrastructure in the areas where market competition won’t deliver it. – Tony Abbott
It’s very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places – to kind of look at things through the ‘noble innocents’ prism or through the ‘chronically dysfunctional’ prism, and I suspect that is so often the case. – Tony Abbott
Oppositions are not there to get legislation through. Oppositions are there to hold the government to account. – Tony Abbott
I do enjoy exercise, not because I am an exercise junkie but because it’s terrific stress release. – Tony Abbott
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. – Tony Abbott
I have close family members as well as lots of close friends who are gay. Many of them strongly support gay marriage. – Tony Abbott
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. – Tony Abbott
