Malcolm Turnbull

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.'

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?

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.

Those who condemn gay marriage, yet are silent or indifferent to the breakdown of marriage and divorce, are, in my view, missing the real issue.

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.

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

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.