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.

If consulted by friends about marital dramas, I always encourage the singles to marry, the married to stick together, the neglectful and wayward to renew their loving commitment and the wronged to forgive.

If Margaret Thatcher took climate change seriously and believed that we should take action to reduce global greenhouse emissions, then taking action and supporting and accepting the science can hardly be the mark of incipient Bolshevism.

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.

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.'

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.

Look at countries like China, they are determined to dominate all clean technology areas, putting lots of money into wind, solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. America's political impotence, caused by their terrible partisanship, will see them left behind.

Mitt Romney speaking to a $50,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser says he doesn't have to worry about the 47 per cent of Americans who don't pay tax. He was not counting on the smart phone recording his speech and then posting it on YouTube.

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.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

So the proposition that the ideal parents for any child are its biological parents is a statement with which we can all agree in the generality, but which does not apply, for one reason or another, in many particular circumstances.

Study after study has demonstrated that people are better off financially, healthier, happier if they are married, and indeed, I repeat, if they are formally married as opposed to simply living together.

The proliferation of outlets that digital technology has enabled has itself contributed to the changing nature of what we regard as 'news' and the way in which many citizens perceive politics.

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.

We are already experiencing the symptoms of climate change, especially with a hotter and drier climate in southern Australia - the rush to construct desalination plants is an expensive testament to that.

We need to recognise that the whole edifice of our fifth estate, of our journalism, has been built on a foundation of newspaper journalism and that that foundation is crumbling. The management of the media companies will deny that the end is nigh. I hope they are right.

What you've got to do is recognize that you don't control everything for a start, you've got to play the cards you're dealt, the hand of cards you're dealt, as best you can, and that's what I always seek to do.

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.