Catholics From Australia

"Being part of the lives of parish families has been my greatest joy. When you don’t have your own personal family or wife, sharing the highs, lows and joys of the life of families is the kernel of a parish priest’s life, and I think that’s where you find God."

"There is such diversity in Sale with the vast growth corridor to the West and vibrant local parish communities reaching from the coast to the High Country – I am excited by the pastoral opportunities which exist and which are yet to be imagined."

"Of course we want to be in communion, faithfulness to the universal Church but to also recognise that within the Church we have to react to the realities as they are, not as we wish them or think they should be. We have to start where we are at – to see, to judge, and to act."

"We've been saying for decades and decades that faith is at home and in the parish, and now it's literally at home, this sort of language has been part of that church for a long time, but now it's actually what it is."

"The Northern Territory is not Melbourne, or Sydney or Adelaide or Perth or Brisbane – it is the Northern Territory, we need to be looking at how do we respond as a Church to the challenges of our time in this place. We are not creating a different Catholic Church. We are the Catholic Church in the Northern Territory."

"We need to be there walking alongside the Aboriginal people. And they appreciate us being there, but they’ve had their lives dominated by others, controlled by others."

"The Jesuits had helped to instil in me this thought that our calling in life was to be, to use the phrase: 'a man for others'."

"No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS"

"Well, that was one boat that did get stopped, wasn't it?"

"It's pretty obvious that, well, sometimes shit happens, doesn't it?"

"My commitment to the forgotten families of Australia is to ease your cost-of-living pressure. Stopping wasteful and unnecessary spending will keep your interest rates down."

"While I think men and women are equal, they are also different and I think it's inevitable and I don't think it's a bad thing at all that we always have, say, more women doing things like physiotherapy and an enormous number of women simply doing housework"

"Fire is a part of the Australian experience."

"[Victoria] "responded to with the most severe lockdown tried anywhere in the world outside of Wuhan itself"."

"I know politicians are going to be judged on everything they say but sometimes in the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark. The statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth are those carefully prepared scripted remarks."

"Victory is within our ready grasp...We are in reach of a famous victory"

"The love and commitment between two people of the same sex can be as strong as that between husband and wife... There is more moral quality in a relationship between two people devoted to each other for decades than in many a short-lived marriage. Still, however deeply affectionate or long lasting it may be, the relationship between two people of the same sex cannot be a marriage because a marriage, by definition, is between a man and a woman... Let's celebrate all strong relationships, whether they are between a man and a woman or between people of the same sex but let's be careful about describing every lasting sexual bond as a 'marriage'.""

"I don't really do diplomacy"

"No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom."

"WorkChoices is dead, it's buried, it's cremated."

"We need to attract and retain better teachers to remote schools. And we need to empower remote community leadership that’s ready to take more responsibility for what happens there. The objective is not to dictate to the states their decisions about teachers’ pay but to work with them so that whatever they do is more effective. It’s not to impose new rules on remote communities but to work with local leaders who want change for the better."

"There may not be a great job for [aboriginal people] but whatever there is, they just have to do it... And if it's picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done."

"That's bullshit. You're being deliberately unpleasant. I suppose you can't help yourself, can you?"

"Let's be upfront about this. I know Bernie is very sick, but just because a person is sick doesn't necessarily mean that he is pure of heart in all things"

"It's not goodies versus baddies, it's baddies versus baddies and that's why it's very important that we don't make a very difficult situation worse"

"The poor will always be with us."

"However long my public life lasts — in government or out of it, in parliament or out of it — I intend to persevere in this cause. Some missions, once accepted, can never really cease. Of course, the future for Aboriginal people lies much more in their own hands than in mine, but getting more of them to school, and making their schooling more useful, is a duty that government must not shirk. An ex-PM has just one unique trait, and that’s a very big megaphone, and I will continue to use it to see this done."

"Islam needs to delegitimise the urge to “behead all those who insult the Prophet” but only Muslims can do this. That’s why everyone interested in a safer world should be reaching out to “live and let live” Muslims and encouraging them to reclaim their faith from the zealots."

"I probably feel a bit threatened, as so many people do... look, it is a fact of life and I try to treat people as people, and not put them in pigeonholes."

"It’s also time Australians stopped being apologetic about the values that have made our country as free, fair and prosperous as any on Earth."

"Well, there is no doubt that (homosexuality) challenges, if you like, orthodox notions of the right order of things, but as I also said on the program, it happens, it's a fact of life and we have to treat people as we find them."

"We are all influenced by a value system that we hold, but in the end, every decision that a politician makes is, or at least should, in our society be based on the normal sorts of considerations. It's got to be publicly justifiable; not only justifiable in accordance with a private view; a private belief."

"I mean, the Nazis did terrible evil but they had a sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it"

"Where hate preaching is not illegal it should at least be thoroughly answered point-by-point with a very robust defence of human rights and responsibilities."

"Governments which live in fear of tomorrow's headline are incapable of any change."

"I stand for active government, not big government. I stand for government which gets off people's backs, not government which opts out of the future because it cannot face hard decisions. I stand for government which backs Australia's families with real policies and not just platitudes."

"Australians rightly object to higher taxes because they observe that most government spending disappears down a bottomless well. Government often seems like an evening out—it costs a fortune and in the morning there is little to show for all the expense. But it is my hunch that people would be less hostile to paying tax if they were more confident they were investing in lasting assets..."

"Mr Speaker, standing before you in this chamber, which is heir to 700 years of parliamentary tradition, I feel like a very small boy in a very big school. To my parents and to my grandparents; to my sisters, who have made me what I am; to my wife, my mainstay; to my priceless friends; to my party, which has given me the privilege to serve, I give my heartfelt thanks. To the Jesuits who first encouraged an ideal of public service; to Bob Santamaria, who sparked my interest in politics; to several editors, who honed my way with words; to John Hewson, who introduced me to this place; and to John Howard, who has been the contemporary politician I admire most, I hope I can be true to the principles you taught. May God and the ghosts of great men give me strength. May those who have laboured greatly to build this nation fortify my resolve to make a worthy contribution in this House."

"If we’re honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little bit like a bad father or a bad husband. Not withstanding all his or her faults, you find that he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he’s employing someone while he is in fact a boss."

"[Abortion is] the easy way out."

"... an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience."

"I want to make it clear I do not judge or condemn any woman who has had an abortion. There would not be anyone under 50 in this country who has not come up close and personal against this issue. I accept that resolutions made in church often wilt under the hot breath of passion - I think I know that as well as any person in this chamber - but every abortion is a tragedy and up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation's legacy of unutterable shame."

"I won't be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated [for cervical cancer], maybe that's because I'm a cruel, callow, callous, heartless bastard but, look, I won't be"

"Cardinal Pell is one of the greatest churchmen that Australia has seen. I am a very imperfect Catholic. Why shouldn't I go and seek counsel? Why shouldn't I go and trespass on the time occasionally of someone like Cardinal Pell? If you spent more time with Cardinal Pell, your life might be more interesting."

"We pledge to the families of Australia that we will never make your lives harder by imposing unnecessary new taxes."

"I want to record my deep conviction that our Australian story should fill our hearts with pride and our eyes with tears. It is a story of the dispossessed and the outcast, redeemed through the innate goodness of humanity—a society challenged by nature, tested by war, enlarged by other cultures and blessed by such peace, prosperity and tolerance that we are now the envy of the earth."

"I am, as you know, hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change... and I think that the economics of an ETS are a bit dodgy... [but] whatever second thoughts people like me might be having, I don't think it's a good look for the Opposition to be browner than Howard going into the (2010) election."

"If you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax?"

"The argument is absolute crap. However, the politics of this are tough for us. Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger."

"I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons."