Tony Abbott Quotes

Tony Abbott's books are so amazing!

The sky is where mathematics and magic become one.

On the outside it doesn't look like very much happened. A burned girl was in my class for a while. Once I brought her some homework. In class she said my name. Then she was gone. That's pretty much all that happened.

when you haven’t got the numbers, be vicious. It’s called minority politics.

You know what it’s like—you see someone on the train screaming awful, racist things and think, ‘How can I protect this person’s right to free speech?

The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn’t really deserve.

Tony, Tony, we’re not going down that path again’ was a line cabinet ministers recalled Howard using with Abbott on more than a few occasions.

During negotiations with independent members of the House, Abbott told Member for New England Tony Windsor that he would ‘sell his arse’ to become prime minister.

They see a lot of pit bull pups at the RSPCA, her handler tells me. Why? “Because young guys have pit bulls and they are idiots and they don’t desex their dogs.

The press has given up saying so but these two men are denouncing what they once supported: a price on carbon and an emissions trading scheme.

Abbott joined the union, the Australian Journalists’ Association. He led a little strike at the Bulletin and opposed a big strike at the Australian.

Misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the parliament as a political crime.

A happy Hickie verdict on Abbott: “He’s not a reformer; he’s a great opportunist.

A first bill for the abolition of compulsory student union fees failed in 2004 but it was back as soon as the government won control of the Senate.

But the bill was also loathed by the National Party because it would drain university sporting clubs of cash. Out in the bush, those clubs and that money mattered.

He stumbled and told the truth one night: workers had lost protections under WorkChoices.

This champion of self-reliance, the man who made the unemployed work for the dole, has no doubt that families like his deserve a great deal of help from the government.

He knows the cruel truth that the baiter is never blamed when victims lose their cool.

What he’s about is destroying a government. Looking like a prime minister in waiting is a second-order consideration.

We all thought Tony would be a force to be reckoned with when he grew up and we’re still waiting.

Even those on the executive supporting his right to take office thought his behaviour “senseless, futile and provocative.

Abbott was running a one-man campaign to wreck his own organisation.

Three days ago, Dana had been kidnapped by the Norse god Loki and trapped in the Greek Underworld.

She had been forced to accept the idea that what was true, and what couldn't possibly be, were ideas that depended on which life you lived - on which lives you lived.

Good-bye isn't forever.

When people make up their minds about you, they only see you one way, which is the easy way for them.

Standing to one side watching the politicians and the journalists and the cameras is one of the factory’s owners, John Kernahan, who tells me Sulo’s annual turnover is $85 million. So the carbon tax? “It’s not a biggie.

From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott’s mantra has been: “If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government.” But for that to keep working in his favour, it’s best the boats keep coming.

When Kevin Rudd announced that Australia would bid for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council Tony Abbott announced his immediate opposition. The bid would be abandoned in the event of a Coalition victory at the 2010 election, he pledged. The total cost was then estimated at perhaps $40 million, though ended up at around $25 million.16 For perspective, the Victorian Government spent $56.7 million to subsidise the Grand Prix in 2012 alone.17

He invaded the Women’s Room with a Channel Ten news crew and cub reporter Mike Munro. The issue was voluntary fees. The point was ridicule. When asked to leave the room, Abbott declared for the cameras: “This is a man’s room for the moment.

Abbott was all over the shop on emissions trading. He feared destruction at the ballot box if the Opposition blocked Rudd. “The government’s emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public’s fears,” he had said in late July 2009.

At one level, the Opposition's most urgent job, between now and the next election, is to publicise the government's mistakes. Randolph Churchill once declared that oppositions should oppose everything, propose nothing and turf the government out. He was right in this fundamental respect: the opposition's job is to get elected. Intelligent oppositions have no unnecessary enemies. They make the government rather than themselves the issue by ensuring that everyone harmed by government decisions well and truly knows about it.

Support for getting rid of the Queen was at 57 per cent but the nation was divided on the kind of republic that should replace her, a division that proved the death of the proposal. This was minority politics – the power of the passionate minority to hold the line – played at a level of genius by Howard and with inexhaustible passion by his lieutenant Tony Abbott. The republicans have never recovered. Abbott can claim a good measure of credit not only for wrecking the republican hopes in the 1999 referendum, but also for keeping them off the agenda ever since.

He was the most in your face. That’s what set him apart. There were, of course, other Liberal Party and DLP types on campus but they weren’t offensive and they weren’t rude. They were people you could talk to. You could sit down and have a cup of tea with them. I would never do that with Tony Abbott. He’s not that sort of person. I don’t care what your politics are, you can still engage with another person. You don’t have to be threatening. You don’t have to be just that awful person. I have no doubt Tony was a most charming man when he wanted to be. It was a very conscious choice he made.

Turnbull is sharp with Jones once or twice, asking to be heard, reminding him his heroes Margaret Thatcher and John Howard wanted action on global warming: “Don’t you think,” asks the leader of the Opposition, “you sound like the old lady who says the whole world is mad except for thee and me, and I have my doubts about thee?

Abbott began the 2009 parliamentary year comatose on his office couch, and ended it by winning the Liberal leadership by one vote. Four years later, he was prime minister. Little more than six years later, he was back where he started. All of it wrought by his own hand. Is it any wonder he had trouble coming to terms with it?

He doesn’t see private health insurance rebates or support for private school education as middle-class welfare. He sees it as backing family aspiration, sound public policy encouraging people to do more for themselves. And help should not be cut off simply because a family is earning a hundred thousand dollars or more a year.

He wanted the assurance from the department that nothing was going wrong underneath. But as long as that was the case, he didn’t really want to get into all the detail of how the Job Network was actually running. He was not hands-on. He was generally interested in employment but he was not one of those ministers who run their department.

Abbott has always had a knack of sidestepping blame for his own hyperbole. Even wild exaggerations are rarely held against him. He retracts a little and is forgiven a lot. “What you’ve got is constant colour and movement,” says his old boss John Hewson. “He gets right in your face. He exaggerates; he grabs the headlines, even if he knows that the next day he’s gonna have to back that off.

While he was in the neighbourhood he went to New York for the – surely redundant by now – ceremonial visit of the next prime minister to Rupert Murdoch. Back home in the Spectator Australia he laid it on thick again: “Along with the commander of the First AIF, Sir John Monash, and the penicillin inventor, Lord Florey, he is one of the Australians who have made the most difference in the world.

While he was pilloried for enforcing a severe regime of punishment to force them to look for jobs, he was trying behind the scenes to persuade the government to take another course entirely. He wanted tax breaks for those on welfare to encourage them to take work. This was his one big idea in the portfolio and he has cited it since as evidence that somewhere inside the Liberal Party the DLP was alive and well. But not very alive: the plan was killed off by Howard.

If we hadn’t controlled the Senate, I would never have had to eat that particular shit sandwich,” Abbott told Peter Hartcher. “Getting control of the Senate was a curse. It allowed us to do things that we would not normally have been able to get away with and I think it tempted us to chance our arm in ways which ultimately did us significant political damage.” In the end, he decided to stay in cabinet. He didn’t bitch and moan to the press gallery. He went back to work.

Though he went about the task with a will, he clearly did not share the ideological conviction that the jobless were better off without help from the public service. Abbott’s default position is that governments are there to act, to solve problems, not to withdraw and leave things to the cut and thrust of market forces. He was clearly not one of those conservatives who loved the market. His loyalty was to government and what government could achieve through intervention.

He accused republicans in his own party of conducting a “proxy war” against Howard. He threw into the mix Churchill, Pétain, Charles de Gaulle, the failings of the Weimar republic and the rise of Hitler. In the Sydney Morning Herald at that time I set him some homework:   Clearly explain how an Australian head of state with powers as proposed in the referendum could bring to office in Canberra a local equivalent of the most vicious dictator of the century?   He never justified the Hitler slur to anyone.

Briefly it seemed Abbott’s leadership might be under threat after a member of shadow cabinet, disgusted by what was going on, leaked to the press that Morrison had suggested the party capitalise on growing concerns about Muslim immigration. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher reported being told: “He put it on the table like a dead cat.” There was talk in the party of easing up on boat people. It was not to be. One Liberal MP told the Courier Mail: “It works incredibly well for us in outer metropolitan electorates.

It's a theory," Roald said. "Multiple universes, maybe. Parallel timelines. The idea that every possibility actually exists and that the life we're living is only one of them. There's also the famous butterfly effect. It's chaos theory, pretty heady stuff, but basically it says that a change in something as tiny as the flap of a butterfly's wings can eventually affect the path and strength of something as huge as a hurricane. In other words, if you could keep the butterfly from flying at a certain time and place, you might prevent a hurricane>

WikiLeaks told us how keen the Coalition is to exploit the boats. In late 2009, in the dying days of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Opposition, a “key Liberal party strategist” popped in to the US embassy in Canberra to say how pleased the party was that refugee boats were, once again, making their way to Christmas Island. “The issue was ‘fantastic,’” he said. “And ‘the more boats that come the better.’” But he admitted they had yet to find a way to make the issue work in their favour: “his research indicated only a ‘slight trend’ towards the Coalition.

But before the year was out, Oldfield was plotting with the Queensland renegade Pauline Hanson to set up her new party. This emerged only after he left Abbott’s office in April 1997 armed with a glowing reference from the member for Warringah. A humiliated Abbott blasted Oldfield: “He’s a dangerous, snaky Rasputin who thrives on notoriety. Sure, I had him on my staff when I knew he held some unnaturally intense views on some things, but he seemed like a Liberal with a reasonable standing in the community. I’m not making any big claims for myself, but even Jesus had his Judas.

Abbott’s one big idea in Health was for the Commonwealth to take control of all the nation’s hospitals. This required a shift in his thinking. In the Keating years he had declared that Australia had “a perfectly good system of government provided each tier minds its own business.” He didn’t think so any longer. “As a new backbencher, I had not anticipated how hard this was, given that voters don’t care who solves their problems, they just want them solved.” As Minister for Health he lit on a new guiding conservative principle: “Power divided is power controlled.” He had in mind an enormous reform that would reshape Canberra’s relations with the states. He was roundly mocked in cabinet. His senior bureaucrats put a lot of work into talking him down. Did he really want to be responsible for every asthma patient who had to wait too long in an emergency department? Eventually he was persuaded that Commonwealth public servants could not run hospitals any better than state public servants. This was the argument that got him, but he found it frustrating.

When Tony Abbott became prime minister in 2013, he announced that he would be a prime minister for indigenous affairs and that responsibility for this area would be moved into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Yet PM&C had no substantial infrastructure for developing or delivering indigenous policy – one of the most difficult areas of public policy. PM&C is a department that specialises in coordinating the work of the rest of the public service, not in running a major area of spending in its own right. To start with the basics, PM&C doesn’t have offices around the country, let alone in remote locations. So it immediately had to assign the delivery of indigenous services to other parts of the bureaucracy.

For instance, was it wise for Tony Abbott to announce to the House that the federal police had set up counter-terrorism units to intercept would-be jihadis at Sydney and Melbourne airports and that other airports would follow later? Or was it a premature disclosure that tipped off terrorists to escape detection by using Brisbane or Adelaide instead?

That he won Warringah with a single speech is a myth. Not in living memory had there been such an open, aggressive and competitive Liberal pre-selection contest as there was in Warringah in 1993.

After announcing the scheme, Abbott sought with some charm the absolution of his startled party. “Sometimes,” he said, “it is better to ask forgiveness rather than permission.

Abbott thought Turnbull’s leadership was terminal at that moment. What he was hearing was a bar-room brawl between his leader and the guru of a great swathe of the Liberal Party. This was no way to deal with Alan Jones. Turnbull wasn’t showing the necessary respect. It would cause immense damage.

They had the shattered look of people given what they’d wished for.

Deep down, the boringly pragmatic Liberal Party has a sunnier view of human nature than the passionately idealistic Labor Party because we are prepared to put more trust in the common sense and decency of our fellow Australians.

It’s not surprising that the Rudd Government is slowly turning Work for the Dole into a training program. The idea that ‘the world owes people a living’ is strong inside the Labor Party. This is why even a normally sensible frontbencher like Martin Ferguson once called Work for the Dole ‘almost evil’.

The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good.

What happened made the staffer sit bolt upright, then shift back in his seat. To their dismay, they watched Credlin feed Abbott — who had a voracious appetite, and had already polished off his main course — mouthfuls of food from her plate with her fork. They had all heard the stories about her finishing his sentences for him at meetings with business leaders, but this took their behaviour to a whole other level. The MP noticed that a couple of other diners sitting nearby had witnessed the spectacle. Asked to describe the reaction of the other patrons, he told me: ‘It was like I am not seeing what I am seeing.’ According to the MP, Credlin also fed Abbott some of her dessert — again, from her fork, off her plate. As the meal was ending, she put her head on his shoulder to complain about being tired, to which Abbott said they must go soon.

Speaking at the end of the summit, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said countries will hold each other accountable by monitoring implementation of their commitments to boost growth. The G-20, criticized in recent years as being all talk and no action, was urged to deliver measurable results this year. Perhaps in response, the group said the International Monetary Fund will also play a role in monitoring progress and estimating the economic benefits of the growth plan. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde dismissed concerns that countries might fudge their growth figures, saying the monitoring is a thorough and detailed process. “We’ll make sure they keep their feet to the fire,” she said. The G-20 communique says that if the $2 trillion initiative is fully implemented, it will lift global GDP by 2.1 percent above expected levels by 2018 and create millions of jobs.

If Australia had large and growing gaps between rich and poor, if minorities were persecuted, if we were struggling to meet an existential challenge, there’d be every reason to want fundamental change.

Gelehrsamkeit

Air

Rick Starmover and Hal Sono in Space Wars: The Return.

sets

If Tony Abbott ends up the prime minister of Australia, you've got to say, god help us. [He is] truly an intellectual nobody [and has] no policy ambition.

They’re two of a kind.” Eric eyed the sorcerer. Maybe, he thought. But there was something else in Sparr’s look as he gazed from the throne. It was almost as if … No, it couldn’t be…. Sparr, can you hear me? Salamandra spoke again. “I have learned the riddles of the ancient rulers of earth and sea. I have stolen the great magics of every age. And yet you, Lord Sparr of Droon, have told me a tale of a Dark Stair and of a great magic that lies hidden in another time….” Sparr did not rise from the throne. “As we agreed,” he said, “I shall use your time portal to find it. And you shall take whatever magic remains —

Eric

Besides, elvish arms and hands aren't really made for fighting, you know-" "Whose are?" asked Merwen. Kringle looked at her and bowed his head. "None," he said finally. "Maybe soon, everyone will know that.

When Kringle gripped the staff, what had been his hand's normal place on it no longer suited him. It was true. He was taller now. "I'd rather this was a sword." "Not a sword. The King of kings never used a sword.

Eric Hinkle wasn’t alone as he hopped

Medallion.

genies.

Sailing between worlds in a magical stone boat is for the young at heart . . . Mrs Hinkle

Where there is friends , there is hope . . . Ortha

A child who carries a book with a bookmark in it is in two places at the same time.

We all have a choice, you know. To give or take or do nothing.

.... chasing someone and being chased at the same time. You look in both directions at once.

What is time anyway but a small word for a vast and inexplicable phenomenon? What are past, present, and future but vague points on an endlessly coiling thread?

Pish-posh, just doing my lot for the future of the world, you know. I'll sign off by saying, you know where to find me...

...but maybe that was the thing about being a kid. Either you didn't know when things were just too dangerous, or you didn't know enough to let the danger stop you from doing them.

Wade peeked over his shoulder. “Robin? Wow, bro, I’m sorry. I’m Ross. Robin and Ross. I kinda like Ross better.” Darrell hid the passport in his jeans. “We shall never speak of this again.” “Kids,

I begin to realize that it's little things like this--snarled traffic, a phone call, rain, some new job, whatever it is--that make all the difference about whether things go good or bad. You tiptoe around stuff or you kick it away or you crush it, but whatever is going to happen happens anyway because of stuff you can't control.

And again that idea makes you crazy, that any dumb, stupid freak thing--being late for a puppet show, a lightning strike, somebody falling in a store--can bomb your plans to hell.

Tony Windsor puts the economic doomsaying down to the Opposition Leader: ‘Abbott’s behaviour in relation to a lot of this has been absolutely disgraceful.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott also promptly set his tone about her, taunting her as an untrustworthy political assassin—a rich description from a man who had ambushed his own leader, Malcolm Turnbull, and snatched his party’s leadership by just one vote on 1 December 2009.

7, 1, 9, 3, 2, 4, 0. For NC.

In the narrative of the left, Australia was a boring outpost of the British Empire until Gough Whitlam became prime minister, formally ended the White Australia policy, instituted multiculturalism and gave Aborigines land rights. Whitlam’s brief government was certainly a cultural watershed, but not everything that happened before 1972 is irrelevant and not all that happened afterwards is admirable. Australia was never quite the antipodean England of left-wing mythology. People from Africa, Asia and many of the countries of Europe were aboard the early convict fleets, as would be expected in a representative sample of London’s jails. In the 1830s, after the Myall Creek massacre, white men were hanged for the murder of Aborigines. Among the Gold Rush influx were thousands of Chinese, quite a few of whom stayed after the gold they’d chased ran out. The first decade of Australia’s national existence, which brought the passage of the ‘White Australia’ legislation, also saw our first Chinese-speaking MP, Senator Thomas Bakhap.

Our fascination with change won’t, of itself, make it more likely or more rapid. Come 2020, I’m confident that Australia will still have one of the world’s strongest economies because the current yearning for magic-pudding economics will turn out to be short-lived. The United States will remain the world’s strongest country by far, and our partnership with America will still be the foundation of our security. We will still be a ‘crowned republic’ because we will have concluded (perhaps reluctantly) that it’s actually the least imperfect system of government. We will be more cosmopolitan than ever but perhaps less multicultural because there will be more stress on unity than on diversity. Some progress will have been made towards ‘closing the gap’ between Aboriginal and other Australians’ standards of living (largely because fewer Aboriginal people will live in welfare villages and more of them will have received a good general education). Families won’t break up any more often, because old-fashioned notions about making the most of imperfect situations will have made something of a comeback. Finally, there will have been bigger fires, more extensive floods and more ferocious storms because records are always being broken. But sea levels will be much the same, desert boundaries will not have changed much, and technology, rather than economic self-denial, will be starting to cut down atmospheric pollution.

Quite soon, the Rudd Government’s attempts to stave off a recession by fiscal sugar hits and propping up uncompetitive businesses will come to seem like putting off the inevitable at unsustainable cost. The public, if not the government, will come to appreciate, in former British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s words, that ‘you can’t spend your way out of a recession’. It

As with public hospitals, better public schools are likely to emerge when local teachers and parents have more say over how their schools are run. It’s especially important to give parents a direct say in the running of schools rather than just an advisory role. Even

Teachers who are accountable to principals who are, in turn, accountable to school communities are likely to be more professionally ‘grounded’ and less susceptible to avant garde fashions in curriculum and pedagogy. School

ebb and flow

As Tony Abbott said to me one day, describing the Liberals’ approach to Opposition: ‘Kevin, if we see a head, we kick it. That’s it.

King Zello and his daughter

Everybody on Pasha’s rug! Now — fly!