Malcolm Turnbull's Quotes

The only reason to be in politics is public service. There's no other reason. Frankly, if that's the best job you can get in terms of money, that's too bad, you know. Because frankly, it's not well paid, everyone knows that. So for most people it's a big sacrifice.

It's not a 24-hour news cycle, it's a 60-second news cycle now, it's instantaneous. It has never been easier to get away with telling lies. It has never been easier to get away with the glib one liner.

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.

Anyone who thinks it's smart to cut immigration is sentencing Australia to poverty.

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

Greece is an extreme case: a country where both the level of spending and the level of taxation were unsustainable!

It's really corny to say, but if you are happily married and have good kids, that is about 98 per cent of what you should be seeking to achieve.

On balance, after weighing the arguments, I believe that the time has come for Australia to create a new sovereign wealth fund.

The way to lose weight is to eat less, so I ate a lot less for a month and lost a lot of weight pretty quickly.

There is a tendency to try to dumb everything down and turn everything into a one-paragraph press release or even less, just a slogan.

When politicians offer you something for nothing, or something that sounds too good to be true, it's always worth taking a careful second look.

All Australians understand that high-quality, reliable and affordable broadband is a critical part of the infrastructure our nation needs to prosper in coming years.

Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?

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.

But who knows, some years from now if there's a global emissions trading scheme agreement, as many have hoped for, then I'm sure Australia would be part of it.

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.

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?

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides.

I am an ambitious person, but I am not ambitious in the sense that I want jobs only for the sake of them... I am here to do things I think are worthwhile. I am always careful that the political positions I take are consistent with good policy. I would not want to be prime minister of Australia at any price.

I do not believe we can effectively move Australia to a lower emission economy, which is what we need to do if we're going to make a contribution to a global reduction in greenhouse gases, without putting a price on carbon.

I love radio - its immediacy and especially its intimacy... it is part of your life, whispering into your ear. You can't see it, but equally importantly it can't see you.

I try to talk about policy issues intelligently, I try very hard to avoid thought bubbles. I make sure my speeches are well researched and footnoted. I make sure I am not talking through my hat.

No man is responsible for his father. That was entirely his mother's affair.

This all comes down to what we know about life on Earth.

When a man meets catastrophe on the road, he looks in his purse, but a woman looks in her mirror.