Top 150 Tony Abbott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There will be no surprises, there will be no excuses, we will do what we’ve said we will do.”

— Tony Abbott

2. “No one, however smart, however well-educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.”

— Tony Abbott

3. “If we boost productivity, we can improve economic growth.”

— Tony Abbott

4. “The sky is where mathematics and magic become one.”

— Tony Abbott

5. “We will act to build a better world. We always have, we always will. We will act to lend a helping hand, not just here but wherever we humanly can.”

— Tony Abbott

6. “Now, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who aren’t happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country’s British Heritage.”

— Tony Abbott

Featured in: Country Quotes

7. “We just can’t stop people from being homeless if that’s their choice.”

— Tony Abbott

8. “Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.”

— Tony Abbott

9. “Climate change is crap.”

— Tony Abbott

10. “Our police, our hard-working police, that our extraordinarily committed and dedicated military personnel, I’m really pleased that they are getting a good paid parental leave scheme.”

— Tony Abbott

11. “The role of CO2 is not nearly as clear as the climate catastrophists would suggest.”

— Tony Abbott

12. “They’ve changed the salesman but they haven’t changed the product.”

— Tony Abbott

13. “To move past fear is a cliche.”

— Tony Abbott

14. “The last thing Australia needs right now is instability and uncertainty.”

— Tony Abbott

15. “Mates help each other; they do not tax each other.”

— Tony Abbott

16. “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it’s going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.”

— Tony Abbott

17. “Abortion is the easy way out. It’s hardly surprising that people should choose the most convenient exit from awkward situations.”

— Tony Abbott

18. “If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I’d want to come to Australia.”

— Tony Abbott

19. “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.”

— Tony Abbott

20. “I think that people should come to Australia through the front door, not through the back door. If people want a migration outcome, they should go through the migration channels.”

— Tony Abbott

21. “Australia will take more refugees from Syria in response to the growing international crisis but it will not increase the total number of asylum seekers it accepts.”

— Tony Abbott

22. “I am not being negative, I am simply being factual when I say Kevin Rudd is the best friend the people smugglers have ever had.”

— Tony Abbott

23. “If you don’t want to work weekends, don’t.”

— Tony Abbott

24. “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.”

— Tony Abbott

25. “No country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself and this is the risk that the countries of Europe run through misguided altruism.”

— Tony Abbott

Featured in: Country Quotes

26. “Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world.”

— Tony Abbott

27. “No cuts to health, no cuts to education, no cuts to pensions.”

— Tony Abbott

28. “We cannot suffer a person by his affidavit to arraign the whole justice of the country and its administration.”

— Tony Abbott

Featured in: Country Quotes

29. “A midnight knock on the door followed by execution is no way a leader should be treated.”

— Tony Abbott

30. “The Australian people expect the Government to govern, they don’t expect it to make excuses.”

— Tony Abbott

31. “Do we really want to invest $50 billion of hard earned taxpayers money in what is essentially a video entertainment system?”

— Tony Abbott

32. “We can’t conclusively say whether man-made carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to climate change.”

— Tony Abbott

33. “Voluntary paid maternity leave: yes; compulsory paid maternity leave: over this Government’s dead body, frankly. It just won’t happen.”

— Tony Abbott

34. “I’m getting my exercise at five o’clock in the morning, that’s good. So far I’ve managed to hold on to a bike ride on Saturday or Sunday morning, probably at least two weekends out of three.”

— Tony Abbott

35. “A bit of body contact never hurt anyone.”

— Tony Abbott

36. “There’s always a lot happening. I mean, that’s the thing about politics: it’s just one damn thing after another!”

— Tony Abbott

37. “We accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.”

— Tony Abbott

38. “It’s very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places – to kind of look at things through the ‘noble innocents’ prism or through the ‘chronically dysfunctional’ prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.”

— Tony Abbott

39. “I’m not saying that people on welfare don’t contribute in their own way, but as many as possible should be encouraged to be economically active as well as socially and culturally active.”

— Tony Abbott

40. “We are naturally reluctant as a peace-loving people to reach out to far-away conflicts but, as we know, this conflict has been reaching out to us for months now.”

— Tony Abbott

41. “We are about getting things done. We are not about the blame game. We are not about making excuses.”

— Tony Abbott

42. “The choice made by families not to immunize their children is not supported by public policy or medical research nor should such action be supported by taxpayers in the form of child care payments.”

— Tony Abbott

43. “Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country’s British heritage.”

— Tony Abbott

Featured in: Country Quotes

44. “The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the ‘seagull syndrome’ – we fly in, scratch around and fly out.”

— Tony Abbott

45. “We shouldn’t be willy-nilly creating potential human life just to satisfy the urges of the scientific community.”

— Tony Abbott

46. “Western civilisation came to this country in 1788 and I’m proud of that.”

— Tony Abbott

47. “You cannot win an election without a fight.”

— Tony Abbott

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

— Tony Abbott

49. “We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. Thank you so much, Malcolm Turnbull.”

— Tony Abbott

Featured in: Strong Quotes

50. “Most of the people who are coming to Australia by boat have passed through several countries on the way, and if they simply wanted asylum they could have claimed that in any of the countries through which they’d passed.”

— Tony Abbott