It looks like John Howard is putting his stamp on this front bench, that he is making all the decisions, that he's not consulting Peter Costello.

There's no reason for our skilled workers to come back because it's like taking an instant pay cut when you get off the plane. The government is swimming in money and it's time to encourage workers back to an economy that's in dire straits on skills.

It is not fair that the Howard Government lets people buy their way into university ahead of others with higher marks.

We want to make sure that our scientists can speak freely. We cannot afford to have these scientists gagged.

If Mr Howard is so concerned about history teaching, he should ask (outgoing Education Minister) Brendan Nelson what he has been doing for the past five years.

We use the word cross in our hymns, in our piety, in our prayers, and in our pastoral language. But we use it too cheaply. We say that a person has to live with some sort of suffering in life: a sickness that cannot be cured, an unresolvable personality conflict within the family, poverty, or some other unexplainable or unchangeable suffering. Then we say, “That person has a cross to bear.” Granted, whatever kind of suffering we have is suffering that we can bear in confidence that God is with us. But the cross that Jesus had to face, because he chose to face it, was not—like sickness—something that strikes you without explanation. It was not some continuing difficulty in his social life. It was not an accident or catastrophe that just happened to hit him when it could have hit somebody else. Jesus’ cross was the price to pay for being the kind of person he was in the kind of world he was in; the cross that he chose was the price of his representing a new way of life in a world that did not want a new way of life. That is what he called his followers to do.