10 October 2025

Good evening, everybody.  

I acknowledge that we are gathered here on Gadigal land and pay my respects to elders past and present.  

Acknowledgements:

The Honorable Chris Minns MP, Premier of New South Wales

The Honorable Susan Lee MP, Leader of the Opposition

The Honorable Angus Taylor MP, Shadow Defense Minister

Lachlan Murdoch, Chair of News Corp and Executive Chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation and Sarah Murdoch

Simeon McKenna, Chair of Sky News  

Michael Miller, Executive Chairman of News Corp Australasia and Tanya Miller

Paul Whitaker, CEO of Sky News Australia

Michelle Gunn, Editor-in-Chief of the Australian  

I would also like to welcome Nova Peris OAM – not just a former senator and an extraordinary Australian, but a true Olympian in everything that she has done.  

Nova, it is wonderful to see you here tonight, and it is wonderful to see you in the documentary.

The episode which I've been given the great privilege to see includes the time that you spent with the former Prime Minister on your country.

The documentary is truly superb, and it was wonderful to see that part of it.

I also want to acknowledge the very distinguished members of the media, communications, and business community here tonight. 

And I also acknowledge Richard Andrews and the documentary team because, having seen the first episode, I don't think we've seen anything like this on the small screen before.  

It is magnificent.  

I saved my last acknowledgement for last, not because he is the least, but because he's the most important guest here tonight, the Honorable Tony Abbott AC, former prime minister and author, who we celebrate tonight.

It is wonderful to see you here with Christine and Louise and to be so celebrated by the people who join us tonight.

I want to thank you personally, Tony, for your warm invitation to launch Australia: A History.  

It is an honour to do so.  

I have read every page of this book happily and, having read it, I'm delighted that you offered me a role to play in setting this book on its way out to the public.  

Now most people would not know that you and I have much in common.  

In fact, they may laugh at that.

You were the 28th Prime Minister and I am the 28th Governor General.  

We are both lifelong volunteers.  

You, among many other pursuits, as a firefighter and a surf lifesaver.  

For me, it was door knocking for the Salvos and the Heart Foundation as a child, to volunteering at community organisations throughout my life.

We both love and participate joyously in sport, and we know its centrality in Australian life.  

We both spent considerable time in Aboriginal communities across the country, often in remote parts of the country, and we both have strong, enduring, close friendships with many Indigenous people

We both have the privilege of regularly meeting young Australians across the country, whose care about the future is both palpable and optimistic, and you speak about that as the purpose of the book. Vitally, we both care deeply about this mighty country, Australia, its history and its unbound future.  

You and I, together with as many as Australians as we can gather, are passionately engaged in the great Australian project.  

We also have one more thing in common, a little bit more controversial.  

You and I, in different ways, are often subjected to commentaries about ourselves, largely through stereotypes and tropes which fail to respect and reflect our true selves in all of our unique complexity and our humanity.  

People often miss what it is that motivates us in public life, and what is the core of who we are and what we care deeply about.  

I think Paul Kelly's reflections about you in the most recent Weekend Magazine this last weekend captures this well.  

He said this,

‘People have no idea about Tony Abbott. He is a mass of contradictions. He is a journalist by nature. He is obsessed by history. He is a genuine intellectual and scholar. He is a romantic, in thrall to the great Australian project. But his identity remains concealed, hidden, throughout his political career.’

Tony, your response in that article to that reflection should give us all pause for thought.  

This is what you said,  

‘Most significant people are mixture of things, and different persona can coexist within the same individual.’  

Paul Kelly reminded me tonight that, at your core, you are a modest man, and we should remember that when we think about the act of care involved in eschewing many of the trappings of a former prime minister's life to spend time to author a book about the country you love.  

Prior to my swearing in as your Governor General, last year, I met with all former living governors-general and prime ministers to learn about my role.  

Tony and I met in London for what was, unsurprisingly to me, a long, insightful and generous insight into the relationship between a governor-general and prime minister.  

Tony was very generous in his sharing of what sits at the core of that relationship and his experience of it, and I learned a lot about how I conduct myself in my relationship with the current Prime Minister as a result of that.  

That took place just a day after I had my audience with His Majesty the King in Buckingham Palace.  

In fact, we were at the Buckingham Palace Hotel just near Buckingham Palace when we met.  

My reflection from that meeting, and then again, from the hour long discussion we recently had at Government House for the filming of your documentary, was something I think everyone in this room and indeed all of the country, knows to be true, that Tony Abbott has always and continues to care deeply and passionately about Australia.

At this fragile time of global conflict and challenge, he's turned that care into action, spending years closely examining our history, going to every primary resource he could find to encourage a younger generation and all of us, but really that future generation, to read, to learn, to watch and to find their passion for our nation.  

There was another lesson from that day, and I have asked Tony, if he is happy for me to share it.  

I remember it so vividly as we met, because we had not met personally before.  

I talked about the fact that we were both sort of tropes and that people had lots of names for me before being sworn in, that bore no relationship to the life I have led and the service I've given to my country in many different ways.  

And Tony said this to me. ‘When I was at the Bulletin as a journalist, I never wanted to meet the people that I was writing about. It was much better for me not to know them personally, because I could write a lot of things about them. I could make great copy. People would read it, and I can move on.  

And then he said, ‘But that changes when you meet a person.’

And I reflected again tonight, Tony, that we've now met each other several times.  

I think we know each other better.

Now there is a deep respect there, but that comes with a really big lesson for all of us.  

And so that is what my dad taught me.  

You meet people where they are at, and you always give them the respect of getting to know them before you cast aspersions on the person you think you know.  

We do that far too much in this country, where there are so many good people.  

Tony is one of them, and he deserves better, and that is what the book tells us, that his gift to us is something he has done quietly and patiently as a gift to the country.

And now that I know Tony Abbott, I know why I enjoyed the book so much, because it is infused on every page.  

I joined the many people from very diverse backgrounds whose early reviews of the book speak to this as a thoughtful, elegant account, written in the rich tradition of single volume histories of Australia. That is how Nicholas Jensen described it in his profile of Tony in the Weekend Magazine.  

Now our conversation at Government House just a month or so ago spanned many areas from significant women leaders in our history, including Dame Enid Lyons, Dame Quentin Bryce, and former prime minister Julia Gillard, about whom you were very generous.  

You are generous in the book to many of your former opponents, and it shows a care for people in that sense as well.  

We also talked about the nature of service.  

As the daughter of an army officer, I was brought up in service, so we talked about service at the heart of what Tony had done in his life, and what actually sits at the centre of our country.  

We talked about understanding our constitutional arrangements and our civic institutions, and then to Noel Pearson's beautiful framing of the three-part story of who we are, which I used in my address to the Senate when I was sworn in.  

Noel says this, and Tony uses it often, and it, for me, shapes both the book and the documentary  

our indigenous foundation of 65,000 years

our British traditions and institutions, which, of course, I am a very strong marker of  

and our remarkable multicultural present and future.

Our wide-ranging chat underscored that Tony began his career as a journalist, has not lost any of that forensic skill that brought the experience of the prime minister to bear on this book.

His care for the country is evident, as I've noted already, all of us are much more interesting and complex than the stereotypes drawn of us by those with limited understanding of our character and essence.  

Tony's passion for this country transcends any of the matters that might otherwise divide people.  

There is no division in this book.  

Any opportunity to take political points has not been taken.  

It is evident in our discussion.  

And, as I said, the book is a wonderful testament to a true history, and it is Tony's view of that history.

But it does not have ideology in it.  

It has truth in it.  

When I was sworn in as your Governor-General, over a year ago, I committed to putting care, kindness and respect at the core of everything I do.  

Care for one another, care for those that do the caring of others, care for our extraordinary continent and its environmental beauty, care for civics and institutions and care for the way in which we discuss and debate the issues of our time without judgment, anger or violence.  

Tony Abbott speaks to each of the forms of care that I just spoke about.

There are people who disagree with elements or draw other conclusions.  

And that is as it should be.  

As Geoffrey Blainey says in his Foreword, the study of the past thrives on debate.  

Our ability to have those debates with civility, with respect, and indeed, with care, is central to who we are as Australians, and it is a responsibility of all of us in public life.  

And Tony shows us how to do that in his history.  

All the latest data tells us that whilst we do have a strong, stable and successful democracy, the envy of the world, which I hear about during my travels on your behalf, on state visits, wherever I go, we are the envy of the world.  

Our understanding, though, of what makes us great, of our democracy, is in a very parlous state.  

And I see that also firsthand in my role wherever I go.  

And I know this is the moment to grasp, should we choose to engage in our history and to celebrate the extraordinary advantages that define this mighty country.  

So, I want to thank Tony for the considerable work that underpins his thoughtful and important contribution to our national discourse.  

It is a highly engaging, deeply researched treatise on our country, and the documentary is glorious in its visual ambition.  

I believe that his desire to get Australians talking and caring about who we are and how we got here is a significant act of care in and of itself.  

It speaks to the three things I said I put at the centre of my work, care, kindness and respect.

And before anyone thinks that care and kindness and self is soft, I'll let you know that they are the hardest things to do consistently and to commit to in everything we do.  

It is hard to care, because care is accountable and responsible.  

It has to show up, and that is what it means to be an Australian – to care and to take the learnings from our history to care about our future.  

I'm going to conclude with one last anecdote.  

It has been the favourite moment of my experience of spending time with Tony, particularly at Government House.  

After our interview at Government House in Yarralumla, Tony and I stood in front of the magnificent portrait the Wattle Queen that hangs at the State Entrance.  

It is one of the greatest examples of portraiture by Sir William Dargie of the late Queen

She is wearing a wattle dress and a wattle brooch that was gifted to her by Sir Robert Menzies, which Queen Camilla wore when she came back to Australia with His Majesty in October last year.  

As a mark of respect, we were admiring the portrait, and I then asked about Tony's affection for the Queen and her remarkable leadership and her contribution to Australia.

In the same way that Tony has captured what he thinks is important and is telling a story, I wanted to grab something in a thoroughly modern way to help tell the story as well.  

I asked Tony, would it be possible for us to do a selfie with the Queen?  

Which we did.  

We took a selfie, which I promised to send to my dad.  

He has it printed in his apartment in Deakin. He loves it.  

But what was interesting was that the Sky team was filming us doing that, and then Tony posted us taking a selfie with the Queen on Facebook that afternoon.  

And I was very touched by that, because it was a very modern moment that spoke to our history, a concern and an admiration for someone who epitomised service.

Having just spoken about our mighty country, Tony, I want to congratulate you on this contribution to our national discourse.  

I have not said anything about what is in the book, because I want to leave that to readers to enjoy for themselves.  

I will say that, in addition to all of the grand things, you can find out about Vegemite.  

You can find out about Vita Goldstein.  

You can find them, but almost anything, and to look at the index is to remind you of the fact that Tony cares about particular things.  

Tony Abbott and to all here, I am delighted and honored to now officially launch Australia: A History.