The Prospect of Tony Abbot As Prime Minister

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Recent opinion polls show Tony Abbot has a better-than-even chance of becoming Prime Minister. This possible requires some serious thought. If you are gay, you can absolutely forget about same-sex marriage rights. At least with Labor, all that's required is to get the matter tabled at cabinet and the vote will be won. His absolutely archiac and offensive attitudes towards women, climate change and indigenous people is infuriating.

He carries a dangerous attitude towards to industrial relations and his deep indifference and ignorance of economic matters. Abbot loved 'Workchoices', and will bring it back; especially targetting unfair dismissal laws, pay and conditions, and penalty rates. Opposing the economic stimulus package, which is considered among the best designed in the world, with excellent results, Abbott not only expressed opposition to it, but slept through the vote after a night on the sauce.

Absolutely reckless cuts are planned against nation-building IT and environmental infrastructure, in favour of handing back $10.5 billion of resource rents from our commonwealth, to mining companies; because Tony understands that billionaires are having tough times. Abbott's accounting has been slippery or stupid. [T]he Coalition asked the department the cost of giving the Productivity Commission an extra $4 million a year. Yesterday the department replied poker-faced that it would cost $4 million a year.. One can only echo the words of Craig Emerson; Australia has never had in the post-war era a more economically incompetent candidate for the prime ministership than Tony Abbott.

Update: Former Reserve Bank chief, Bernie Fraser, (hardly a radical) blasts the Coalition over their economic policies.

Comments

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[arjen-lentz.livejournal.com]

Craig, the problem is closer then you think: your lifestyle choice for the city forces others to live out in the country. You want your fruit, veg and possibly meat. It has to be grown somewhere, and there's not enough space near where you live. So it's further away.

Now, you want to pay a reasonable price for things things, so these farmers need to work efficiently. For instance, need to upload a video of their cattle to sell it, rather than ship them all to a central location and then onward to the buyer (expensive in time, manpower and other resources, loss of cattle in-transit, etc)

Distributing people more allows food production to happen near or closer to population centres. That would need infrastructure too, broadband is a key aspect of it anyway, and I'll still contend with you that NBN is bloody cheap compared to pretty much any other capital infrastructure project.
Of course $40bln is a lot of money, but that really is not the point.

There's issues in rural Australia with health and education. Well, big growing cities have major problems with the same. Cities are not the solution, they are as much part of the same problem. We might as well build smart infrastructure so that location is no longer the problem. Then we have a more space to solve the real issues.

Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

That was a great comment.