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

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OK, I didn't know that about the U.S. In a sense it doesn't surprise me, given the political disdain for public expenditure (except for war, of course). This is certainly not an situation to aspire to and your comments on Sweden are illustrative.

Of course, a better original privatisation of Telstra (functional separation or competing infra providers/maintainers)

True fact that! I put that in my submission to the Australian government in 1998 when I was contracting for Telstra when they moved to privitisation (which was called, the 'public ownership' bill because 'the public' could buy shares!).

Despite the seriousness of this change there was only 27 submissions, mainly by peak telecommunication organisations...