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

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

How can you define scrapping the ridiculous excess of the NBN as a reckless cut? $2000 per person for fast broadband, when what we have at present is quite adequate for most purposes, is inane waste.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

You haven't mentioned asylum seekers. That's just as abhorrent a policy.

[zhenzhi.livejournal.com]

i don't even want to imagine what it would be like with him running the show. :-(

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I am so angry that I can't vote any more. The thought of that man being PM makes me sick to my stomach.

[jennifergearing.livejournal.com]

That so many people seem to think he's a viable option terrifies me. I'd put it down to shit polling but I've spent too much time with some of my business clients of late, and too many of them feel comfortable enough to talk about how they think he's "a great bloke" with "a better plan" (what fucking plan? IDEK). Every time it happens my stomach drops and I feel a little less safe in this country I've lived in my whole life; and I never felt very safe to begin with.

Perhaps it was naive of me to think 2007 was a few steps forward, but I gotta say; if this election swings LibNats back into power, I don't know how we come back from that.

[omnot.livejournal.com]

I'm an ABBA fan: Anyone But Bloody Abbott!

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I would've preferred an article in place of the thirty-second Youtube ad, to be frank. I think it short-changes the post.

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

Thts election is like life-saving surgery without anesthetic.
I want the pain to stop, but there's too much riding on it to just ignore:(

[zey.livejournal.com]

"[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."

Ah, now that's not quite a fair thing to take the piss out of them for.

In most Coalition governments, it'd cost an extra $5M in consultant fees to buy the justifications for it.