@lightningdance wrote:All the pundits seem to agree that PM Abbott has done pretty well on all fronts except trying to sell the budget, but with 99% of it passed by Labor and the rest it's a pretty good start.
PM Abbott has mastered the world stage, taken us on a steady course and handled horrific events with compassion and strength. Every day he grows in the position.
Julie Bishop has been honoured for her foreign policy work and outshone all. All this without leaving a 20 million dollar tip at every turn.
This, in stark contrast to Labor and Rudd who had the biggest tanty ever seen at Copenhagen and mightily offended our Chinese partners, spied on heads of state in Indonesia, cut exports to Indonesia without any dialogue or warning and ruined the relationship, spat in the faces of our biggest wealth creators and watched over a border control policy that saw thousands dead and lost at sea.
Gillard played footy with Obama (cringe), begged for kisses on his Australian tour, and fell flat on her face on the world stage and shrunk in the postilion of PM.
Made the "we are Us" speech and everybody guffawed, knitted a picture and everybody was appalled, she was, in the end dispatched by Rudd, his revenge complete.
Then we saw the manic hyper of the PM (Rudd) of this country running an election that could only be called hallucinatory to anybody who cared to watch him and gave the longest concession speech in history saying they did well.
We can all look forward to another good year of steady progress and hard work by our elected politicians to try to get some order back in our fiscal policy and keep the repair work going even though the rivers of gold Labor squandered are no longer at their disposal.
All in all, Well Done PM Abbott.
Look at the title of the thread, then consider that 7 of the 9 paragraphs reference the (apparent) failings of the previous Government. It appears that some still do not realise that the LNP are in power now, this constant harking back is irrelevant and specious.
All the pundits? except just about all the pundits
very funny...
https://newmatilda.com/2014/09/07/year-tony-credit-where-credit-due-and-theyre-running-lot-credit
A Year Of Tony: Credit Where Credit Is Due (And They're Running On A Lot Of Credit!)
A year into the Abbott Government’s term we can reflect on its impressive economic achievements.
The highlight is the repeal of the carbon tax. It’s easy to stand up against tree huggers and left-wing romantics who prat on about global warming, but it takes political courage to stand up against scientists and economists.
A close second has to be repeal of the mining tax. Some people refuse to understand how Australia works. For 200 years, ever since Macarthur opened up the wool trade, we have been selling raw materials for cleverer people to make into useful products.
For a few years after 1945 we thought we could be clever ourselves and make things like cars and airplanes – even Menzies got carried away by that delusion – but thankfully that era of unreality has passed.
The world needs a quarry and we’re in the business of providing it. Australia can be the Saudi Arabia of the twenty-first century.
The Government hasn’t scrapped the Renewable Energy Target, but, with a bit of help from Dick Warburton, it has created enough uncertainty to kill this crazy scheme. Joe Hockey is right when he says windmills are ugly – they distract one’s attention from advertising billboards on the roadside.
More seriously, all this renewable energy eats into power companies’ profits.
Some say that Australia shouldn’t break a long-standing bipartisan commitment on the RET because to do so increases our sovereign risk, but don’t they realize that there has never been a sovereign risk as bad as six years of a Labor Government?
Six years when foreign investment fell to the lowest on record! (The ABS statistics on investment erroneously show high foreign mining investment mining during Labor’s term – proof if ever you needed it that you can’t trust public servants).
Australia is open for business, but not all businesses – certainly not businesses that undermine our world-standard coal industry.
The cuts to science are well-directed: $75 million from the Australian Research Council; $120 million from the Defence Science and Technology Organisation; $8 million from the Institute of Marine Science; and $111 million from the CSIRO.
We don’t need all these boffins. The CSIRO served us well in the past when it focussed on crop yields and sheep fertility; it could serve us well in the future if it concentrates on mining research.
One of the Government’s least-understood achievements is reversal of most of the Future of Financial Advice changes – Labor’s meddle in the financial market, which made it hard for financial advisers to reward themselves with ongoing commissions.
These are proper, respectable, upstanding people, not like the unionised riff-raff who work in car plants or in companies like SPC-Ardmona. Their jobs need support. In fact, with re-training, unemployed scientists could find useful work in the finance sector, or in the tax avoidance salary packaging industry.
Then there is repeal of small business tax concessions. These concessions – instant asset write-offs and offsetting future losses against past losses – were highly favourable to new companies and to companies expanding into new ventures.
The trouble with encouraging such businesses is that they put competitive pressure on existing businesses to improve their performance or lower their prices. That’s just not fair.
In any case the concessions were introduced by the Labor Government – a clear indication that they were not good for the country.
