>> Given the perceptions around Labor's economic management, it looks like the next three years will be long and lonely for the opposition.>>

The story goes that Harold Macmillan was asked what drove decision making in his cabinet. His alleged reply:

"Events dear boy, events."

Macmillan may or may not have uttered these words but it remains a truism. Abbott may luck out. There may be no crisis during his first term.

But if there is one it his re-elections chances will depend on how he handles it.

I have no opinion on how he would perform in a crisis. Many crises, such as global financial crashes, are in any case beyond the power of any Australian government to prevent. All we can do is try and manage the consequences as best we can.

The coastline of Australia is about 60,000 km, MOrrison is using the navy to hunt refugees off one small island 2,600 from the mainland, he is committing high seas piracy and illegal refoulement of refugee attempts back to Indonesia.

Why do all the media and commentators get so easily sucked into lazy jingoistic language that has no bearing on fact?

It is not legal to close the borders to refugees, it is not smuggling if they come by sea even if they have been smuggled by choice and necessity out of their own countries.

What is also illegal is for us to traffic humans by force without papers to the neighbours for votes.

To go on from *Marylin,* with whom I agree in principal, I would like to add the following.

During the last election, the ABC so called fact checking unit came up with the conclusion that the coalition is correct in its assertion that these people are illegal immigrants, as they are not complying with the requirements of the guvment when seeking asylum.

But I would argue, that in this case, that the so called requirements do in fact go to wholly frustrate the process of Asylum Seeking in its entirety, thus I cannot agree that these people are illegal immigrants.

No, the appropriate course of action for the guvment is to withdraw from the convention, and it is a shame that the international system is so flimsy as to not have booted them out already.

In some ways, whenever they sign up to these international conventions etc but only put some half baked implementation into local law(which is all they really care about)they are in fact defining themselves out in any event. But as Keating just pointed out, such is the duplicitous nature of these creatures.

Neither do I consider temporary protection visas to necessarily be a bad thing.

If we consider the hypothetical that the future indeed may bring more frequent upheavals and displacements of populations, I think we just ought do our bit to safeguard and preserve the sanctity of life whenever it falls within our sphere of influence.

To that end, I have no problem with outback processing facilities, but without all the wasteful expense of outsourcing, secrecy and security camps. Remote locations in the desert with a billabong or 2 would do just fine, and much could be gained in terms of training peace keepers, multilingual capable personnel etc etc to members in service who are already been paid.

As for the conclusions that the author has reached, I tend to think that there are a few more live variables in the present state of flux that need to be taken into account prior to making predictions.

He may be ticking some of them off early but that doesn't mean that they will go away before the next election. There will certainly be more to come.

Like Gillard's alleged "lie" about the Carbon Tax and even Howard's fixed attitude toward the Stolen Generation, many of Abbott's policies may well become lead in his own saddlebags.

He adopted American Tea Party tactics while in Opposition and should expect to be on the receiving end.

Hey, where are all the published weekly polls we endured for the last couple of years?

At elections it's the swing voters in ten electorates who have the real power to decide who is going to be the PM. Abbott is obviously hoping that the swing voters in those ten selected electorates agree with his stance on gay marriage and climate change. Unfortunately for Tony Abbott the majority of the population supports gay marriage and believes in climate change.

Many crises, such as global financial crashes
stevenlmeyer,
Well, he definitely won't have the luxury of a future fund to dip into like the useless previous PM.