"Remember the Granny killing GST and Howard's promise that it would never ever be reintroduced, and then introduced against the clearly expressed majority will of the people in poll after poll?
(87% against.)"

As I recall Rhrosty, Howard took the introduction of the GST to the people as part of one of his election platforms, oh and the Liberal Party won the election!

Selective memory is not always a good thing!

Geoff

hasbeen,

i agree. what does it say about our university system that so many academics have such a tenuous grip on reality?

imagine what this country could achieve if the billions we spent on education went to academics who tried to investigate rather than obfuscate or to create rather than redistribute?

Herbert Stencil, I think John Howard turned his back on Menzies' statement there when he dished out millions in middle class welfare to buy votes.

Atman, unless you can prove Gillard was planning to introduce a carbon tax, it is clearly not a lie, but a broken promise. I'm sorry, but if you think that is what constitutes a lie, you have a deficient understanding of the meaning of the word. My mate said he wouldn't damage my car when he borrowed it. Then he went and smashed my car. Did I call him a liar? Of course not, he had no intention of smashing my car, but broke his promise when he did. Of course, Alan Jones probably would have wanted him buried at sea for such a disgraceful act!

And for Liberal supporters to be accusing Labor of breaking promises and lying is just hypocrisy in the extreme. Abbott has been caught out lying on so many occasions it is beyond a joke. It is a disgrace.

HAsbeen and Dane,

Your disrespect for the opinions of educated experts in a field only reveals your ignorance. No doubt you'd be jumping behind any expert that supported your views. Funnily enough, judging by your disdain for the educated, that hasn't happened too often for you. I wonder why...

GST and gun control, both good reforms by the Howard Government. However pretty much all they did over eleven years of strong economic performance in which they competently managed the books and bought votes with the proceeds of the mining boom. 11 years of manufacturing decline.

Oh, sorry. I forgot WorkChoices and War.

From the mid-1990's to the end he Howard Government, Australia was ruled by a rotten coalition that was broader than the Liberal/National Coalition. That broader coalition also comprised much of the Labor Party.

We know this from "The Latham Diaries" of 2005. In that book Mark Latham has shown that Labor state premiers including Steve Bracks, Peter Beattie and Bob Carr deliberately sabotaged Labor's Federal election campaign in 2004 so that they could go on using Howard's misrule at the Federal level as a smokescreen to cover their own misrule at the state level.

Latham's testimony was consistent with my own previous experience with members of the Labor Party. Back in 1996 I briefly shared a house with a Labor apparatchik who stood as a candidate in the 1995 Queensland State election for Wayne Goss's Labor Party. As the newly elected Federal Howard Liberl/National Government was slashing and burning Government services on the false pretext of the supposed "Beazley Black Hole" and plotting to break the Maritime Union with mercenary strikebreakers, I remember at one social gathering how she and other members of the Queensland Labor Party sung praises for John Howard because of his stance against gun ownership ostensibly resulting from the Port Arthur Massacre -- the same John Howard who was later to take this country into the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq which caused the death of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

A major factor that allowed Howard to hold onto power for so long in spite of his obvious malevolence and ineptitude was the white-anting of Labor's electoral prospects by many of that party's faceless men.

I would not say Labor in general, but the last almost 5 years of this Labor government is the worst in my living memory and i can hardly wait to be rid of them.

I have never seen such bungled and mismanaged lot of attempts to bring in ideological changes. Starting with Rudds increasing drasticly the immigration rate and then the softening of the border control measures to be 'more humane'. Remember about 600 died from that 'humane' effort. Record numbers of illegals are arriving.

There is a very long list of failures and mismanagement. Perhaps a competition to pick the worst stuff up? Everyone seems to have quite a few stuff ups they can refer to. Pink bats anyone?

They have spent money like drunken sailors with nothing to show for it. With borrowed monies now over $166 billion. At say 5%, the annual interest on that alone is $8300,000,000 ($8.3 Billion)

They just promised the IMF a cool $27 billion to help prop up some European countries.

The sooner this totally incompedent lot are kicked out the better.