I see Labor's PR man, Alan Austin is back on the job. Unable to embellish the dismal truth over Labior's miserable performance, Alan tries to tarnish the successes of the Howard/Costello years.

Look Alan. Labor is stuffed at the moment but it will win in the end. The dependent people just keep on increasing in numbers either through immigration or birth rate differentials and the productive people keep declining in number. Soon, parts of Australia will resemble Detroit and I hear that the Labor Heartland of South Australia is on the way to emulating it.

You socialists can't make everybody rich but you can sure make everybody poor. Like the Arabs, the only thing keeping us afloat is our natural resources and when they run out Australia will probably become a third world country and we are doing our best already to populate it with third world people.

But after you have stuffed your own country, Alan, where are you going to go? Every white liberal democracy is hell bent on creating social suicide from unrestricted immigration, and economic suicide from the adoption of socialist economic solutions. So when you become a minority in your own country and then realise that those shining ideals of Human Rights and Egalitarianism were the fantasies of white tertiary educated, social climbing socialists, (not those of the people Australia has imported) you might start to feel like a Christian scientist with appendicitis.

Good morning all,

@Pericles, re “It [Huffington Post article] is obviously not the one you wanted us to read, because it says absolutely nothing about the "Howard and Costello years", or the lessons derived from them.”

Correct. The point was simply that the media in Europe and North America do frequently report on events in Australia.

No, the failures of the Howard/Costello period are no longer newsworthy. Unlikely to find that reported in journals abroad.

The more pertinent point, however, is that economists interested in comparisons of economic wellbeing between nations or regions and through time – who actually look at the hard data – don’t regard the Howard/Costello years as successful.

As with previous Coalition regimes, Australia’s world ranking fell significantly, though this was masked by the mining boom and constant self-talk proclaiming prosperity.

What happens in Australia over the next three years will be instructive. How will Australia’s current ranking as best-managed economy shift if there is a change of administration?

Some detailed data on this is embedded in the links in this article:

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/we-really-must-talk-about-tony-abbott-and-joe-hockey/

@Hasbeen, no you should not get upset at what is presented here.

As far as possible, the input in these analytical pieces is based on actual verifiable data. You are urged to ask for validation for anything at all asserted here in the articles or the comments if it’s not explicitly shown.

Perhaps we should all be a bit more upset about the distortions, omissions and outright lies that Murdoch, Fairfax and the ABC dish up to Australians daily in order to keep people misinformed to their own advantage.

@LEGO, can you see how repeating those falsehoods promulgated by the Murdoch and other media in Australia illustrates that last point?

Do you agree you would be happier and more effective if you actually understood the way the world really is rather than believing and parroting a seriously distorted view of the world?

There is plenty of data available, Lego, to confirm the assertions in this series of articles. It’s just a matter of accessing it.

Cheers,

Happy voting!

Alan

Hang on a moment, Alan Austin

You cannot simultaneously take issue with my observation on the subheading "Outside Australia, the Howard years are actually widely regarded as dismally disappointing", which you did as follows:

>>re: “outside Australia, we are for all practical purposes politically invisible.” Depends where we look, Pericles.<<.

...and then turn right round and agree with me:

>>...the failures of the Howard/Costello period are no longer newsworthy. Unlikely to find that reported in journals abroad<<

That's cheating.

Not everybody saw the Howard era through rose-tinted glasses.

Many people were hurt by his policies - some irrevocably - and most showed their displeasure at the ballot box.
Rudd was no messiah at the time but a convenient excuse to dump the worst of Howard's failings.

A clever media handling strategy with the novelty of having not one (as is typically the case) but three press secretaries working to stifle public criticism eventually failed him.

Despite calls for smaller government, the Public Service actually grew faster under Howard than under Labor governments, despite privatising many of it's functions.

His biggest failing perhaps was converting what used to be a typical conservative party to into a bunch of extremist neo-conservatives run by the religious right and their own "faceless men" - many of who are still in control today.

Many people have very short and selective attention spans.