Yes, there are problems and risks ahead.

However, more of the same, under present style Labor, hardly an option. It had its chance. Australians appear today to no longer trust Labor.

But Andrew, you do provide a laugh. A free trader, and more liberal than the Liberals, but an advocate to spend, spend, spend in a tough international economic environment, almost as if money grows on trees.

You bag the conservatives, yet the policies of Thatcher and others probably did most to boost growth of international economy to force Western economies to become more competitive, albeit new types of problems have emerged.

Bit of honesty rather than complete bias would go a long way.

I only got as far as "If anyone doubted the relevance of Keynesian economics,". Having read some Hayek, some general macro-economics and a few books on the difference between Keynes and Hayek, I remain fairly skeptical of macro-economics in general. Keynesian economics would seem to be the pseudo-science that props up socialist government stimulus spending in the same way that climatology props up various agendas including those of the United Nations Environment Program.

Restoring health care rebate. Hooray!! Fully equitable and justified that people who save the government money should be compensated.

Cutting foreign aid. Hooray!! What a waste of money this has been over the last 50 years. China received no aid at all and has done far better than most african basket cases. Even the Guardian had a recent headline:

"The Congo War; the folly of western aid"

In the words of Tony Abbott: "Why should we borrow from overseas to send aid overseas?"

Hopefully Abbott will give more aid to private schools so that parents who save the government money in education can be compensated.

Roll on the Abbott government! At last both the witch and the wizard are dead!!

A coalition Government still has to obey its political masters, and those masters appear to be saying, don't go too hard with the austerity, least you damage a still very fragile economy.
Decidedly becoming more fragile by the day.
While there are green shoots of economic recovery appearing in the US and parts of Europe and Asia, that could be destroyed in a minute by a hot war in the middle East.
Moreover, not for nothing are both China and Russia calling for the US to continue with the quantitative easing.
Both of the latter would be seriously effected with a quite massive economic downturn, if this particular tap were turned off at the moment.
We for our part can do something very similar, if we need to pour more money into our economy; and a vastly better outcome in many ways, than simply borrowing more from offshore entities.
So, all we need do for the moment is rationalize some of our Government service, and eliminate the duplication, and indeed, the trend to centralize most of the service, with the only real outcome, the waste of billions on empire building bureaucracies!
Eliminating the waste and rationalizing Government service, will return a 30%+ bounty.
Eliminating tax avoidance, will eliminate the need to cut the budget.
The NBN may even remain in its current form, given that Nats want it, and could cross the floor to keep it?
Besides, credible reports has it already earning more money in its current form for Australians, than the entire iron ore industry! And if that's not a cogent business case, I'd like to know what is!?
Rhrosty.

Chris, "honesty"? No hope. Otherwise Leigh would support my right to vote "none" and have it recorded as a valid vote.

"Queenslanders know that they used to have an unemployment rate below the rest of Australia, but now record an above-average jobless rate. Again, conservative austerity is a significant part of the story."

Oh Andrew, where have you had your head buried? Queenslands unemployment rate is rapidly on the way down and the growth figures are amongst the highest(if not the highest) of any state.
And guess what? Conservative austerity is a significant part of the story.