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.

The rich must be having parties tonight! Their favorite government is likely to win the election and it's good times for them again!

Yeah, during the Howard years, the rich did well. Howard was their poster boy!

It's hard to imagine Abbott as a poster boy. A suppository of all knowledge he isn't! A personable person he isn't. If he is bright, he doesn't show it! His speech patterns reveal he is slow of mind and he repeats things over and over in order to allow his brain to catch up with his tongue!

Of course, Abbott beat Turnbull by one vote so he hardly has the full support of the Liberal Party. I wonder who is waiting in the wings to topple him?

Will he last six months, I wonder? As an Australian, a P.M. who wears budgie-smugglers doesn't cut it for me.

Abbott is a national embarrassment!

One just has to look at Andrew Leigh's introduction & career & all his arguments go out the window.

A Phd from Harvard, and all he can produce is this pathetic piece of discredited scare campaign.

How the mighty have fallen.

Shadow Minister,
Isn't it a strange phenomenon that educated people still haven't come to grips with that part of reality which clearly demonstrates that education without an ounce of pragmatism & even just a tiny degree of wisdom amounts to nothing but a burden on others.

Labor is like a psycho-abusive significant other (select gender / pet / fluffy toy here). I won't spend all the money, I will leave the credit card alone, I won't leave the front door open, I will cook a meal or two, I won't go out with that nut-case Gaea, I will stop stealing coal mines, I won't / will /won't ..... blah blah. Poverty is oppression when avoidable and that is all Labor is good at, they mixed up the Dismal Science and it ended up all Greek to them. Sigh; another wasted decade fixing up a Lefty mess.

In,

I think to join the Labor party you need a laborotomy to reduce the IQ by 100.

Look there's only two possibilities to explain Labor supporters.

Either
1. they genuinely can't recognise Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard and the whole party as being the conceited, infantile, incompetent, dysfunctional, nasty thugs that they are; or
2. they support them because of the material benefits they get or expect to get from supporting a party which holds thieving as the highest social principle.

In either case they should be disqualified from voting away other people's liberties and property, and voting themselves handouts paid for by other people.

Andrew ,who put us in this position that austerity must be imposed to pay for unnecessary Labor debt? Labor sold off the Commonwealth Bank that used to create money from nothing to equal some inflation + growth. Now all of our new money gets created as debt.ie $90 billion pa + interest. We are now slaves to the international banksters.

So don't give us the crap about the austerity which you have initiated.

JKJ,

Perhaps the Labor party should be renamed the free lunch party?