If Abbott gets the RBA just to create our inflation money, this will save us $30 billion pa + interest in taxes. If we don't address the issue of monetary sovereignty, we will become even more enslaved via debt.

"Many of the media organisations concentrated on policies and facts this election"
Particularly the murdoch press eh Graham?
with the bar set exceptionally high for ludicrous posturings in this election, that has pretensions to first place.

Selfies undid the ALP, whether they were Rudd's photos or the party's two-term obsession with itself. This cost them government and some good future parliamentarians, Greg Combet chief amongst them.
Some interesting times coming up for Abbott. What will he do with Malcolm? How will he accept having his over-generous and unrealistic maternity leave scheme amended? How will he re-package the carbon tax and the mining tax? What to do about industrial relations?
I'm glad he got in. I wish him well.

It is clear that Labor lost the election rather than the Liberals having won it.

To claim Tony is a deep thinker brings a whole new dimension to the meaning of the words 'Deep Thinker'. Is a deep thinker a suppository of all knowledge? Is he the kind of person who talks about 'Baddies fighting Baddies'? Is he the kind of person who thinks up and promotes ideas like buying up all the second-hand Indonesian fishing boats?

Troubled times are ahead but the press won't report them or they will gild them, anything to keep the Party of Big Business at the helm!

Poor fella', my country.

GY
Your Liberal roots are showing "Labor has been traducing Abbott for decades using phrases like the "mad monk". The politics of smear is ingrained in Labor psychology,..."

Have you forgotten "Juliar", "Bob's Bitch" and much worse, and RW shock-jocks line Jones and Hadley. Have you ever visited any of the far right extremist blogs like Pickering. I don't think there is much worse expecially from Labor.

The politics of smear is not limited to one side of politics, to suggest it is so is another indication of the weird 'team sport' politics has become in this country. The idea that 'our side' must win and the other side must be mocked rather than citizens actually looking at government as their representative and what plans they have for the country.

I am not altogether unhappy with Abbott's win although at the final hour did preference ALP above Libs down low on the both tickets but before the nutter parties.

Why I did not preference Libs:
1. PPL - too generous and a form of vote buying, middle class welfare. Ironically by contrast aged care workers are not to get their long deserved and needed pay rises.

2. Indonesian boat smugglers buy back scheme - I think there is no need to explain the fact Australian taxpayers will be funding a booming boat industry to the North.

3. Paying long term unemployed a bonus for being unemployed for over a year. Enough said.

However, Labor did not deserve to win. It was a better of two evils choice.

In terms of the 13 Coalition victories since the war there has only been one occasion when they have won with less than the primary vote than Abbott managed to scrape from the electorate. To be calling it “one of the greatest victories in Australian politics” is a touch hollow but heck, to the victors go the bragging rights.

And one does get the image of Graham rolling around amongst hundreds of mantras that he keeps gleefully tossing into the air.

Yet the article is rather high on rhetoric that doesn't match the facts. For instance Wayne Swann was, inconveniently for some, indeed voted as the best treasurer by Euromoney.

“World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who said it was a "significant and deserved honour".
"This is the second time in the history of the awards that Euromoney's finance minister of the year has gone to an Australian treasurer, a demonstration that Australia has benefited from the continuity of effective, influential treasurers," Mr Zoellick said.”

To say that “The Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government was one of the worst that Australia has seen. It was economically and managerially incompetent, dishonest, philosophically lightweight, and out of touch with the hopes and aspirations of the bulk of the populace.” just does not stand up.

However I do share Graham's hopes for an Abbott government, my personal dislike of the man aside. In fact if his hand were to be ever offered to me I could not in good conscience take it after the 'Dying of shame' references he directed at Julia Gillard, 'undergraduate' sniping at its most base level.

But perhaps his government will “stay humble, disciplined and hooked-in to the public” and be able to nurture a country “full of citizens who are creative and take responsibility for themselves and care for others”.

One can only hope.