All this from a Prime Minister who trained to be a priest.

It is interesting the rhetoric about the "entitlement", but I doubt if Tony or Joe see their own sense of entitlement in the mirror.

After all they will entitled to a tax payer funded, tax free political welfare for life, that is indexed to politicians pay rises.

*After all they will entitled to a tax payer funded, tax free political welfare for life, that is indexed to politicians pay rises.*

As well as that they will no doubt be offered a number of well paid directorships in companies that have benefited from all the tax handouts and rorts given them during the term of the jackboot government.

If only politicians everywhere, had to be the very first to suffer the adverse results or consequences of their often asinine decisions, we would have the very best health care, the best education system, the best most rapid transport system, the most affordable housing, the lowest taxes and the best average or minimum wage etc/etc/etc!
There was another choice, besides austerity for the most vulnerable, and that was simply build a bigger economic cake and then distribute larger slices of it, for everyone!
Which then would force feed the domestic economy, forcing even more inflation free economic growth.
If those who wish to lead can't lead us there, then they need to just hand the baton to other's who can; or just generate some original ideas, not accompanied by the smell of burning, emanating from previously unused cerebral circuits!
We need people who earn their relatively large salaries, by doing a little more than nodding off in the back benches!
For heaven sake, parliament only ever sits for a fortnight at a time!
Wake up! Sleep in your own time, not ours!
If china can produce 8% annual inflation free growth, then surely a free market democracy can best that?
Even if that then requires us to remove all/legislate against the parasitic practices, middlemen broker (robber) barons/armchair bound, bloated advisers, who only ever add their profit margins/obscene unearned fees, and often into perpetuity, rather than at the actual service point!
Rhrosty.

Mr Abbott has waged a war on the middle to lower income earners, He has gone back to the basics and the foundation of Liberal beliefs, by doing so the vague differences between the two major parties that has occurred over many years are now quite distinct ! So yes he is at war, a war he will surely loose, The numbers of swinging voters will decline because of this as the choices become much more distinct and clear ! The numbers ultimately favor Labors political values as there heartland is with the majority of voters in Australia who are of low to middle incomes ! The Liberal party has only one real option left to survive its next election without total devastation and that is to rid themselves of Abbott Hockey and Pyne so they can change their direction and gain some faith back from the bulk of the Australian voters, left as they are they are doomed to opposition for many a decade !The people will not soon forget this fiasco !
!

Marko remember the sage words of Margaret Thatcher" Socialism works until you run out of other peoples's money" lol.

'[Abbott's] attack on Australia was not foreshadowed whilst in opposition.'

Are you kidding? Of course it was foreshadowed. We had plenty of evidence of what ideological path the Coalition was on in the recent track records of the Newman and O'Farrell governments.

We've also had plenty of evidence of how the Murdoch media, the free-market IPA (and its cosy cabal of think-tanks) and the Coalition are all joined at the hip. If we didn't, then surely the overblown and irrational IPA-led victimisation in the Murdoch press of the Gillard-Rudd leadership - which pilloried any attempt it made to redistribute Australia's sovereign wealth away from the rich - must have left some elephant-sized clues.

We also had plenty of evidence of the Coalition's ideological links to, and frequent contacts with, the Cameron government's 'big society', austerity-rules policies.

And the biggest foreshadowing of all was the former Howard government and its Work Choices legislation. Only a political party that wants to create an underclass of desperate people willing to work in inhumane conditions for next to nothing would have come up with such a brutal 'worker's choice' system.