>"'It empowers negative campaigns, privileges sectional and special interests over the national interest … and confronts a conflict between long-run policy and the short-term tyranny of the polling and media cycle.'"

I agree. It's extremely irresponsible of Labor-Greens to hold the country to ransom as they are doing. Unfortunately, their relentless negativity began when Kim Beasley's led the Labor Opposition during the period of the Howard Government. It was a disgraceful act, especially given that Howard had set the agenda and justified the policies and then strongly supported Hawke and Keating as they implemented them (as only Labor could given it meant getting the unions to allow them to happen).

For those Lefties who wanrt to tag Abbott with relentless negativity, the Abbott Opposition supported some 85% of Labor policies during the Gillard and Rudd years. They opposed only the really bad policies that any responsible Opposition would have opposed. On border security policies, Labor always had the opportunity to admit it's massive mistake of dumping the proven successful 'Pacific Solution' and reinstating it. but their incompetence and pride prevented them from doing so. That's just one of a very long list of really bad policies the Rudd, Brown Gillard, Milne, Swan, Wong, Conroy, and the rest of the incompetent union trained politicians imposed on Australia.

It will take may decades to unwind the damage Labor-Green have done in just 6 years.

If the Abbott policy was any good they would not have any trouble getting it past the senate. Abbott’s budget was way over the top, it was the budget of someone out of control, and to date there has been no improvement.

The problem is Abbott’s authority over the rest of his team, he wants all the decision making, without any opposition from members of govt;.
You can’t say his policy on the run is justified, it doesn’t even sit right with the rest of his front bench.

Your comments are saying Abbotts policy is the only course of action that can be taken, which is very shortsighted.

The amount of damage done to the liberal brand is unrepairable without leadership change. Historical commentary shows how little there is to write about the present situation.

Might have helped in the Abbott govt's case if they hadn't fundamentally misrepresented their intentions prior to the election.

Of course, Labor provided them with a fairly large target, especially with the media on board.

It's quite difficult to sustain the ruse once the cat is out of the bag - especially since the Abbott govt let out all their cats at once - attempting to do a Gough in reverse!

The wheels are falling off quite rapidly as things stand, however. Autocratic rule from the PMO now has backbenches leaking like sieves and resentful of their leadership duo.

When all is said and done, Abbott himself provided the best analogy yet of the difference between him in Opposition and him in government.

He can't bat, he can't bowl, he cant field...but he's a damn good sledger.

>>... our parties remind me of professional football teams, focussed on winning. Most players could belong to either side. The MPs and Senators are no longer representative in any real sense of the constituencies that elect them...>>

Love it.

Excellent analogy.

Thanks for a really good article, Don, on a topic that's pretty close to my own heart.

It seems to me that what is missing from politics is a means of conveying any sense of common purpose to the electorate. That common purpose exists, on the other hand, is taken as a given.

It is very easy to be negative and it's something we all do (myself included) when we can't be bothered to take the trouble to think properly about the other person's position or if we feel our own to be under attack. That's fair enough, but if we want to be able to achieve decent long-term stable solutions there has to be a willingness to accept that not being wrong is less important than finding the right answer.

I think that most of our politicians are people of good faith and when people of good faith get together, then even really hard questions are soluble. On the other hand, I'm not sure that all of the people who our politicians look to for advice are people of good faith, so what we, as voters, need to do is to show those people that it is in their own best interests to act in good faith, whether they actually possess it or not.

Then we might be able to think about more important things, like the Broncos winning the Premiership.

Don great setup to blame all of Australians failings on the evil "left", talk about playing to a crowd.

Looking forward to a no workable solutions partisan part two.