Dear Shadow Minister,

I fully understand that you as a Coalition supporter
remember the Rudd Government through the prism of
debt and dysfunction (despite the Coalition's own
belated acknowledgement in its costings that
return to surplus is no easy task in a time of
falling government revenue). By contrast Labor
supporters will remember the Rudd and Gillard
governments as ones that did attempt to deal with
key challenges of the 21st century.

We now have to wait and see how successful the
Coalition will be in governing in such difficult
and challenging times (with not only internal
party problems but with a debt that has more than
doubled or is it tripled? under its watch).

Foxy,

You forgot Labor's massive waste and incompetence, and the border control disaster. As government you don't get judged on effort or intentions, but on results.

So far the results under the coalition have been far better than under Labor.

Dear Shadow Minister,

I beg to differ. Labor did have a substantial record of
reforming legislation and did attempt to sustain growth
with fairness in immensely challenging economic times.
We have yet to wait and see how the Coalition will be
in governing in such difficult and challenging times.

Foxy,

I challenge you to point out one policy that Labor put in place to facilitate long term growth. In fact quite the opposite, the carbon taxes, mining taxes, wildly regressive labour laws, and tens of thousands of pointless bureaucratic regulations all added massive costs to doing business in Aus.

Juliar during her regime put in place a plethora of huge spending programs, and to balance this put in place savings measures (read new taxes) that only covered a tiny portion of this new expenditure. Then to top this off Labor and the Greens are doing their best to stop the repeal of any of these spending measures, even the ones they pledged to remove prior to the elections.

So by any measure, labor's economic record is shocking.

Dear Shadow Minister,

Labor's economic record is shocking you say.

Really?

What utter BS!

Of course mistakes were made. I agree that
Rudd government's stimulus
package failed to regulate adequately either private
sector builders of school halls or installers of insulation.
And unfortunately - the resulting excessive costs
and tragic deaths overshadowed
memories of the thousands who had been successfully employed
under the programmes at a time of economic crisis.
However Rudd's stimulus worked. Australia had the shortest
and shallowest of recessions of any advanced industrial
country.

Despite the problems selling the message (And Wayne Swan's
poor communication skills combined with virulent opposition
from the Murdoch press - didn't help) the Rudd/Gillard
governments could claim to have left the Australian
economy in a relatively good state compared to most Western
Economies.

The very favourable IMF and OECD figures and Australia's
AAA credit rating were evidence of this.

Despite your continued perception that the Labor
governments under Rudd/Gillard were dysfunctional the
legislative and policy record of the Labor governments is
in fact extensive. The minority Gillard government alone
successfully passed over 500 pieces of legislation.
Great credit needs to be given to Gillard's negotiating
skills.

Anyway, enough said.

See you on another discussion.

Foxy,

Unable to find a single piece of Labor legislation that supports jobs. Don't worry no one else can either.

Juliar passed 500 pieces of legislation with the greens? That put her on par with Trump.

The media was nasty to labor? The truth hurts.