Yes Luddy, I sure am.

Voting for the cowboy hat or the mining magnate is not on. Neither of them are likely to get enough votes to do more than spoil.

Voting independent is what gave us the current mess. Can you imagine a parliament with a dozen of those egotistical idiots & Gillard. God help us!

Voting Green is like cutting your own throat. They are such twits they would have us starving, bankrupt, & over run with illegal boat people before they knew what was happening, & probably would be happy with that result anyway.

Voting Labor, apart from pleasing Belly would be no better than green really. You would have a very dumb tail wagging a totally incompetent dog, & that horrible woman still degrading our TV viewing. I expect she'll disappear after she looses, I'm sure she wouldn't want to downgrade her pension.

So mate, Abbott is the ONLY choice. Pity Barnaby is in the wrong party. Another 3 years of this bunch & half of us will be eating bread & dripping, & that will be the 3 day old bread I currently get for the horses.

praxidice I like you went to the trouble of voting below the line to give Pauline a go. I was sorry quite quickly. Even at state level the party was a rabble, & did more harm than good. Hell I think it is a toss up which is the worst we've had, One Nation or the Greens. Time to bury the hatchet, & do what is best for our kids future. Cutting off your own nose is a grand gesture, but a bloody silly one.

Just in passing, you wouldn't be Pauline would you? Nah not practical enough, when I think about it.

Dear Prax.,

So who to vote for?

Suggestions would be most welcome.

I tend to agree. Abbott will use austerity and a scorched earth policy to resolve what he sees as the problem. Abbott is locked in with large corporate interests and won't do anything radical that might upset his corporate masters.

Unless we find a new party we can trust,nothing will change.

Big Clive is the dark horse. He has bulk money & is prepared to spend it, he has assembled 39 good quality candidates in three weeks (no failed lawyers or ex-priests), he won't have any difficulty signing up the 150 by end of June, he has nothing to prove, he cannot possibly be bought off by external interests, he does not oooze sleaze like the red-headed witch & the RAbbott & unlike other contenders , he actually has a clue about business. In person he has a lot in common with Richard Branson, same kind of infectious enthusiasm, same sense of adventure, same 'who gives a rats about money' attitude, and same desire to leave the world better than he found it. Unlike the red-headed witch & the RAbbott, one doesn't feel an urge to count ones fingers immediately after shaking hands and then race off to wash away the feeling of toxic contamination. Female associates in the counselling profession tell me very few males can comprehend the 'dirty' feeling women report after being raped. That may well be true, however simply being in the same room as the red-headed witch & the RAbbott left me feeling like I should have had a long shower a week ago. They are like those uber-slimy Parramatta Road used-car salespersons except a thousand times worse.

I don't know what Tony Abbott could have been thinking, sending a note to the GG indicating his agreement to this proposed over-the-top political re-election slush-fund, without consulting with his cabinet or the party-room. Peculiar, and really somewhat out of character, even for loose-lips Tony. Thankfully he only sent the note to the GG and not to Julia.

Still, I commend him for heeding his colleagues in this matter (even if they had to hold a knife to his throat, or threaten him with a 'Turnbull' style of revolt). And I believe the public is generally pleased that Abbott put the kibosh on this ridiculously excessive free handout from the public purse - especially given the last budget projections.

Does anyone think political donations are not a reasonable measure of the mood of the electorate? No funds must surely mean no confidence?

My take is that Julia was concerned that Labor would get little financial support this time around from industry, and somewhat diminished support from the Labor rank and file, and so was looking to raid the public purse in a last ditch effort to flood the media with even more endless self-praise in the run-up to September.
We can be thankful for small mercies.

Whether you call it politicking, or belatedly getting the right 'message' from the public and the party-room, I give Abbott credit for making the right call on this issue. Better late, than too late.

As for September, I tend to agree with Hasbeen that a vote for Bob Katter's mob or Clive Palmer's can probably only result in an even more clouded and disjointed minority government than we have had to suffer these past three years.
As for the Greens, with perhaps best of intentions, I fear they have lost the plot, and may at best expect a minor and slender balance of power in the Senate.

My inclination is to give Tony Abbott a chance, because nothing could be worse than three more years of Julia.

the laborlites select Latham, Rudd and then Gillard. Gillard tells Rudd to dump carbon tax and then does a sleazy deal with Greens/Independants having lied to public. After several dudds and continous broken promises all they can come up with is abbottphobia. And this before he moves into the lodge. To think that about 30% of aussies will still vote Labour. Unbelievable. Hatred really does blind.