"With Christmas gone and 2016, an election year, about to blow in what speculative gossip and scandal-mongering can we expect from the headline-hunting Greens?"

There, I fixed that for you.

The honeymoon for the tiresome Greens should be over if the ABC does what the walking, talking, hairpiece Ray Martin says and gives the Greens some equal scrutiny. That will be novel for the Greens and the ABC.

The honeymoon is not over for Turnull. He still keeps Abbotts policies of stopping the boats, getting rid of the idiotic breathing tax and will leave it to the public to decide if they want to pervert the defintion of marriage. Amazing how the luvvies from the abc let him get away with it. It is all about sides not policies for many.

Bazz,

Although some Australians have a debt problem, Australia as a nation does not.

Whether our creditors want their money back is immateriial, as we don't have to reduce our debt when we pay them back.

Barnaby puts his fot in his mouth so often I'm not surprised they want to muzzle him. Unfortunately the rebuttals of his arguments haven't got a lot of media attention so a large proportion of the population still believe them.

The aged conservatives on the forum hold a faint hope that Abbott is not gone, but he has just morphed into a new leader in the shape of Malcolm Turnbull, as demonstrated by the comments of forumites such as runner, nothing could be further from the truth. Turnbull is playing a very smart game, as he slowly but surely wrestles power from the hard right faction of the Liberal Party, and installs his own like minded supporters into positions of authority. The first method of control is rather visible, dump those you don't want, the Hockey types, and promote those you do, Turnbull did a fair amount of that within the Cabinet. Then the less obvious is to install candidates of your choosing into winnable seats, Zimmerman in North Sydney, that move is high on the Turnbull agenda, out with the old, in with the new, watch the new blood in some blue ribbon seats come next election. Turnbull also bought a fair amount of support, by promoting some Abbott "loyalists" like Morrison, and leaving Bishop as deputy.
The Nationals are a problem. e thorn in Turnbulls side. Soon the crusty old Truss should be gone, only to be replaced by the parliaments resident loony tune himself, Barnaby Joyce. A smart move by Turnbull was to cut the legs from under Macfarlane as he tried to run to the National, and therefore giving them a bigger say in things.
I don't expect a great deal of policy change from Turnbull in the run up to the election, no need to rock the boat too much now, but after woulds that could be a different story.

The antics of the remains of Abbott’s henchmen continue to add up with Dutton making a goose of himself. The sooner the Abbott front men have gone the better, they are making the Liberal’s look like a mob of amateurs. Briggs disgracing the liberal party, they are in turmoil, shows the depth of misogyny in the far right side of the Liberal party. Dutton needs eliminating, sack the idiot. Surely there are some competent women in the party that can do better.

"Whether our creditors want their money back is immateriial, as we don't have to reduce our debt when we pay them back."

We run a current account deficit of around 6%, so similar to many a banana republic. The way we pay for it is that we simply sell more and more of Australia to foreign interests. So in decades to come, we'll be working for our Chinese bosses, etc. Hardly smart thinking, but it won't be my problem by then.