This is a very exciting time in politics.

Things have happened for a reason and hopefully
good will come out of these recent events.

We've just seen an ordinary suburban bloke do
an extraordinary thing. Win an unwinnable
election. A bloke who went from an accidental
Prime Minister to a homespun hero.
And he did it almost single-handedly.

I imagine that now, not for decades, will another
Opposition Leader dare take to an election an
agenda so bold as the Shorten Labor Party did.

Bill Shorten has now become Labor's John Hewson.
He proposed a starkly different set of policies
for the Australian economy and like Hewson's
"Fightback" manifesto a quarter of a century ago,
Shorten also got burned.

So convinced was Labor that the time and the vibe
suited their agenda. They were wrong.
Australians have shown themselves to be cautious
about change, susceptible to doubt, and to fear.

We've seen that especially in Queensland, voters
did not buy or believe in Shorten's message.

On the Adani mine, Shorten's words that the
contentious project would receive no public money
and would have to stack up scientifically and
commercially did not go down well with voters.
To them Adani meant jobs. Something the current
Labor Premier in Queensland has quickly picked up
on by taking immediate action.

The good and exciting news for us all is - that
Mr Morrison now has an opportunity to use his
immense authority (with Abbott gone), to demand
loyalty from the Coalition to steer a new direction
on critical areas such as energy (NEG). While
Labor also now has the opportunity under its new
leadership to steer it also in to a new direction.

We can only hope that the country will benefit from
the challenges that lie ahead for both the major
parties. And that both will have learnt lessons
from the recent election.

The opportunities are there. Who will make the most of
them, we shall have to wait and see. Fingers crossed
they both will.

Foxy I have got to say, thank god that Shorten with his ridiculous destructive energy policies was given his marching orders.

You say, "As we've seen from this election - for reform to be
successful you need to take the people with you
and possibly try not to do too much all of a sudden" No Foxy, reform has to be something that is good for the people of the country.

Shortens reform was only to allow him to buy votes from the envious & stupid. There is still nothing good in his policies, & a whole lot destructive. The politics of envy is a horrible thing to observe, & got what it deserved.

By the time of the next election, more people will have woken up to the scam that is the overheating of the atmosphere by CO2, & we might get an election on things that really are important to our future.

We are a 'representative' democracy. I want to be represented by at least some people like me - who have enough experience in common with me to represent me and my interests. Simply, I don't believe a male dominated parliament can represent me.

The parliament decides on how the country should be run - they don't do the actually work themselves, they delegate it to departments or contract it out. So the argument that running the country is a full-time job doesn't wash. Ministers don't run departments - they sit in their parliamentary offices and handle political issues.

(Actually some try to be hands-on (aka micro-manage) - sometime in the 1990s I was visiting a Qld government department; I was sitting in someone's office while he went to get some documents. The phone rang, and I was undecided whether to answer it or let it go to message bank. Suddenly a guy ran into the office, yelled at me 'Answer your phone' and picked it up, just as it stopped. With another quick lecture on how to do my job, he rushed off before I could say I was a visitor. He turned out to be the Minister, who drove the staff crazy from his habit of dropping in unannounced and telling them off - clearly he had no idea who was actually employed there!)

As for women with children, assuming a standard two child family, it would take about 18-20 years of a mother's time to raise the children till they were final high school/ university. A woman's life expectancy in Australia is 85. Plenty of time after bringing up a family for women to be effective, hard-working politicians. We need some good older women in there. Look at the Queen! She's 93 now, and has worked since she became queen at age 25, raising 4 kids along the way. Yes, she had help, but she did a lot of hard work herself. She should be a role model for women in government - especially on the conservative, monarchist side.

Thank You for all your contributions so far.

They are appreciated.

It is good to read differing opinions.

I'd just like to add a few more thoughts on
some of the problems that we're faced with
today in the world of politics.

In earlier times it was common to see much
larger percentages of the voting population as
members of political parties. Today we see a
fraction of those figures. Membership of
political parties has declined.

This has forced parties to look to other sources of
financial support, notably from corporations, and
private benefactors.

This feeds the problem of distance from ordinary
citizens creating a vicious circle. The closer some
parties get to business the less they seem to care
about the needs and wishes of the ordinary voter
or party member.

This in turn feeds into the declining trust of
politicians. A recent survey found that only a small
percentage of voters thought that politicians could
" almost always be trusted." The very word - "politician"
for some has become a byword for sleaze, self-serving,
narcissism and incompetence.

Long gone are the days when politician meant "public
servant"and when public service meant putting to one
side one's own needs and interests in favour of the
country. This has given the emergence of populist
anti-politics parties like Pauline Hanson's One
Nation. Parties that are led by figures who trade on
contempt for political elites.

Interest in politics today also differs from the past.
Voters no longer seem to care about politics as is
usually defined. They're more interested in
mainstream politics when it is a story wrapped in a
negative, showing politicians in a bad light doing bad
things to bad ends.

slagging off the lady
Belly,
I wasn't, I merely see a female that hasn't really done anything noteworthy for the Nation as yet !