Moondoong, sounds like you're also old enough to have lived through the Bob Menzies era of pork-barrelling election year budgets followed by post election horror budgets.
If Tony Abbott is seeking to repeat what Menzies and John Howard did he has a few major issues to address:
1. As a PM, Abbott isn't within coooeee of either Menzies or Howard - he lacks the management, negotiation and social skills essential to the role.
2. We're almost into December with just two more sitting weeks and yet the May budget is still in tatters. Abbott's gifted $Billions to his backers, thrown away revenue raising taxes including the MRRT and the CT/ETS, committed Australia to another war in the Middle East, ordered prohibitively expensive new equipment from overseas for Defence, etc while revenues from mining companies continues to plummet. This year's budget mess is almost certainly going to spill over into 2015 and adversely impact that budget as well.
3. Abbott and Hockey's destructive negativity has so damaged the economy that the sharemarket has lost the momentum it had when Kevin Rudd returned as PM - investors are deserting Australia in droves and it's difficult to see why they'd return!
4. A growing chorus of highly respected economists are predicting recession for Australia in 2015. Abbott's contractionary policies will exacerbate any such downturn.
5. Abbott has a NO plan for economic recovery - he's just leaving that to a very lazy and myopic large business sector pre-occupied in increasing executive remuneration.
6. Soon after becoming PM, Abbott declared that economic growth in Australia would rise because of the improvement in confidence now that he was in charge. He urged a people already weighed down by record private debt to spend like drunken sailors. They took no notice and the May budget explains why, but with a recession in the wind it's hard to see consumer led economic growth.
7. APEC and the G20 forums demonstrated that under Abbott, Australia is on the wrong side of history. Having suffered badly from the GFC, other countries are not going to have much sympathy for the country that exited it as of September 2013 as the wealthiest people on Earth. Abbott has burned any goodwill that may have come our way!
