Daily Telegraph Blog
Posted on Friday, 26 August 2011
This week marked the first anniversary of the election that no one really won. Julia Gillard was ultimately chosen by the Greens and the independents, not by the people.
She’s the prime minister who has been selected, not elected: first by the factions after the political assassination of Kevin Rudd, and then by the Greens and the independents in a hung parliament.
Since then, the Prime Minister has had no plan to govern, just to survive. She’s committed to a carbon tax because Senator Bob Brown made it a condition of his support. She dumped hospital reform because the states wouldn’t give up their GST.
She’s committed to an expensive and ineffective poker machine measure because an independent demands it. And she has to keep expressing “full confidence” in Craig Thomson, the embattled member for Dobell, because he holds her keys to the Lodge.
This week the government has been focussed on protecting Craig Thomson’s job when the public want it focussed on protecting their jobs.
Instead, the Prime Minister has been in hiding, Mr Thomson has been in protection and the government has been in paralysis.
Some 1400 direct and indirect jobs are going at Australia’s iconic steel maker yet the government’s Steel Industry Advocate position has been vacant for nine months and the government’s Steel Innovation Council has not met for six months.
Julia Gillard’s only answer to Australia’s problems is to spend more and to tax more – and to heap abuse on anyone who disagrees with her, like the bush protestors this week smeared as the “convoy of no consequence”.
If there is one lesson from the European sovereign debt crisis it’s that governments which borrow too much, spend too much and tax too much eventually inflict a terrible toll on their own people.
It’s no wonder that the Australian people now look to the former Howard Government as a golden age of economic growth that’s now been lost.
If elected, the Coalition will once again take the tough decisions to put our country back its fiscal feet.
26 August 2011