Abbott, Hockey and the new Government, a case of letting everyone down with frugality?

It is the political norm for all newly elected governments to make the previous mob look incompetent by magnifying mismanagement, policy failures & budget deficits.

Tony Abbott & Joe Hockey are no different as political operatives & will make sure by the time May Budget comes down, everything is blamed on Gillard, Rudd, Shorten & co.

However, as Christopher Pyne's huge stumble (and Abbott's timely intervention) with education funding clearly demonstrated, Tony Abbott must be very careful!
Whilst in opposition, he had made commitments such as parental leave scheme, which will be very costly to fund.

Tony Abbott can not break his promises because of the successful way he totally discredited Julia Gillard over her Carbon Tax broken promise.

But at the same time & most crucially, he must not fund his expensive promises by simply taking away from other funding areas such as health & education.

If he does, he will at his own peril & will no doubt pay for it at the next ballot box.

RIP Nelson Mandela 1918-2013

RIP Nelson Mandela, A true inspirational political & social leader & teacher of humanity!

There are no comparisons in the modern history (Gandhi aside) & words can not describe Nelson Mandela, what he did, what he taught & what he achieved for his people.

Mandela gave hope, inspired, led & most importantly taught his enemies & followers humanity & compassion without resorting to excessive power, violence, religion, money or guns!

The curious case of Gonski vs Carbon Tax as broken promises!

It would be amazing to find out what gets the better of politicians at times & why their egos cloud their judgements to the point of total naivety in reading the public mood!

It is therefore hard to guess what Christopher Pyne, PM Abbott & their highly paid advisors were thinking when Christopher Pyne decided to bulldoze through the Gonski education agreement by ignoring the fact that Tony Abbott had made a clear pre election promise to honour the funding as agreed by Gillard Government with most states.

To paraphrase the famous saying..." a little bit of information is a dangerous thing!" So as a lay person, I can't & won't claim to be privy to all the behind the scene information & drama that take place in the political arena & the end game stage show that we witness in the media.

This post is also not about the merits of Gillard's Gonski agreement vs Pyne's view! rather, this post is about the peculiar question of political judgement!

However, curiously, for a political party which patiently took 3 years to carefully & masterfully destroy the Labor Government's credibility based on a) broken Carbon Tax promise & b) returning the boats slogan, it was rather baffling when last week they appeared to be breaking a politically sensitive election promise at a time when the diplomatic stoush with Indonesia was potentially affecting their border protection policy (another election promise!)

But even more puzzling was what Tony Abbott was thinking when he said ....."We are going to keep the promise that we made, not the promise that some people thought we made or the promise that some people would like us to make. We are going to keep the promise that we actually made,"......

Can't he see that a statement like that can profoundly damage the little remaining trust the voters have in our politicians & political system, and even worse, render what is still the most highly prized aspect of our western democracy ie "election campaign promises" totally obsolete? (not that election promises are worth the paper they are written on in most cases anyway)

So hats off to PM Abbott & his advisors for realising the huge political misjudgement on the cards & quickly going into damage control to mop & clean up what could have been a political suicide so early in Abbott's first term!