@Eriny
I have to attempt to disagree, please point out where I am mislead, but I am not a fan of labor's excessive spending. As good as money in my pocket sounds, I prefer a strong economy, strong job market and high standard of living much more than the economy going backwards.
I'm trying to look up more, but it's really difficult, on the website they say things like 'we're going to restore budget surplus in 3 years' without actually telling people HOW they're going to find the money when over $6 billion has been committed to stuff already, and the election is still weeks away.
Firstly, from
what I can find, the government has a revenue in excess of 300 billion every year. $6bn is not a huge portion of that (5%), and a budge surplus can be easily achieved by SAVING elsewhere. From my understanding, budge surplus and deficit is not dependent on past year's budge (at least not directly), and it's not a running total. You can see from the previous link that labour has managed to overspend 25.6bn and 48.9bn in the past two financial years. Liberal is willing to stop spending money on non-essential crap (such as the NBN and the laptop scheme, which I will talk about later), and save money so we can start paying the debt already. If anything, that's a brilliant idea. In the meanwhile, labor is still trying to win votes by committing more money to get marginal votes off people who drive old cars, families with 16-18 year olds (FTB increase). It's a tried and true method though, more spending = more vote.
Not sure where you are getting "they are increasing business tax", because
this says they are decreasing business tax from 30% to 28.5%.
As for climate change, if you are still thinking a carbon-trading scheme, you really should understand that the power generation plants in Victoria is incapable of being that clean from an engineering perspective (the cost will outweigh the benefits by much), and putting a trading scheme on it will simply mean our electricity bill will increase, so the government might as well just tax us normal citizens for it. What we really need is to decommission the dirty power plants and build new ones, but generally new ones take up to 10 years to build, and old ones have contracts that the government can't pull out of without going out of pocket (read: excessive waste of money). So I'm not sure how the Greens or any other 'environmentally conscious' party plan to reduce carbon emission immediately, because the coal fire stations (owned by overseas companies, of course) will simply tell the Government to piss off, because the govt is these companies' bitch.
On the topic of immigration policy, I agree completely with stopping the boats. These aren't refugee seekers, they aren't pursued by terrorists who are going to kill them (if they are, I'm sure US would have invaded that country already). They are illegal immigrants who want to jump the queue, and bypass the criteria. As a migrant, I'm disgusted, and as a citizen, I say a fair go for everyone IS the bottom line, so get back to the back of the queue, and if you don't want to wait back in your country, you can wait outside my door.
On the topic of the laptop policy, let me start by saying it's been FOUR YEARS, and I haven't seen any laptops been freely given out in Victoria. I hear in NSW they had some, but they weren't exactly free either. The only ones I've heard of in Victoria are the ones where students are forced to buy the laptops at ridiculous prices (some 200% of retail prices,
without administrative access to the computer), in the name of maintaining a good school network. Network admins don't get paid that much, the price students pay for that abomination of a laptop covers twice if not thrice the cost dept of education would purchase them at, so where is that money going into? Network maintenance? Communication companies would be laughing with their new-found riches, because it's almost all pure profit. Hint: Excess spending.
And National Broadband Network, Labor simply
had to buy the copper network from Telstra for some 40bn dollars. Telstra did bid for the project, and offered something that's actually acceptable and competitive at a much lower price with a much lower overhead, but since the govt didn't have control over it and Telstra wasn't too keen on censorship in the backbone of the network, the tender was rejected. So now, Labor wants to develop this NBN, headed by a previous head of Telstra, with a whole load of bureaucracy (read: inefficiency), and the prediction of the cost for a fibre-optic connection to a home is much higher than Telstra's proposal in the tender (which was deemed too high by the government). At this point, I doubt if anyone competent actually sat down and did the maths with proper advisors. This whole sham of a project reeks of EXCESSIVE SPENDING. Do you really trust the same treasurer and the same party to be back in the decision making position?
I agree that Tony Abbott is nowhere near as good as past Liberal PMs, he's a bit too out of touch for me, a bit too conservative, a bit too religious, and a bit too stupid. But you gotta realise it's the policy that makes a government, and the figurehead at the top doesn't have all that much power (unless you are Kevin-Rudd-Riding-Solo), and it's the cabinet and powers-that-be in the party that make the decisions. To be honest, I'd much rather a bunch of people who have successfully managed the country for many years in the past, than the Labor party (Read: bunch of idiots) who are known for excessive spending
every single term of their leadership.
So no, I won't be voting Julia Gillard, because she represents Labor. I'd much rather a treasurer who can do the job (read: not Wayne Swann), and a party that can actually manage the country.
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