My definition of maturity is the ability to be resolute in doing something challenging now which will improve our lives in the future.

Unfortunately for future Australians, Abbott’s Liberal-National government is completely lacking in this maturity. In opposition, Abbott’s team spent six years bashing Labor for taking on challenges, to improve our future.

In government, they have advocated a ‘me, me, me, now, now, now’ approach to their policy agenda, appealing to the electorate’s most selfish, short-sighted, immature instincts.

Abbott is no doubt pleased today to find that this approach has got him into power. Becoming PM was all he ever wanted. But what about the future? Whether he likes it or not, while he stands still and looks back, time rolls on towards the future.

The problem for Abbott is he’s only ever thought as far as the election. As far as the moment where he could display his daughters dressed in white and declare himself Prime Minister. But what next? Next, I’m interested to see how Australia’s future will judge the Abbott government. A future he apparently gave no thought to.

An immature government that only thinks of itself and seems incapable of worrying about anything that might happen more than a week in advance is a very dangerous government.

Josh Bornstein suggested in the Guardian this week that Abbott won the support of the electorate by scaring them into believing Australia was facing many crises.

But these crises were concocted. I think he makes a good point. Unfortunately, the Labor Government failed not only to play down Abbott’s boy-who-cried-wolf-claims but even backed some of them up by going along with the idea that there was a cost of living crisis (when there wasn’t).

On top of this, Labor failed to back up its own economic credentials in delivering an economic success story, not a crisis. And Labor also failed to persuade the easily frightened electorate of the long-term benefits of the Carbon Price, while Abbott successfully persuaded them of the short-term costs (which didn’t eventuate).

Of course, it wasn’t exactly easy for Labor to get their positive message across, given the barrage of publicity, Abbott was gifted from every news outlet in the country, including the ABC, while so-called-journalists offered zero scrutiny, of Abbott’s messages of doom. The media loves a crisis, whether the crisis exists or not.

The ridiculous and tragic part of this tale of ‘crisis’ propagated by Abbott is that there is a real crisis looming. Climate change. Yet Abbott convinced people who were all too willing to be deceived, that climate change is just a big over-reaction by alarmists, and that the Carbon Price hit on their electricity bills was the only thing they had to fear.

But what now? The future is still coming, and climate change isn’t going away. Abbott is still promising to replace Labor’s Carbon Price with the unpopular Direct Action policy – the world’s most expensive government tree planting exercise, which no expert has been able to prove will have any discernable impact of Australia’s carbon emissions.

Labor’s Carbon Price is reducing emissions, and Abbott is scrapping it, without even explaining first how, logistically, his government will plant 20 million trees with a 15,000 strong ‘Green Army’.

This lack of foresight into the future is going to become a huge political mess for Abbott. And covering it all up isn’t going to help either. Not when the Climate Commission is now an independently funded Climate Council, which is dedicated to keeping reports like the latest climate predictions from the IPCC front and centre in the community’s mind.

Abbott might like to think his buddies in the media will cover up climate change for him, but what happens when more and more engaged Australians flood to social media, independent Australian media and international press to find out the truth for themselves?

What happens when even the doubters and deniers start to notice temperature records being broken on a monthly basis? When the predicted sea rises start to affect beachside property in Sydney, and not just small islands which are currently out of sight and out of mind? Abbott can’t hide from the future forever.

It’s actually difficult to find a policy area where Abbott and his colleagues have given any thought to the future. But what happens when they have to come face to face with this future? A future just around the corner?

In 1943, Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM, said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”. ‘

This is the sort of future thinking that Malcolm Turnbull deployed when he said: “25 megabits per second will enable anybody in residential situations to do everything they want to do or need to do in terms of applications and services”.

He should have added another word to that sentence. Today. But what about tomorrow Turnbull? Wouldn’t the best idea be to future-proof Australia’s broadband network, so that it doesn’t rely on old rotting copper infrastructure?

Shouldn’t you look to the future and expect megabit needs to increase exponentially as technology improves? Or is the future not of your concern?

This week Pyne floated the suggestion that he will again cap university places, and he would also like to see the removal of the student amenities fee. (Abbott has backed quickly away, although it’s clear the policy change is still on the table).

Characteristically, Pyne explained his concerns were that Labor’s demand-driven tertiary education sector (in other words, a huge increase in the number of Australians with a tertiary education, many first in their family to gain a degree) was going to have a negative influence on the ‘quality’ of Australia’s tertiary education sector.

Apart from the fact that Pyne is breaking a pre-election promise to not re-introduce caps, it’s clear his perception of a ‘quality’ education is a ‘scarce’ education.

Like a Porsche owner bemoaning the number of other Porsches, he sees on the road, as evidence of the lack of ‘status’ accorded to him by spending a small fortune on a car.

Pyne doesn’t want just ‘anybody’ to have a tertiary education. Especially not those who are first in their family. No, only the privileged few should have access to a quality education, presumably to maintain their privilege and to squash social mobility and aspiration.

But this sort of thinking reveals the lack of foresight Pyne has about the benefits to Australia of lifting the number of the population with tertiary degrees.

Pyne needs to understand that the point of a university degree is not to add a qualification to your resume, to frame a piece of paper on your wall, a piece of paper lots of other people don’t have.

The point of educating more Australians is to have more educated Australians. To have a highly skilled population. To improve productivity. To increase innovation. To better Australia’s competitive advantage against other developed economies with ever increasing numbers of educated adults. But this is a future goal, something Pyne obviously cares little about.

And what about Abbott and Bishop claiming for years that they can turn around asylum seeker boats and send them back to Indonesia? Did they consider what they might do in the eventuality where the Indonesian government won’t have a bar of this reckless plan? Or did they just think they’d worry about that later? Later is here.

Or look at Abbott’s cutting of Australian Research Council funding, which will stifle Australia’s future scientific advancements and strangle the economic benefits of a high-tech economy.

How about Abbott’s preferences for road infrastructure, over funding for renewable energy technologies to eventually replace polluting vehicles. It’s all about now and what Abbott thinks he needs to do now, to win power now.

Abbott cares only about himself. He doesn’t even seem to care about his daughters’ futures. It’s fairly clear even the election in 2016 is way too far away to have any effect on Abbott’s current behaviour.

This is good news for those hoping for a #OneTermTony. The future is not going to look kindly on Abbott’s government. Abbott should have thought about this. But thankfully, he and his team don’t have the maturity, nor the intelligence, to notice.

Dear Greg Hunt,

It’s funny how sometimes we get to see the worst of people and the best of people all in the same day. The best of people is not you, in case you are wondering. Tim Flannery and his new Climate Council colleagues are the best of people. They could have sulked when you fired them last week, from the most important jobs in Australia. But they didn’t. They’re too busy working for free, setting up the Climate Council. They have no time for sulking.

I want to make it clear, the founding members of the Climate Council are not working on something they ‘believe in’, like someone who works for a church because they believe in God. They are working on the important cause of educating our community about the devastating effects of climate change, which we are already experiencing, and which are going to get worse as people like you make it your life’s work to reduce action which could save millions of lives. I don’t know how many temperature records you need to see broken to take this situation seriously.

Although I suspect we already know all we need to know about your strength of character in this situation. Having titled your university honours thesis ‘A Tax to Make the Polluter Pay’, it does seem a bit odd that you are now Abbott’s chief ‘kill the carbon tax’ environmental vandal. I mean, minister. I guess power is more important to you than doing the right thing for the community. Even if that means completely changing your view of the world on a subject you won an award for researching. Perhaps you don’t think carbon emissions are pollution? If this is the case, I guess the one blessing is that you’re not Abbott’s science minister. Oh, that’s right, your government has no science minister. Funny that.

So since people like Tim Flannery are the best of people, you are quite obviously a perfect example of the very worst of people. In response to the news that Flannery and his colleagues are courageously keeping the catastrophic effects of climate change in the public eye by working pro-bono to set up the community funded Climate Council, you said this news vindicated your decision to scrap the taxpayer funded Climate Commission, with this explanation:

“That’s how democracy should work,” … “If people want to invest in those with a particular view, they have a right and a freedom to do that, and our job is to make sure that we deal with the core scientific agencies, that we protect the taxpayers’ funds. The fact that this can be done at the private level shows that taxpayers’ funds were not required from the outset.”

Wow. I was lost for words for a moment. It is 2013 and Australia’s environment minister is calling a group of world-renowned climate scientists ‘those with a particular view’. That’s like saying all those people who think the sky is blue shouldn’t be supported in this particular view as this is a belief, not a fact. Do you want to make your climate change denial any more obvious? What a complete and utter disgrace!

I was similarly lost for words when I read ‘protect the taxpayers’ funds’. How about you worry less about money, just for a moment, and start to worry about the environment where this money is being earned and spent? It’s called earth and it’s where we all live and where we all keep our stuff which we buy with money. How will your government coffers look after climate catastrophe strikes? Or are you hoping not to be environment minister by then? How about worrying about the protection of our communities (ie the people in them) rather than the protection of taxpayer funds? Thanks for letting us know where your priorities lie. Very helpful.

So I guess since you think it’s great news that Australians who are scared about climate change are democratically reaching into our pockets to fund the Climate Council, this should now set new precedents for ‘user pays’. We all know your government loves nothing more than the concept of ‘user pays’. Maybe every road and footpath should have a toll at the end of it, so only those drivers and pedestrians using that particular strip should be the ones who pay for it? How about sewerage – should we drop a dollar in a pot every time we flush? Maybe parents should pay for their children to go to school and if they can’t afford the fees, their child shouldn’t be educated? How about medical bills – only those who can afford to have a heart operation should be in a position to save their own lives? Your version of our society sounds pretty depressing actually.

But what’s extra depressing is that you’re happy for a small number of passionate, community-minded people to fund an organisation which is trying to protect all Australians from the effects of climate change. Why the f*ck, should only those with a conscience be responsible for the fate of our entire community? I think you’ll find we’re all ‘users’ of this planet and we’re all going to ‘pay’ when it comes to the destruction caused by climate change.

The selfish people like you and Tony Abbott and all those voters who think it’s a great idea to stop action to reduce the effects of climate change would never put your hand in your pocket to help. Those who are small minded and hell-bent on denial at all costs, who have different ‘beliefs’ from good people like Tim Flannery, are going to be affected by climate change too, just as much as those funding the Climate Council.

But you’re happy to leave this financial burden to good people, while your government wastes millions buying Indonesian fishing boats and paying millionaires $75,000 to have a baby. While your government builds more infrastructure for cars but cuts funding for scientific research into renewable energies.

That makes you the worst kind of person, Greg Hunt. Petty, short-sighted and frankly just not very bright. How someone like you can be put in charge of Australia’s environmental protection is beyond me. You should try to spend some time with Tim Flannery. You would be a better person ten-fold just by breathing the same air as him.

Yours Sincerely
Victoria Rollison

Dear Rupert Murdoch,

I am writing with good news. Not good news for you. Let me explain.

You are probably in a pretty good mood right now, understandably. Your puppet is running my country. Not your country. My country. You chose to give away your citizenship of Australia, presumably because you can make more money as an American. So now you are precluded from voting in Australian elections, which is by the by because you are, I’m depressed to say, having the pulling-out-a-plug-in-a-bath sort of influence regardless. Compared to my citizen’s vote, being equal to pissing in the ocean.

However, I’ve moved on from the anger I felt about this situation in the lead up to the election, when you used your Australian newspapers to not just campaign for an Abbott government win, but to bully and downright corrupt your way into power. You got what you wanted and now we (Australians, not you) have to live with the consequences. I studied marketing at university (and graduated, did you graduate from Oxford Rupert?), so I understand why you were so anxious, in a business sense, to ensure a whole new market for television viewers didn’t suddenly open up via the internet via a world-class National Broadband Network. A business owner should do whatever he or she can to protect their market share, whether selling fruit or Foxtel subscriptions. I can see why it’s in your personal best interests to kill such progressive infrastructure reform in Australia in a dollar and cents way. This, of course, doesn’t make your behaviour in campaigning against the Labor government to rid your company of the NBN any less evil. What you’ve done is akin to a fruit grower sneaking into his neighbour’s yard in the night and burning down his apple orchard, because his own orchards aren’t bearing profitable fruit. So yeah, your ethics leave a lot to be desired. But what would we expect from a person whose newspapers profited from the hacking of a dead child’s phone? Business ethics? What a f*cking joke.

I guess with this free run you’ve given your puppet candidate, it’s understandable that the puppet is feeling a tad cocky. This cockiness seems to be of great pleasure to you. Amazingly you even managed this week, amongst your excitement, to deliver a tweet without a spelling or grammatical error. Good work Rupert.

So you’re pleased with the level of obedience you are seeing. You love that Australia has just become the first nation in the world to turn off a climate change alleviation policy when other countries are fighting similarly evil, rich old men like you to implement their first action against climate change. You’ll be dead before we truly know how f*cked we are by your evil acts. I guess the safety of your young children and grandchildren is of no consequence to you. Not when there’s money to be made in your lifetime.

But the thing is Rupert, your joy at your puppet’s quick and decisive action to show us just how conservative, backward, unthinking, anti-intellectual, misogynist, circa 1950 and just plain old f*ckwit Australia’s new government is going to be, may have some unintended consequences for you and your puppet and your puppet’s government.

I know you might not have noticed the outrage your puppet has caused in the very first three days of being in power, a power you have longed for and your puppet has longed for your entire lives. I guess it’s understandable that you don’t hear the masses when you only follow 47 people on Twitter and I can see you choose those Tweeps very carefully. A quick scan of the accounts you follow reveals The Australian, Boris Johnson, Pope Francis and the puppet himself. Excuse me if I pass on attending your next Tweet Up. But I’m fairly well connected with Australian Tweeters and this is where I get to the point where you will understand why my letter is a joyous one. You see, Australia’s progressive Twitter population might be a very small population, but we’re representative of a larger whole and we’re wholly outraged by your behaviour in unethically delivering your puppet power. And equally as outraged by the way that this puppet is also using this power. So what? I’m getting there.

Surely you’re smart enough to advise your puppet that it’s not exactly bright to prove how ready-for-power and not-sexist he is by naming himself as the Minister for Women’s Policies and Programs in a cabinet of only one very questionable woman. Leaving aged care, disability and science from Cabinet Ministries. Scrapping the Climate Commission. Meanly, removing the popular Steve Bracks from a diplomatic post. Petty sackings of bureaucrats. Promoting a work for the dole policy for indigenous Australians (hello race discrimination) and a reduction in indigenous legal aid. Managing to piss off our largest and most populace neighbour, Indonesia, just to name the highlights.

Going this hard, this early is only going to have one outcome, and this is not a good outcome for you and your puppet. I know all the actions I have listed above would count as achievements to people like you. But not everyone feels this way. In fact, through these actions, your puppet has done something Labor was unable to do over the last six years, and it’s something that is going to hurt your puppet’s government deeply at the next election. I even think it will make my hash-tag prophecy come true. #OneTermTony. It’s pretty simple Rupert. Something has shifted. You and your puppet have unified and mobilised progressives. We got sidetracked over the last six years as our progressive Labor government delivered reform after juicy policy reform. Our eyes came off the ‘fighting Tories’ ball as Labor MPs infighting and Labor vs Greens infighting removed effort from the primary goal of ensuring baddies like you don’t win government. But we’ve learnt our lesson now. In only three days, we’ve collectively learnt our lesson. Thanks to you and your puppet, we’ll never err again. You’ve sparked a revolution and for that, I am very thankful. Not grateful, because you haven’t done it purposely. But thankful. Well done Rupert. Australia will, eventually, thank you. Because after progressives unite to rid this great country of your puppet, we will never forget the part you played.

Yours sincerely
Victoria Rollison

What exactly does an Abbott government stand for? After reading Julia Gillard’s insightful and useful appraisal of what’s come before and what might come after for the Labor Party, I was reminded again, but this time more severely, exactly what Abbott’s government stands for. If you believe Paula Matthewson if an Abbott government can deliver on the low expectations of the public by promising to do little and actually doing less, this makes Abbott a great Prime Minister.

But I disagree. And it saddens me that anyone would think this way.

When you look at the very core of the differences between the Labor Party and the Liberal Party, it does make perfect sense that someone like Matthewson would be happy to see a government do nothing. This is why it frustrates me so much when I hear people saying Labor and Liberal are just the same. I know the mainstream media isn’t interested in, or capable of framing the political struggle between the Labor Party and the Liberal Party in a narrative which actually explains the fundamental ideology of the parties’ policy platforms.

Obviously, there will always be the odd policy from both sides which confuses this overarching difference. But this doesn’t mean the difference isn’t still blatantly obvious and it doesn’t mean the difference isn’t still incredibly important.

The difference is this – the Labor Party believes it is the role of the government to improve the management and support of the community through progressive policy reform. Progress. Equity. Fairness. Sustainability. In Gillard’s words: “a party of purpose”.

The Liberal Party believes that the government already intervenes too much in our capitalist economy and that the community is managed and supported by the economy, not the government. Profit. Greed. User-Pays. Privilege. A Liberal Party supporter, when true to their values, believes government ‘regulation’ is not there to serve the community’s interests; it’s there to hinder the freedom of the economy.

When a voter understands these core differences and holds an opinion on these opposing values, the values should, in a sensible world, strongly influence which party they vote for.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a sensible world and these differences are muddied by the inept and corrupt reporting of politics by our mainstream media. Because of this, I think most uninformed voters don’t understand these differences at all. And I don’t think either the Labor Party or the Liberal Party have successfully communicated these values to the electorate over the last decade – though for different reasons.

As Gillard points out, the Labor Party has failed to remind voters that the government policies they rely on for the success of their communities exist because of the Labor Party. Policies like Medicare, a strong public health system, a high-quality public education system, a workplace relations platform which gives workers safe, fair and stable employment, disability support, nation-building infrastructure, environmental protection and a strong, regulated and growing economy are all there because of the successful work of Labor governments. Labor government policies are what make our communities, and our country, such a fantastic place to live. Labor’s communication failures are caused by nothing more than mismanagement of the party and leadership failure. A bad sales pitch spoiling a great product.

The Liberal Party, on the other hand, have failed to sell their ideological position to the voting public for a completely different reason. They know, deep down, they would never win power if they told voters what the Liberal Party really wanted Australia to look like. So in their case, they offer a good, or perhaps expertly misleading sales pitch, for an awful product. Middle Australia don’t want the gap between rich and poor to widen substantially. But the Liberal Party has no qualms about this outcome. Middle Australia was, judging by their response to Work Choices, wholly alarmed at the prospect of the Liberal’s industrial relations agenda.

Middle Australia do expect government services and assets to be publicly owned, and not part of the capitalist private sector, available to only those who can afford to pay. Middle Australia, I think, do care about equity and balance in our economy – they don’t want all the wealth and the privilege that comes with this wealth, to be distributed only to the upper-echelons of our communities. So this is why the Liberals have become experts at convincing western Sydney residents that they have their best interests at heart when really this couldn’t be further from the truth. Abbott’s front bench didn’t come up with Work Choices, and campaign on Gina Rinehart’s side of the Mining Tax debate, because it sounded like a good idea at the time. This is what these people stand for. Not just Abbott, but every Liberal MP.

It has always been very clear that the Liberal Party is very concerned with the economy. They pride themselves on being superior economic managers and this message runs through much of their rhetoric about what is wrong with Labor governments. In the last six years, while in Opposition, the Liberal Party has had to rely on the delusion that the Global Financial Crisis did not happen, in Australia anyway, to convince themselves and their supporters that it was the Labor government’s fault that the economy has been weaker than it was under the previous Howard government. But this delusion is about to come very unstuck. Because now the Liberal Party has to deliver the strong economy and the budget surplus they have been promising for the last six years in an economy which already has strong economic credentials in the form of low-interest rates, low unemployment, low debt, low inflation and moderate, but impressive growth when compared with every other developed economy on earth.

We already know, from the very last minute costings released by Abbott’s team in the dying days of the election campaign, that the promised surplus isn’t coming. Even with a heartless, short-sighted and gutless cut of $4.5 billion in Foreign Aid spending, the Liberal government’s budget will be in a very similar place to the previous Labor government’s deficit – as Gillard kindly pointed out – with a difference of only 0.4%. Funny how the mainstream media haven’t made much of this news. When you consider on top of this, that we know from independent Treasury figures that company tax revenue is falling at unprecedented levels, the Abbott government is going to find it extraordinarily hard to differentiate its economic credentials from the previous Labor government, without drastically cutting spending. Austerity, here we come. This might seem fine to Liberals – after all cutting government spending on services for the community, as I’ve outlined, is what they’re all about. Cutting the budget spend is often just code for their ultimate goal of smaller government.

But here’s the problem.

The Liberals know that those who vote for them are very happy to support the notion that most government spending is waste. And these voters are happy to support an Abbott campaign which promises to cut, slash and burn government services. Until such a time that their lives are personally affected by these cuts. When their child’s class at school suddenly has 30 students per teacher, instead of 20. When they have to wait 12 hours in the emergency room at their local hospital because there are no nurses or doctors available to see them. I always think of Liberal voters as those who decry paying for insurance, until the day their uninsured house burns down. How will Abbott organise his austerity regime so it only affects Labor voters? I don’t think this is possible. Anyone who’s seen the state of David Cameron’s austerity economy in the UK lately? Has Abbott caught up on the news that the pro-austerity spreadsheet contained a fatal mistake?

So what does Abbott stand for? He stands for ‘no’. He stands for ‘backwards’. He stands for ‘repeal’. He stands for undoing Labor’s progressive policies, which he has successfully misrepresented as failures. The Carbon Price. A National Broadband Network for all Australians. A Mining Tax that shares the wealth of our nation’s resources with everyone, not just the rich. He’ll keep Labor’s policies that he knows the voters won’t let him touch in the short-term, such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Gonski School Funding plan. However, as Gillard says, it’s important for Labor to remind voters, and to remind them again when they don’t listen, that these reforms were Labor’s doing.

While Abbott might get a short-term glow from killing Labor’s progressive policies which he has painted as waste, and keeping Labor’s policies that he’s too scared to touch, at the end of the day, what does he really stand for? And what comes next after his wrecking ball hangs idly? It’s wrong for people to say Abbott stands for nothing. It’s blindly obvious what he and his Liberal colleagues stand for, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. The next three years are Labor’s opportunity to remind voters exactly what they voted for in an Abbott government, and what will happen to their communities because of this. I say bring it on.

Dear Bob Day,

I would like it known from the outset that this is not a letter of congratulation. I will not be showing any joy at the news that you have been elected to the Australian Senate.

The reason for my letter is to point out to you that those who voted for the two-word-slogan ‘Family First’ might be a little alarmed at finding out what you really stand for.

Do they even remember that when you stood for the Liberals in 2007, you turned the marginal seat of Makin into the safest Labor seat in the country with a swing against you of 8.63%?

It does trouble me that many Australian voters are so uninformed that literally the sum total of campaign research carried out by them was to read the two words ‘Family First’ and to think ‘that sounds good’.

And this is why I think it’s important that you be made accountable for your values, even if it’s subsequent to the public’s opportunity to choose whether you are a suitable representative for the interests of Australians.

On your website, your slogan is ‘Strong Families. Strong Values. Strong Australia’. I notice ‘families’ is mentioned all over your website and in your policies. However I was wondering if you could clarify for us exactly who counts as a ‘family’?

I have a husband and three cats. Are we a family? Before I had a husband, and after I left my parent’s home, was I family then?

What about if I happened to never have children? Or if I was in a homosexual relationship living with my partner? Or if I was an old-aged widow living on my own with no children? Or if I was single at the age of 32, still looking for the right man? Or if I was single at the age of 32 and contentedly not interested in living with anyone? Are any of these living arrangements something you would call a ‘family’?

Are families just a collection of individual Australians living together or apart? Or, do your ‘strong values’ dictate that a family is a married man living with his wife, with children at home? I suspect only the latter are the Australians you are hoping to represent in the Senate. Am I right?

Keeping in mind that your policies are defined for your special, un-inclusive brand of ‘family’, I would like to scrutinize how exactly it is you think your Family First policies are going to benefit ‘families’. And by my definition of families being any individual with friends, relatives or animals in their life, also how your policies will affect all Australians. Each and every one of us.

It didn’t take me long to research your policies on the Family First website. They are what I would charitably call ‘concise’. Let’s scrutinize two of these concise policies:

Climate change. You don’t believe in it. Apparently, you think you’re smarter than 98% of the world’s climate scientists. I’m sure you’ve been told you’re wrong on this issue before, and you’ve ignored this advice.

But have you been told that your wilful denial is going to be remembered for generations to come as the very attitude which contributed to a planet too hazardous for future generations to live on?

Have you been told you’re a dangerous extremist before? You have now. I’m fairly sure a warming world is going to have just as detrimental an effect on families as it is on everyone else.

Especially since your definition of a family seems to include heterosexual couples who have procreated and who are therefore bringing up the very people who will be most adversely affected by the catastrophic effects of climate change. Pity.

How many people who voted for you knew they were voting for a climate change denier who will obstruct action to reduce the damage? How many of them knew they were voting for the destruction of their children’s future?

Employment. It was when I was reading this policy Bob, that I recalled that you are a former board member of the HR Nicholls Society.

I wonder if we polled the people who voted for you, how many of them would know that a) you have been a long-time supporter of this right-wing think-tank and b) what exactly it means to be right-wing and c) what the HR Nicholls Society stands for.

When I read your Family First employment policy, it actually sounds exactly like the HR Nicholls Society’s introduction on their website. Funny coincidence don’t you think? Just to refresh your memory, the HR Nicholls Society stands for this:

“The HR Nicholls Society believes that in a modern society there is no intrinsic imbalance in bargaining power between employers and employees and the regulation of workplace relations should be minimal. That is in the interests of both sides and in maximising economic growth for the economic and social benefit of the nation.”

The content that struck me as similar in meaning in your employment policy is this:

“Family First believes it is time to acknowledge the inevitable and create, enshrine and protect in legislation employees and employers right to have the freedom to determine what is in their common interest.”

The thing that upsets me most Bob, is that you’re not even trying to deny that you would have been just as opposed to Work Choices as the union movement was, but for the reason that it didn’t strip workplace protection enough, not because it threatened collective bargaining.

You would no doubt destroy the union movement if you could. You would no doubt put every employee on an individual contract, and you would no doubt fight to remove the minimum wage if you were given the chance.

I wish people who voted for you understood this. I wish they understood that when you say you are supporting families by stripping away the regulation that you say makes it hard for them to get a job, what you’re really saying is that the employer should be able to do whatever they want to the employee, including firing them at will for no reason, and that the employee should have no rights to defend themselves.

For you to say you are ‘Family First’ with this attitude is insulting. The stability and prosperity of families rely on the adult’s ability to find and keep stable employment, and for that adult to have negotiating power in a situation where he or she does not have an equal relationship with their boss.

Your buddies at the HR Nicholls Society are not only looking to increase the power of the boss over the employee, who might just so happen to be a mother or a father or a son or a daughter. They would also happily destroy every right that workers in this country have fought for.

I note your employment policy also includes this paragraph:

“The traditional employee – employer relationship, has become so regulated that we have, in the words of Richard Epstein “……created a legal edifice of stunning complexity. Protective laws abound on every conceivable aspect of the subject: health, safety, wages, superannuation, unionization, hiring, promotion, dismissal, annual leave, long service leave, retirement, discrimination, access and disability. The volumes of regulation, rulings, and cases on each of these bodies of law would take a treatise to summarize fully.””

These protective laws would no doubt all be at risk if you were given enough power. Health and safety laws. Wages (which you would like taxed at a flat rate of 20%, the same rate as the boss pays). Superannuation. Unionisation. Hiring. Promotion. Dismissal. Annual Leave. Long Service Leave. Retirement. Discrimination. Access and Disability.

I would have thought these are all the protective laws your ‘families’ rely on for their security of employment. The security of their employment is their security in putting food on the table for their ‘family’.

Of course, you’ll never admit that the simple truth is that you couldn’t be less interested in families and their welfare.

The HR Nicholls Society agenda is to smash the protective power of governments so that there is nothing publicly funded except a Defence and Police Force. And a user-pays capitalist system of education and health only for those who can afford it.

Maybe you should change your party’s name now that you are their poster boy. Just to be a little bit more transparent for those voters who can’t be bothered finding out what you stand for. Maybe you should change your name to the ‘Family First as long as you’re rich and not a worker and don’t care if your planet fries to a crisp Party’.

Yours sincerely

Victoria Rollison
(someone who clearly did not vote for you)

I was thinking the other day about my generation, or the people I come into contact with from my generation, and how little they care about politics.

This isn’t surprising. Not everyone can be interested in every minute detail of the political process like I am.

But what concerns me is not just how little they care, but how little they actually understand what elections like this one are all about.

I was born in 1981 and it’s fair to say, living in Australia between then and now has been pretty bloody easy. Sure, house prices have been high, but this is probably the most stressful thing for most people of my generation. And if this is as bad as it gets, it’s no wonder there is so much mass apathy towards politics. And even more worryingly to me, is the mass apathy towards the Labor Party and what it stands for.

I’m starting to think Labor is being squished between two very different types of voters in my generation – those who’ve had it too good for too long and therefore expect progressive policy as if it’s a birthright, but don’t want to work hard to get it. And those who think they are better off if their bosses are better off – all hail the boss. Let me explain.

I’ll start with the progressive voters who don’t support Labor. You can guess where they flock. And yes, as I’ve had to debate seemingly hundreds of times on Twitter, I do understand preferential voting. But there is a very large difference between quietly giving Labor your number two (or second to last) preference in a polling booth, and campaigning for Labor in your community.

I count campaigning as everything from joining the party, to the odd ‘like’ on your Facebook page, to a conversation with a work colleague about which political party you support and why.

I’ve written before how easy my life would be if I were a Green. Time and time again I meet perfectly reasonable and passionately progressive people, who take great joy out of bagging Labor and praising everything the Greens say. (I said ‘say’, not ‘do’ for a reason).

But here’s what I don’t understand about these people. How can they say they are all for progressive policies when they spend their entire lives attacking the only major party which is going to deliver anything close to the progressive policies they seek?

I understand that many Greens voters are concerned about the plight of asylum seekers, and are outraged by Labor’s policy. But how secure in their lives must these people feel, how perfectly catered for in all other areas of progressive policy must they be, to only care about one policy?

Do these people think their rights at work are safe forever and therefore not worth shoring up and defending? Has the union movement been the victim of its own success, breeding a misguided belief amongst my generation that rights can’t be taken away?

Do these people not care if the gap between rich and poor gets wider, and social mobility is crushed for future generations? Do they think health and education, and the government ownership of public assets important to the community are less important than asylum seeker policy? Do they think policies like the NDIS and the NBN being available to all, and action to reduce the effects of climate change will just happen without them lending a hand?

Do their ‘principles’ on one issue really make them totally blind to how detrimental their public bagging of the Labor Party is to their goal of having a progressive government? And if they really do care so much about asylum seeker policy, what do they think of the Liberals’ alternative?

Sometimes on Twitter, I get the most inane tweets from Greens supporters, which just make me want to cry. For example, one person tweeted to me that he couldn’t vote for a progressive party that doesn’t have a mining tax which is progressive enough.

Seriously. In other words, this person is saying they can’t support the progressive alternative because Labor hasn’t gone as far as he would like, so he’ll bag Labor, in effect supporting the conservative alternative that will get rid of the progressive mining tax altogether. This is ludicrous. Juvenile and ludicrous.

I understand that many Greens voters take great pride in despising both the major parties and the whole two-party system. It’s the ‘you can’t trust any of them’ mantra. But is my generation really so flippant about how easy life is, that they can’t see that politics is all about one alternative over the other? Progressive versus conservative?

It’s not about finding a soul mate, or some spiritual quest. Yes, the progressive major party might not be perfect. Just like people aren’t perfect. Progress takes time and a lot of effort, it never happens overnight. It takes compromise and pragmatism. This means the Labor party might not match up to your policy preferences 100% of the time. They might not be as progressive as you want them to be all the time. Two-party politics is messy, it is unglamorous and it does make progressive reform difficult.

Is my generation really so impatient and scared of hard work, that the progressive voters amongst us would prefer to bag the progressive major party, rather than get in there and help them to beat the conservatives? The worst part of this is, bagging the progressive alternative helps the conservatives.

Don’t you realise Tony Abbott is thrilled every time he hears Christine Milne complaining about Labor? Don’t you understand why you would never see the Nationals criticising the Liberals in an election campaign? If progressives can’t get behind Labor, why would a swing voter looking for something to believe in vote for them?

Every time you bag Labor, especially during an election campaign, you’re limiting the likelihood of Australia having a progressive government. You’re putting at risk all the progressive policies Labor has implemented in the last 6 years, and all those they plan to strengthen and implement in the future. So what exactly are you trying to achieve?

The only thing that can beat Abbott’s Liberals, who enjoy the backing of Murdoch, Rinehart and the rest of the big business community, is a united, strong, progressive alliance. I’ve been so disappointed during this election campaign that my generation are not interested in this fight.

Now let’s look at the conservative voters in my age group. To be blunt, I don’t know many and those who I do know most likely vote Liberal for one or both of two reasons – they think rich people vote Liberal and would like to consider themselves as belonging to this group, or they just vote how their parents do. Actually, some of them want a tax cut and to hell with the impact of reduced government services for their community.

But presumably, there must be a sense amongst Liberal and National voters that when the 1% is looked after, the 99% get some trickle-down benefit, no matter how stupid this idea is. Sure, there might be some entrepreneurial, business owning Liberal voters in my generation who strongly believe that a free market solves all problems, and any government intervention in a privately owned market is just bureaucracy getting in the way of profit.

And maybe some really do think a minimum wage is bad for the economy. But honestly, I don’t think most Liberal voters in my generation think hard enough about politics to come to any conclusion as deep as this.

Many are likely to think the economy is always better under the Liberals and choose to ignore the economic success of the Labor party in bringing the country through the GFC without a recession. In some ways, my generation is even more likely to rest on their laurels because of the reduced impact of the GFC, which ironically is even more likely to produce more Liberal voters – ‘see there wasn’t a crisis so why did Labor have to spend so much to save us from something that didn’t happen?’ To this, I say for f*ck’s sake!

My biggest frustration with conservative voters from my generation is this – they’ve been trained well, by vested interests in the media and by conservative politicians, to blame the government for everything that goes wrong in the economy, and to praise capitalism for everything that goes right.

In these people’s eyes, Wall Street greed wasn’t to blame for the share-market crash which caused the GFC, it was various governments and their failures to do something about it at fault. But then you use the word ‘regulation’ to try to explain that this is the only thing the government could have done about it, in advance, to stop the capitalists from eating themselves, and the response to even mentioning the word regulation is revulsion and sneers.

So when I have these Green progressives on my left, refusing to support Labor, and these un-thinking Liberals on my right, hating everything Labor stands for, it really does feel like I’m fighting a war on two fronts. Yes, I support Labor. No, it doesn’t mean I love Kevin Rudd – but I would be overjoyed if he wins this election. Yes, I support most Labor Party policies, but not all of them. Yes, I was devastated by what happened to Julia Gillard, and I’ll be upset about this for as long as I live. No, this doesn’t mean I’ll give up on the Labor Party.

Politics isn’t about personalities; it’s about policies – the people who come up with them and the people who successfully implement them. Those doing the heavy lifting on our behalf deserve our support. Maybe Labor voters like me are the most stubborn voters from my generation of all the ones I’ve described. I just want to live in the country Labor can give me and I’ll fight against anyone and anything that tries to get in the way. This is how I stand up for what I believe in.

By Victoria Rollison
@Vic_Rollison

There’s something missing from this election campaign. It’s not missing in my mind, but it seems to be missing from 95% of the political coverage of this election.

We finally have some policy discussion, and the Liberals are being forced to provide a few details for policies they’ve been talking about for years. We even have the ABC Vote Compass, to help people decide which party they should be voting for, based on their policy interest, which is a very welcome idea.

But still, there’s something missing. Something is missing from the policy discussions; something is missing from the detailed analysis of who spoke better in the debate, who had the best three-word slogans and who read off notes. Something is missing from the articles written by journalists following the leaders around the country, reporting on every gaffe, every hair flick and every baby kissed.

That something is a gigantic elephant in the room, which it would seem that our mainstream media doesn’t know how to, or doesn’t care to even think about reporting. This elephant is the core difference between the political parties’ philosophies and the very bedrock of their plans and their vision for Australia;

Tony Abbott’s Liberals care about the rich getting richer, and the Labor Party aims to reduce the gap between rich and poor.

This stark difference is very important. You can trace almost all policies of the major parties back to these fundamental ideas. Do voters understand this? Unfortunately, I don’t see that many of them do. The politically engaged do. But the general population doesn’t. And this is very concerning.

Take, for example, the Liberal’s recent announcement that they are going to cut the company tax rate. This tax cut is blatantly designed to benefit the rich. Companies making a big enough profit for this tax cut to make any meaningful difference are owned and run by the very rich, and their shareholders.

These are the people who will be pocketing the increase in profits that come from this tax cut. These are the people who will be moving this profit to tax havens or investing it in unproductive speculation on money markets.

The Liberals like to say they are cutting the company tax to grow jobs. But this is a blatant election bribe which isn’t even true. It doesn’t take much analysis to realise there is absolutely no reason, rationally, why a company would hire more people just because they are making more profit. They might hire more people if the demand for whatever it is they sell increases, but a company tax cut doesn’t increase consumer buying power, it only increases profit for people who are already rich.

This is typical Liberal-looking-after-our-rich-mates-and-selling-it-as-good-for-the-community policy. And the ridiculous part is, anyone with any sense can see that a reduction in government revenue must always be replaced by increased government revenue from elsewhere, or cuts in spending – in the Liberals case, more than likely this will come from cutting essential government services which all Australians rely on and possibly increasing taxes on consumers – both rich and poor and everyone in between.

Unfortunately, the Liberals are very experienced at convincing the electorate that they are looking after ordinary Australians when what they are actually doing is benefiting only the very rich.

Another perfect example of this is the Liberals’ popular opposition to the mining tax. I can’t for the life of me understand why so many voters think it’s a good idea to get rid of this Labor policy. The mining tax is designed to redistribute the wealth from the sale of natural resources which belong to all Australians. It’s a tax on super profits, ‘super’ being the important word.

While there is money to be made by digging dirt out of the ground, people will dig dirt out of the ground. Mining companies can’t take this business to South Africa because the dirt is here. And these companies won’t stop running their business here because they are earning gigantic profits here. By taxing the very top bracket of miners’ earnings, the Labor government is receiving tax revenue from the very wealthiest Australians.

This revenue is directly redistributed by increasing superannuation savings for all Australians, and by tripling the minimum amount the poorest Australians can earn without being taxed. So the poor take home more money and increase their consumer buying power in the process, and Gina takes home very slightly less, which leaves her ever so slightly less ridiculously, disgustingly, greedily wealthy, a wealth she has earned by selling Australian owned natural resources.

So explain to me again why people don’t want to keep the mining tax? The Liberals want to get rid of it for the very obvious-elephant-in-the-room reason that doing so helps their rich mates, and in many cases, their generous donors. And they claim they’re looking after ordinary Australians, when really ordinary Australians will continue to work in mines while people like Gina can make any profit at all, let alone super profits. Should we mention Gina’s industrial relations policy of scrapping the minimum wage? How much does she need to donate to the Liberal party to bring about this outcome?

These are just two policy examples which show you the straight line you can draw from Abbott’s vision for Australia (the rich get richer) and Labor’s vision (to increase equity and improve social mobility for all). How about Abbott’s Paid Parental Leave scheme where the rich get paid more to have a baby than the poor do. I guess rich babies are more expensive than poor ones? No? What about the Liberal broadband policy – which will provide broadband only to businesses (rich mates) and to households who can afford a huge bill to connect it to their homes (rich homeowners). Whereas Labor’s NBN was always designed to go to all Australian homes and businesses, in metro and rural areas (in an equitable way).

I could write for days about all the ways that Liberal policies benefit the rich, reduce the power of government to intervene in greedy capitalism and generally con the electorate into thinking everyday Australians are the beneficiaries. I could also write for days about all the ways Labor policies are socially equitable and designed to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Perhaps some people don’t think there’s a problem if a society has a huge gaping gulf between rich and poor. But maybe these people should take a look at America and see if that’s what they want Australia to look like.

Then there are the voters who only care about one or two policies (you can guess which ones) and don’t want to know about the two major parties at all. They’re ‘sick of the lot of them’. I wish these people would take a longer look at the outcomes of all policies the major parties are offering, and try to understand what a future Australia might look like under a Liberal government, and under a Labor government. Is that really so much to ask? Oh, but you don’t like Kevin? Say what you like about Kevin, but if he delivers me the Australia I want, he will be Saint Kevin. Yes, I care about social equity that much.

And ideally, a journalist somewhere, some time, might be able to make a connection between a policy and the vision the policy is trying to accomplish. Or does this sound like too much hard work?