What a disaster, this election, a total disaster. It is clear that it doesn't matter how bad a government is, you cannot displace them if you plan to take ANY benefits away from the people , no matter how fair that might be. It is absolutely clear to me that Labor brought AU through the GFC in an astoundingly effective manner. Labor suffered very high AUD (parity with USD) and low resources revenue; hence the difficulty in bringing the budget back to surplus, even though they weathered the GFC better than the rest of the world. LNP lucked in to a very low AUD and very high, much higher than expected, return on resources from mining; such resources that are limited and will run out. Hawke / Keating set up AU for prosperity, Howard almost destroyed it. Rudd/Swan got us through the GFC amazingly well, we were the envy of the world. Labor clearly is the better economic manager by a very large margin. Arrogance, lies and greed told the story of this election. You can probably add stupidity and lack of heart to that as well (how the hell did TheDud get back in????). Money bags Palmer and please explain didn't help either as their support for LNP is very clear. I, for sure, didn't agree with some of the things that Labor was going to do or to the full extent of their intentions; but overall, it would have been a significantly better government with a real positive outlook for the future; now we are stuck with this rotten mob that has been very destructive of our future and that of our children and grand children. If climate change really is as bad as some say, the future of this planet is really, really heading towards midnight under this rotten mob. Labor's franking credit changes is just one disaster that played out; they should have put a reasonable limit on this, not totally wipe it out. Capital gains was another serious problem, as it has been in the past; I believe that Paul Keating wanted to move on CGT and that helped him lose his last election. Negative gearing.... seriously, people must not understand just how much it distorts the market and plays in to the hands of the already super rich; again fair limits would have been better than the huge changes that were planned. Lies.... well, it didn't take much convincing of the public to believe the lies that Labor was all about tax and more tax. That was way, way overstated and the public just didn't understand this fact. To think that so much could be changed so dramatically was a huge error in arrogance by Labor. At least that is the proof of the results. Obviously not enough people really care about the environment either, when it /might/ just cost them a little money; instead it might cost us the planet. All those rotten laws pushed through the parliament in record time without proper scrutiny, they will cost us dearly for many years to come. 14 laws in about 45 minutes, I think it was, not anywhere near enough time to even read through them? And some very, very bad laws indeed. Of course Labor was expecting to be in power and be able to rectify the problems, so that was and will remain the biggest screw up of Labor as an ineffective opposition. The only positive about this election result is that Abbott, politically is no more, but he'll probably hang around like Howard has and continue to poison Labor. Although he did have a reasonably good exit speech, it was probably the best thing he has ever done as well in public life aside from activities well outside of politics, which are admirable (not his politics, that's for sure). None of the Labor positives seem to matter at all to the people, nor all the chaos, waste and mis-mangement of the federal government of the past 6 years, hence why we are going to have another 3 years of rubbish government at the very least. Howard won his first election by being a very, very small target and it turned out that his government was the most wasteful that we've seen in many years, if not forever -- squandering the benefits of the mining boom.