Australians hate their Carbon Tax big time...

[TheHumanAlphabet]

The Liberals (who are conservative in Oz) win big, one promise was to kill the carbon tax. So, Labor lost two PMs over it...

[KantoSooner]

Keep in mind that Aussie is essentially two countries: one is rural and conservative and tied to the land. It occupies most of the land, but is weak in numbers/strong in a few super rich mining/ranching/fishing magnates. The cities are where the votes are and they tend to lean Labor as do cities here.
The previous liberal gov there lost power for two reasons: John Howard's close association with 'W' and their percieved loss of focus on domestic issues in favor of playing in the international arena.
Labor has lost power this time on the basis of poor governance (they took a nice budget surplus and turned it negative), some intrusive statism (among which, but not prominent was the carbon tax) and a turn toward international focus at the cost of domestic affairs.
A friend of mine there characterized the Abbott victory as 'more of the same, just with a slight conservative vs. slight labor tinge to it'. He's expecting no great changes in policy.

[TheHumanAlphabet]

From what I have read here in Jakarta, Abbott's first priority is to turn back the boats of refugees...Big stuff here as the refugees typically go to East Timor or to other Indonesian islands, some to Papua and PNG.

Then he will focus on the carbon tax. It will be repealed, but as you say, more becuase of the down turn in the economy and the bust in the mining business. They will also look to repeal an "excessive profits" tax on the mining industry. It is great how the Leftist love to tax the business of plenty, then it busts and they wonder why???

Lesson for the Leftist in the US, no windfall profits tax, no taxing an industry punitively unless you want it to go away. Make the tax laws fair and stable...that is what business and people want...

Oh, Kanto, I don't think for a moment this is a big switch. A conservative in OZ could be considered a strong liberal in the US.

[KantoSooner]

There are conservatives there, but very few social conservatives. They take seriously the separation of church and state and the prevention of legislating morality.
It's a model that we could emulate to our benefit.

[okie52]

Laws are often a legislation of morality...whether religion is involved in the matter or not.

[KantoSooner]

All I'm saying is that the Aussies seem to have a stricter societal bias towards staying out of each other's private lives. Not trying to provoke an argument.
I would strongly suggest "The Fatal Shore" for an excellent history of white settlement in Australia. It's loooooong (like 600 pages or something) and spends, in my opinion, way too much time describing flogging, but it outlines the fundamental differences between Australia and the US; two countries that are near clones of each other but still manage to differ significantly in outlook.

Among those differences are, in the author's opinion, a far stronger commitment to personal liberty on the Aussie side and lack of the faith of most Americans in the messianic mission of the nation and its government.

[TAFBSooner]

All I'm saying is that the Aussies seem to have a stricter societal bias towards staying out of each other's private lives. Not trying to provoke an argument.
I would strongly suggest "The Fatal Shore" for an excellent history of white settlement in Australia. It's loooooong (like 600 pages or something) and spends, in my opinion, way too much time describing flogging, but it outlines the fundamental differences between Australia and the US; two countries that are near clones of each other but still manage to differ significantly in outlook.

Among those differences are, in the author's opinion, a far stronger commitment to personal liberty on the Aussie side and lack of the faith of most Americans in the messianic mission of the nation and its government.

We got the Puritans, they got the prisoners.

The sinners are much more fun . . .

[KantoSooner]

That's part of the writer's thesis. Their original immigrants also were there involuntarily and had been, really, the downtrodden trash of the UK. Ours were, at least in the main (Georgia was the penal colony whose closure made Britain shift convicts to Australia), aspirational. America was a better life rather than a life sentence.
And, whereas we had the greatest and only successful modern revolution, Australia was still in part a penal colony into the late 1890's.
Combine that with the fact that Australia had a massive wave of Greek (Sydney is the world's second largest Greek city after Athens) and Italian (a lot of WWII pow's elected to stay) and Lebanese immigrants in the past 60 years and the expectations of Australian's of their government are quite a bit different from ours.
Theirs is, in the main, a much smaller, quieter and less active government.