The Poor You Will Have with You Always Tony Abbott's Liberals have won the 2013 federal election. What a shame for the country. Abbott ran on Labor's budget deficit and the large number of illegal entries by asylum-seekers by boat. The "budget emergency" was a furphy: the LNP's proposed budget needs only $0.6 billion to return the country to surplus in the same period of time Labor would have re-attempted. But Labor made too many promises over too many of each of the last three years that we'd be back in the black "next year". And large numbers of fools believed that deficits are inherently and always bad, even when we can see how Britain and other European countries are struggling with austerity economies, how the US struggles to keep on track (blaming Obama all the way, despite the Bush tax cuts and two endless wars he started). And fear of Muslims, a nice dog-whistle issue since the days of John Howard, make all refugees arriving by boat a deadly threat to the nation. We'll all be wearing burkas next! Labor's lurch to the right on that issue also had large numbers swinging against them. Without being a viable third party in their own right, Greens preferences helped staunch the damage, but xenophobic mainstay Pauline Hanson got into the Senate. We can only hope that she will challenge Tony Abbott's agenda just on principle, if she actually has any, for his attempt to have her imprisoned back when she was first standing for a federal seat. But too much of her agenda coincides with his to be truly hopeful on that point. Bye-bye carbon tax/emissions-trading scheme and hello warmer planet. I may have a coastal property sooner than I'd like, as in at all, under the circumstances, but I can't say I won't be paying for it, as Tony's plans for the country mean people like me will carry the weight for the wealthy. The acceptance speech Abbott gave started out ungraciously and ended up with a promise that Australia is "open for business". That is not a promise I am anxious to see how it plays out. I can't believe the country voted for this guy.