Malcolm Turnbull should ask Tony Abbott to win the election for him. Whatever your opinion of Abbott, when it came to campaigning, he was a machine. If Turnbull loses, he will be the biggest political joke (quite a feat when you consider the stiff competition) and would have made fools of all the sycophants who elevated him beyond his capability.
Alenka Arundel, Swan View, WA
Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen should learn about forecasting budget surpluses from Wayne Swan, and also the words of Mark Twain who said: “Never forecast anything, especially the future.”
Malcolm McMurray, St Ives, NSW
Malcolm Turnbull has failed to learn a critical lesson from Labor — the one about treating the office of the prime minister as some sort of prize in a game of revolving treachery. It always ends in tears.
Mandy Macmillan, Singleton, NSW
I trust that ABC executives have plans in place for counselling staff in the event of the Coalition being returned and Donald Trump being elected US president.
Ian Gibson, Greenwith, SA
Classical Marxism and its 19th-century texts is a theory taught in political economy courses around the world. In today’s power games, Das Kapital has the role of the Koran, selectively quoted where it suits.
The past practice of power politics in the Soviet bloc that posed as Marxism closely resembled jihad-striving by a variety of means to impose obedience, starting with brainwashing and indoctrination. In the 1950s Stalinist phase of Eastern European communism, the brainwashing of children in schools (starting in kindergarten) was pervasive, to the point that children were induced to denounce their “reactionary” parents.
Marxism has been used by Safe Schools activists as an innocent philosophy behind which hides the real objective: to weaken parental bonds with their children by a variety of “progressive” ideas from outside, to advance interests of a tiny minority that considers itself an “avant garde of progress” — as the communists did.
Peter Laznicka, West Lakes, SA
J’accuse Bill Shorten and the entire Labor Party membership of treachery against the economic wellbeing of the Australian people. They have spent the past three years in opposition railing at the “unfairness’” of the Coalition’s proposed budget cuts, done to rein in a ballooning debt situation caused by the Rudd-Gillard years.
Lo and behold, we now find that the Labor Party will pass the majority of budget cuts blocked by Labor and the Greens in the Senate, not to begin the arduous road to budget repair but to fund its outrageous handouts, including to families with annual incomes in excess of $250,000 to assist with childcare fees.
This is the ultimate betrayal of this great country and cannot be rewarded. Labor deserves to be in the political wilderness for at least a generation in the hope that it will learn the meaning of fiscal responsibility.
Peter Sussman,
Brighton Le Sands, NSW