Tory John Abbott's unshakable mandate, for the next ten years.

These are the issues that we as Australians must now face and that will, mean as John Hewson once suggested “the Liberal party needs to tear down, and rebuild the Australian economy brick by brick from the ground up”. Abbott is now on his crusade to do just that .

We need to prepare for the austerity and the recession that we are about to crash into. The Liberals know no other way to manage.

Tony has said himself that long term thinking is not popular with the Australian people and he has made it crystal clear that he is focused on the short term.

Abbott has also stated he will break no promise, core or noncore.

Abbott convinced the electorate that the economy was trashed.

Whatever he does from now, he must be made to own.

My sincere belief is that the strategy outlined below will reverse most of the economic management and social advances achieved

in the last six years, and as a result the economy as it relates to the general population will spiral downwards fast enough for them to have their belief in Tory politics destroyed for a generation.

All the policy actions listed below had been foreshadowed, for the past three years. Mr Abbott, did say“no surprises” so over time he has covertly warned us. We were not listening closely. He says these are precisely targeted, but nothing about the collateral damage they will inflict on those who were naive enough to support him.

He now has a mandate according to your vote, to do the following.

Lower the tax-free threshold from $18,200 back to $6000. This will drag more than one million low-income earners back into the tax system. It will also increase the taxes for 6 million Australians earning less than $80,000. Thereby;

Saving families $300 dollars a year of Carbon Tax and cost them $2,300 per year in reinstated tax.

Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB)

The Opposition costings enumerated the “associated expenditure” that would be chopped along with the mining tax. (These were the spending measures the Labor Government proposed to fund through the tax, when it expected it to raise $22 billion.)

Privatise Medibank.

Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme.

Privatise Australia Post.

Privatise SBS.

Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function.

Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport.

End all public subsidies to sport and the arts.

Privatise the CSIRO.

Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built.

Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship.

Abolish the means-tested School kids Bonus that benefits 1.3 million families by providing up to $410 for each primary school child and up to $820 for each high school child.

Abolish the Baby Bonus

Repeal the National Curriculum

Introduce competing private secondary school curriculum

Repeal the mining tax

Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol

Repeal the Fair Work Act

Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them

Repeal the carbon tax, and don't replace it.

Repeal the marine park Legislation

Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

Abolish the low-income superannuation contribution.

Abolish the proposed 15 percent tax on income from.

End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws

Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement

End all government funded Nanny State advertising

Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food.

Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling

Introduce a paid parental leave scheme that replaces a mother’s salary up to $150,000.

Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784.

Abolish the Clean Energy Fund

Abolish the Department of Climate Change

Repeal the renewable energy target

Encourage the construction of dams

Introduce voluntary voting.

End mandatory disclosures on political donations.

End media blackout in final days of election campaigns.

End public funding to political parties

Introduce fee competition to Australian universities.

Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities.

Means test tertiary student loans

Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools

Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency.

Abolish the means test on the private health insurance rebate.

Repeal the Alcopops tax.

Means-test Medicare.

Cease subsidising the car industry.

End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.

Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database.

End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering.

Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including.

Lower personal income tax for residents.

Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states

Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold.

Allow the Northern Territory to become a state.

Remove anti-dumping laws

Deregulate the parallel importation of books.

Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade

Return income taxing powers to the states

Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)

Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit.

Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP

Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification

Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be 'balanced '.

Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law.

End local content requirements for Australian television stations

Eliminate media ownership restrictions.

Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games

In total, these cuts come to some $18.7 billion, and they will fall most heavily on low-income earners.

Last week the Age Editorial summarised the the campaign thus;

Some of the big ticket items are:

Abolition of the school kids bonus – $4.641 billion – paid to parents to meet the incidental costs of books, uniforms, etcetera, for their kids.

Abolition of the low-income superannuation contribution – $3.722 billion – which topped up the retirement savings for people, most of them women, who earn less than $37,000 a year.

Abolition of the twice-yearly mining-tax supplementary allowance – a top-up of $210 a year for singles or $350 for couples on the dole. I

It was a very modest sweetener in the Budget for people who are doing it very tough, thanks to the Labor government’s failure to increase New start to a liveable amount.

A delay in increasing superannuation contributions, which whips another $1.64 million out of workers’ pockets.

And those are just some of the cuts associated directly with the mining tax.

Elsewhere in the Coalition’s costing's document are a bunch of other hit-the-poor-and-underprivileged measures.

The biggest of all, and perhaps the cruellest, is the decision to lop $4.5 billion off the foreign-aid budget.

Bear in mind, this comes on top of repeated deferrals by Labor of its goal of spending 0.5 per cent of gross national income on aid. Of course the poor offshore are an easy target; they don’t get a vote.

On the issue of trust, the Coalition's own actions leave us with significant reservations. It has obfuscated and ducked critical issues, deliberately keeping voters uninformed, by repeating mantras like “stop the boats”, hiding its savings plans or revenue-raising initiatives from the electorate.

Worse has been its breathtaking arrogance in cynically delaying until the last minute its policy costings - this, from the party that drafted the charter of budget honesty.

When it comes to trusting Labor, we appreciate the public's confidence may be so undone that a change of government could prove to be a circuit-breaker, injecting a short-term misconceived, sense of stability.

But The Age values policies above political opportunism; we do not advocate a vote simply for the sake of change.

The Age believes in economic and social progress, in liberty and justice, in equity and compassion, and openness of government.

We believe the role of government is to build a strong, fair nation for future generations, and not to pander to sectional interests.

It is with these values in mind that we endorse the Labor Party in this important election.