(Australian Prime Minister) Abbott streets ahead on good policy

Herald Sun (Melbourne) ^ | 17th February 2015 | Terry McCrann

[naturalman1975]

TONY Abbott has been a very good Prime Minister, leading a competent and indeed effective Government, where it really counts — delivering good policy and good outcomes in the best interests of Australia overall and of individual Australians.

He has been an ordinary and indeed arguably very poor PM in areas where it doesn’t really count, either for the nation or for individuals — the peripheral policy areas and in the winning of popularity contests.

Now obviously, the second of those really does count for the PM, any PM, personally. If you don’t win the key “popularity contest”, the next election, you will cease to be PM. The same goes, as some other recent examples have demonstrated, also for less-exalted premiers.

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It is important to keep stating, because the ABC and the Fairfax media won’t, that PM Abbott, his ministers and his Government, have delivered — fully delivered — on two of the three big and critically important policies taken to the voters at the last election.

They were the promise to abolish Julia Gillard’s carbon tax; thank you PM and environment minister Greg Hunt. And the promise to stop Gillard’s and Kevin Rudd’s boats; thank you Scott Morrison.

There are two very important points to be made about those successes.

The first and obvious one is of a PM and a government delivering on election promises; and not just any old election promises, but absolutely core promises.

Secondly, perhaps less obviously, but far more importantly, they were promises of good policy. The boats went to absolutely core issues of our national sovereignty.

The carbon tax was the single most destructive policy ever visited on our economy.