On a personal note:
I don’t trust the peanut gallery to plan anything and then keep their hands off it anymore. Just look at the NBN, NDIS, and Medicare… tertiary education to boot… as prime examples of what were supposed to be long term, national roadmaps to future prosperity. All torn down by politicians who want short term gratification for doing something self-destructive.
Interesting factoid: Almost all of them learned from the human cancer that was John Winston Howard. Which as far as I am concerned, any minister that links himself to the history of that man should be booted.
Up until 1996 we had somewhat of a bipartisan approach to policy, parties may not have liked each other. Fraser didn’t like Whitlam, but most of the succesful policies on migration and multiculturalism and reconciliation were rooted in the Whitlam era and continued in the Fraser and later Hawke and Keating era…
Something happened in 1996 that led to the nasty little desiccated coconut being elected and he undid all or most of the Hawke era reforms, tried to destroy the CES, created the misnomer about dole bludgers, tried to destroy Medicare and the right to tertiary education under HECS, and fully privatised the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, and Medibank Private which were all components of getting a fair choice in the mixed market economy where the government had some control of inflationary and deflationary pressures.
Since then Scabbot privatised the Disability Employment Services, and Australia Post, Turncoat destroyed the NBN, and Scumo is now trying to rort the NDIS in the same way they rorted the CES and DES as institutions Labor created to give the most vulnerable in society a leg up. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
The thing is, the changes have sat for so long now that they have infected both sides of the house and I would not trust the average politician as far as I could throw them. The 1990s were the death of statesmanship and politicians acting for the common good of the people. Now its just a game of one-upmanship on both sides of the house.