Australian Federal Election 2010

What happened?

Voters punished Labor for lack of competence, compounded by the Queensland, and particularly NSW state Labor governments.

Changing leaders from Rudd to Gillard only confirmed the voters' perception of lack of competence from the government. As Gillard was involved in decisions during Rudd's leadership, Gillard could not distance herself from the decisions during the election campaign. Voters forgot that many of the decisions were made in the name of stimulus against the backdrop of a global financial tsunami.

Things that Labor introduced/tried to introduce were:

• insulation batt program: a giant honeypot that naturally attracted shonky operators.
• fuel watch website: already done by MotorMouth.
• grocery watch website: the supermarkets had no interest in providing information to this website and would have quoted various "technical reasons" as to why they could not provide it.  The government gave up.  The website's potential usefulness is uncertain.
• school building funding: some good things came from this, however the idea of giving $2.5M to each school without allocating it on a needs basis was wrong.
• mining tax: why did they government have to negotiate with the miners in the first place?  The government should have consulted extensively with the miners first, then made a definite decision, while communicating why the decision would be good for future financial funding of services (e.g. how health service quality would be at risk in the future without the mining tax).

Hopefully the election will start a new dawn where voters are engaged. The spinners and 'hollow men' will see how damaging their tactics are to trust in government. The independent and green MPs must act responsibility by putting the national interest above their local interest.

A disturbing trend is voters thinking "what will this party do for me" - rather than "what will this party do for the country". This resulted in elections becoming auctions to win the largest number of swinging voters.