Recovering with Rudd, post the Cocaine years

So it's been a year since Howard and Costello got thrown out by an electorate tired of their style, ideology and policies.

As many commentators have highlighted, Paul Keating's quote "When you change the government, you change the country" turned out to be very, very true.

Australia, despite the Global Economic Crisis, is actually a lot more relaxed and comfortable. Kevin Rudd has a record 70% approval rating after a year and the only people appear to be really upset are the Liberal Party and the poor journalists who don't have a political scandals in sight!

The Liberals have completely lost the plot, the latest being the The Debt Merchant of Venice saying that a Deficit would be failure in economic management is quite hypocritical.

I was listening to the BBC World Service last night and they were talking about how in times of Crisis, parties tend to fall back to their political roots.

During the Cocaine Years, Australian's were lectured ad nauseum by Peter Costello about Beazley's black hole. Add to that their childishly simple mantra of interest rates always being lower under the Liberals, it leaves the impression that their decade of economic mastery was quite everything they promised.

Like most spin, it only lasts as long as the spinner itself. Unfortunately, the Legacy of Costello is now hanging over the Government which are facing a recession the right had to give us!

Howard and Costello's Cash Cropping of the economy for polical advantage left us with a big mess of crumbling infrastructure, failing monopolies like ABC Learning, duopolies dominating the supermarkets, debt debt and more debt, a mountain of complex laws, welfare churn and red tape all of which are holding back the Nation's productivity.

A year later on, Australian's reputation in the world is being restored. I remember being shocked in Berlin to see how the world perceived Australia, mainly with regards to Aboriginal Land Rights, Mabo and Wik.

I am still waiting for a response from the ABC archives over my request of a photo of John Howard, fuelling fear and racism with his map of Australia, 80% of which was covered in blue, allegedly at risk of Native Title claims. Maybe it will appear in tonight's edition of the Howard Years.

Some people have dismissed the Apology, signing of Kyoto, getting the kids out of detention as being purely symbolic. Symbolism is not something to be trivialised, it's something which forms the National Identity and makes us proud.

That is what changed in Australia under Kevin Rudd, interestingly (for change), we were ahead of the bell curve on the shift to the Left and now that Obama has also won, we enter a new positive era of change for the better.

The next few years are going to be tough, but I'm glad we have some real good leftie leaders at the helm.

Watching socialistic ideas becoming a central pillar of our capitalist society is an interesting and positive development.

As I read in readers page of the The Age a while back, we are no longer Chardonnay Socialists, but Sauvignon Blanc Socialists.