TONY Abbott promised to stop the boats. They’ve been stopped.

Tony Abbott promised to abolish Julia Gillard and Christine Milne’s dishonest, punishing and utterly pointless carbon tax. When the Senate changes in two weeks, that now looks certain after Clive Palmer on Friday finally committed his four senators to abolition.

That leaves only fixing Labor’s debt and deficit budget mess to go, of the three big promises that the prime minister made in opposition.

That’s going to be harder to achieve and was always going to take longer. Obviously, it could never have been done in a single budget, even with an opposition prepared to behave responsibly; holding the government to account but also letting it govern.

We might not now get all the way back to a balanced budget in three or four years time — ultimately that outcome is hostage anyway to what happens in the US and China.

But whether or not the government gets some or all of its measures through a ‘recalcitrant’ Senate, the deficit and the debt WILL be smaller than would have been the case with a continuing Labor government.

It is also the case that the Budget promise was the least important of the three, for saving Australia from the disastrous course it was on under the Rudd, Gillard and Rudd governments.

The other two went to the fundamentals of our national sovereignty. Border protection, or in the famous words of John Howard — deciding who comes to our country — is the most basic issue of sovereignty. That’s true, whether we are talking of Japanese heading towards us in 1942, or ‘subcontracting’ our immigration policy to people smugglers in 2008-2013 as Rudd and Gillard did.

But the carbon tax was equally destructive of sovereignty. We had a government imposing a massive cost on both consumers and business, deliberately if mindlessly undermining the national economy.

At its most basic it was a government prepared to hand control of the future price of our carbon (dioxide) emissions — and so, of the price of our electricity and our key exports — over to European bureaucrats in Brussels.

Abolition of the carbon tax will deliver real cash savings to all Australians. The savings per year will go close to cancelling out ALL the cost increases imposed in the budget — if indeed they are actually imposed.

Arguably more importantly, abolition will take a great dead weight off business. It will also have huge political implications.

First off, it will demonstrate the benefit of wresting control of the Senate away from the destructive and dangerous control of the Labor-Green left combination.

Yes, we have ended up with all sorts of odds and sods holding the balance of power. They range from the rational and reasonable group of Nick Xenophon, Bob Day, David Leyonhjelm and John Madigan, to the ‘Palmer trio plus Ricky.’

But for all their oddities and particular agendas, they are NOT Christine Milne and Penny Wong.

The Prime Minister’s North American trip completely shredded the desperate lie that axing the tax would leave Australia isolated.

Despite the frenzied and quite hysterical ‘projections’ of the Fairfax press and the ABC, it did NOT put Abbott off-side with US President Barack Obama.

Indeed Obama specifically noted that Abbott had a mandate to abolish the tax — putting if anyone ‘off-side’ with him, the said Shorten, who refuses to accept Abbott’s mandate.

Abolition of the carbon tax will rule out any prospect of a double dissolution election. That means this Government will run its full term.

Yes, it might not be able to get some or even most of its Budget measures through the Senate, but they are all secondary. The really important thing is that we do NOT have a PM Rudd or Gillard — or indeed, Shorten — proposing NEW spending initiatives.

One absolutely important thing that has not been well understood — and why avoiding a DD election was so vital — is that the way the Senate vote works, this non-Labor-Green control of the Senate will last through the next parliament as well.

But it also importantly means that a returned Labor government would almost certainly not have a Labor-Green Senate majority.

Specifically, it would not be able to bring back the carbon tax. And by 2019 — the time of the next election — the whole global warming craziness will likely have imploded on its own unsustainability.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott meets US President Barack Obama in Washington DC this week.