Oh man, when Campbell Newman says you’ve sacked too many public servants and cut too many spending programs, you have stepped through the looking glass. When Campbell Newman saddles up and rides hard on your budget because it’s going to hurt people and you need to be stopped, something weird is happening.

Newman’s insurgency, the open revolt he’s leading against Hockey and Abbott’s mad, bad and dangerous budget has to be more worrying to the feds than any sudden reanimation of the ALP’s zombie vote, because of the long-term implications.

The $80 billion dollars – yep, 80 billion, go on, count ‘em. Oh, wait, you can’t, because 80 billion is just too goddamned big a number to even be comprehensible – The Eighty Billion Goddamned Dollars that Hockey and Abbott ripped out of health and education funding will throw a crushing burden on the states for a decade to come; a decade in which conservative premiers like Campbell Newman were quite looking forward to enjoying the soft kiss of ministerial leather on their pin striped bottoms.

Maybe not now, though. Maybe not for much longer at all, with Smokin’ Joe and Toned Abs’ $80 billion ambush due to start bringing the pain from July 1.

You gotta hand it to Abs, though. Even before Newman decided to turn on him, he’d already done so much to betray the trust and faith of the poor, dumb bastards who actually believed him as he lied to them about what he would and would not do in office. It’s not just the breaking of one promise after another which has probably doomed Abbott. It's not merely the grotesque hypocrisy of livin' large on parliamentary expenses while imposing harsh austerities on those without the means to protect themselves from political and economic predation. It's the breathtaking way in which Abbott nakedly framed his betrayal to hurt most those lower and middle income earners who delivered him power.



No amount of cigar smoke can disguise the inequities and ham-fisted brutishness of the society Abbott and Hockey are very obviously intending to fashion because they believe it is the right thing to do. You shouldn’t forget that. By any measurable standard there is no debt crisis or budget emergency in Australia. Why then would Abbott and his urgers rush headlong towards policy that has seen the electorate rushing away from them?



Because, while they’re not so dim as to be honest about it, in their hearts they believe a country which lets people fail and suffer for that failure can only be the better for it. It’s a Darwinian, or more accurately, a Nietzschean philosophy. The weak may fall, but those who don’t succumb will stand taller and stronger. So multinational corporations, big polluters, the one per cent, the real elite, they get to laugh all the way to the merchant bank. Nothing new there, of course.