Just like Krudd and his gang, Nelson can promise anything while he's opposition leader. Like Krudd has found out there is a huge gulf between dreams and reality.

The Coalition is really at sixes and sevens. Nelson, appears to have dropped the language of choice despite the appeal to the individual. He also continues his university bashing ---academics are more concerned with social engineering than high quality teaching. We need more teachers.

The Howard Government was a social engineering government --forcing people to pay a lot more for their education and health care and running down public education and health.

Henry Ergas addresses the choice issue in an op-ed in The Australian. He says that:

it is choice [that] is the key to efficiency. At the end of the day, it is consumers who are best placed to evaluate the services offered to them by suppliers. And it is the threat of that choice being exercised that disciplines suppliers and ensures that they innovate, invest and provide consumers with enduring value....it is that choice is the key to efficiency. At the end of the day, it is consumers who are best placed to evaluate the services offered to them by suppliers. And it is the threat of that choice being exercised that disciplines suppliers and ensures that they innovate, invest and provide consumers with enduring value....This is no less true of the services traditionally provided by state governments, including education and health, than it is of those goods and services supplied by the private sector. It is for this reason that the expansion of choice that has occurred in the past decade - with the growth of non-government schools and private hospitals - is so important.

He adds that Labor came to office committed to maintaining choice, and rightly so. But this makes the messages in Labor's first budget mixed, if not somewhat concerning. then this:

Weakening private health insurance could affect the growth of the private hospital sector, making consumers more dependent on a public hospital system that has found it difficult to meet the community's expectations. It may be that this is merely the consequence of rushed decision-making and a failure to think through the longer-term effects of what is being done. But it could also reflect an instinctive and unthinking centralism that views choice as incidental rather than being at the core of good policy.

He ignores that reducing the tax on the Medicare levy provides greater choice.It gives them more money in their pocket and ---people can evaluate whether to go public or private.

RumpoleQC
the clash between dreams and reality for Nelson may be resolved in a quick fashion; and sooner rather than latter.

There wasn't an awful lot of budget in it, considering it was supposed to be a budget reply.

We're all pretty sick to death of 'working families', but around two thirds of Nelson's speech was conservative values statements. It sounded as if he'd stuck a few extra budget paragraphs into an Anzac Day speech.

Aah Lyn, the performance, the perfomance. What matters in the House of Representatives is the political theatre. What we are being presented with from the Opposition is a comedy routine by rusty actors who are not sure of their lines. So they stumble around cover it up with confected moral outrage.

the Stay-at-home mums need to get drunk on alcopops and cry on Brendon's broad shoulder.

The Liberal response to the Rudd/Swan budget is all about short-term political gain its a kind of political posturing in terms of threatening to block the mix drink and luxury car tax in the Senate.

They can only do that until June 30th.