AFTER six years of failed government, Australia finally has the chance to take a new direction. Labor has failed itself and our great nation.
Under both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the party has been riven by incompetence, abysmal policy and bitter internal wars.
Australia cannot afford to keep the most dysfunctional and inept government in its history.
The Sunday Herald Sun supported Mr Rudd when he was elected in 2007. But his performance was so erratic on so many fronts that even his own party couldn't tolerate the damage anymore.
His successor was just as bad, but sadly Labor resorted to recycling Mr Rudd only to find him the same flawed character they dumped in the first place.
On the other hand, Tony Abbott and his team have shown they are ready to fix the mess and restore strong government. Mr Abbott has displayed courage, decency and a great capacity to listen to the people. His party is united and has presented a powerful case for change.
Mr Abbott kept calm as Labor ripped itself apart and lurched from one crisis to another, focusing his team on addressing the issues that matter most to Australians - a strong economy, job creation and a prosperous future.
This Government has fumbled and stumbled its way to a deserved defeat on Saturday, through disunity, the failure of its policies and its inability to deliver them. Its leaders have been so preoccupied with surviving attacks from enemies within that they have been distracted from governing.
Australia bears the scars of Labor's bungling: ballooning debt, asylum-seeker fiasco, carbon tax backflip, Building the Education Revolution blowout, delayed and overpriced national broadband project, deadly home insulation botch-up, mining tax debacle. The list goes on.
Labor has wasted billions of your taxes on schemes ranging from the feckless to the reckless. Near the top of a long list is the Home Insulation Scheme that cost several lives, as well as $1 billion to clean up. Then there was the $16 billion lavished on schools for works which, too often, were overdone, bungled or not needed.
The rate of illegal migration by boat - cut to a trickle under John Howard's Pacific Solution - exploded exponentially under a rudderless Labor leadership that attempted to disguise porous borders as a humanitarian principle. This Government has let in 50,000 boat people at massive cost to the taxpayer - and the loss of hundreds of lives of gullible-paying passengers lured by people smugglers swift to exploit Labor's dithering border protection policies.
Mr Rudd started out calling climate change the moral challenge of our time but he soon reneged, deferring an emissions trading scheme. This led Ms Gillard to try the on-again, off-again carbon tax that was so obviously a sop to the green vote of the inner-city elite.
Mr Rudd campaigned "to end the blame game" with states over hospital funding, but his scheme to claw back GST revenue to pay for it was dumped, as were all but nine of the hundreds of ideas aired at his 2020 Summit.
Mr Rudd inherited a $20 billion surplus from the Liberals but it evaporated in the global financial crisis, to be replaced by deficits. One reason of many for deficits is that the National Broadband Network has been bogged down in delays, its cost ballooning to $37 billion instead of $4.7 billion for the more modest plan mooted in the 2007 campaign.
Just last week, Treasury officials contradicted Mr Rudd's claims of a $10 billion black hole in Mr Abbott's election promises. If not a lie, this is at best the latest embarrassment a rejected and recycled leader has inflicted on a party unsure what it stands for and out of touch with those it calls "working families".
Individuals are often wrong, crowds rarely are. It seems Mr Rudd has been around long enough for Australians to sense the character flaws his own colleagues rebelled against three years ago.
He doesn't stand for anything except his own overweening ambition. That worked when he was riding the incoming tide of generational change in 2007 but now he is beating against the current. After six years in which the Government has declined from the inept to the disastrous, voters can now test the Coalition's alternative.
The Sunday Herald Sun believes Australia needs less waste, smaller government, reined-in deficits and stable and decisive leadership to secure the country's future.
There are no surprises in that list but it is easier to promise these sensible aims than it is to deliver them.
Mr Abbott has led his party into this election with distinction. He has known defeat before, and has emerged stronger and more determined from the experience.
This time, Mr Abbott deserves his chance, and we believe he will be an outstanding prime minister.
Labor, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have done everything in their power to demonise Tony Abbott, just as Labour and Helen Clark did here in 2008 to John Key. It didn't work for Miss Clark in 2008, and it is not going to work for Mr Rudd and Labor in 2013.
Australia is on the brink of electing a coalition government to be led by the Liberals and Tony Abbott. The Lucky Country may just be about to become just that once again as Labor is sent to Coventry to lick its wounds, prune the deadwood and disease and rebuild.
The ALP should note however that the New Zealand Labour Party has had that same opportunity since its defeat in 2008 (and again in 2011), but it is yet to take the opportunity.
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