Australia's election

Each side panders to and seeks to benefit from another aspect of the unpleasantly xenophobic streak in Australian public opinion. This gets an airing in pronouncements about foreign land ownership such as the latest faux-horror about owning the farm expressed by Rudd. Reality check: only miners actually dig anything up and take it away.

Neither side has an industry policy that truly recognizes the reality that subsidy is not the way to conjure up excellence and product marketability but that seed funding for cutting-edge technology, green or otherwise, is.

The killer in this election is delivery. We don't want any more Pink Batt scandals; we can do without politically motivated grace-and-favour funding for self-serving plaques on school hall walls; we do not want any more fairground-style revolving prime ministers, or tedious Lazarus acts such as we've seen with the Labor and Rudd-Gillard-Rudd circuses; we need no more policies presented on a "gotta zip" basis.

We need – bottom line, both literally and figuratively – budget integrity; lean administration; true consensus (and then delivery) of policies to counter environmental challenges (including climate change); concerted proactive action to bring Australia's first peoples fully into the mainstream of national life and opportunity; and a firm grasp by those who occupy the corridors of power of the fact that Australians will prosper better and faster and on a greater scale if official busybodies leave them alone and let them get on with it.

Labor under Hawke (and, just, Keating) did that well. The Coalition under Howard did it very well. The years since 2007 – whether or not we're all better off on a range of arcane statistical measures, as Labor-leaning economists keep trying to tell us – have been a hiatus for common sense, applied focus, and sensible outcomes.

Oh and by the way, none of it is the fault of Rupert Murdoch, whatever you may think of him and the appalling crassness of many of his corporate products.