The Queensland Liberal National Party’s vegetation management policy will ‘guarantee the slaughter of 45 million animals including koalas that are killed by deforestation in the state each year,’ the Wilderness Society says.

First the ground rumbled ominously, and then it cracked open to swallow Queensland premier Campbell Newman and a mass of his LNP followers.

With the most likely outcome of the Saturday's election being the ejection of the LNP from office after just one term after it swept to power in an unprecedented landslide, Queensland has delivered Australia's biggest electoral surprise at least since regional Victoria blindsided Jeff Kennett in 1999.

Tony Abbott tells us that 2015 will be the year of jobs and families. Well, he wishes. It may yet come to pass, but if it does it will have to be in the second half of the year – if at all, writes Mungo MacCallum

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