There is much to look forward to, and indeed much to be grateful for, as we embark upon the adventure that will be 2016. The certainty of a Coalition victory at the forthcoming federal election is to be welcomed, not that there was ever really any serious doubt that this government – whether led by Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull or one of the Wiggles – would have been capable of seeing off the threat of a return to Labor when it came to the crunch. Much as the opinion polls and many an excited news anchor may have wished us to believe otherwise, it was highly unlikely that the Australian voter would have rushed back into the miserable embrace of Shorten, Plibersek, Burke and co given their inability to move beyond the failed ideas (and personalities) of the Rudd and Gillard fiascos. But Mr Turnbull is to be rightly praised for having lived up to one half of the deal he put forward last September – a reversal of bad polls – whilst he and Scott Morrison struggle to find a formula to fulfill his other grand commitment, that of a saleable economic narrative. The suspicion is, of course, that these two worthy commitments are mutually incompatible; the positive opinion polls come at the expense of any clarity in economic direction, and – as we shall soon see and Mr Morrison has already figured out – vice versa. For this reason alone the contrived media clamour for an early election (post the Briggs/Brough reshuffle) will become ever more deafening as we head further into the year without any plausible economic measures to cut government spending. It is doubtful, given the ongoing poor state of our economic affairs, that those who worked so hard to get Mr Turnbull into the Lodge will risk a Responsible Budget – with all its inherent dangers – coming between them and validation of their actions at a federal election. Whether the second Turnbull government, emboldened by an election victory, will have the tools and/or the stomach to cut government spending in a serious and meaningful way remains to be seen. As it is the start of a new year and a time for positive thinking, we can only hope so.

It is already encouraging to learn that the Turnbull government is eschewing the Gonski spending trap. It is also to be hoped that Mr Turnbull and his team will take full advantage of the findings of Mr Abbott’s Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption to finally lance the putrid boil that parts of the union movement have been upon the body politic. That certain scoundrels operate in a tax-free, largely regulation-free environment, leeching off many of the lowest-paid in our society is beyond belief in 2016. Here’s hoping that Mr Turnbull has the fortitude to see unions and officials brought into a more corporate-style legal framework following the report. It goes without saying – and has been said by many a Labor luminary – that if Labor is to make itself competitive in the modern era it must sever or reconfigure its links with the union movement.

The imminent end of the Obama era is also something to be viewed with optimism. Hope is the one commodity Mr Obama has traded in, albeit fraudulently, since 2008. Yet the very best that can be said of his tenure in office is that he has taken numerous hopeless situations and, unbelievably, managed to make them worse. Old foes have reasserted themselves under his watch, with Russia, Iran, Syria and China all taking advantage of American procrastination.

In a manner as depressing as it was predictable, Mr Obama’s hubris (‘this is the moment the ocean’s recede’) and left wing obsessions with imaginary foes – withdrawing prematurely from Iraq, ‘saving’ our Great Barrier Reef from climate change, publicly belittling Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu over ‘settlements’ and so on – meant the real threats were either unchallenged, or worse, actually encouraged by him.

The rise in right wing parties across Europe, the growing popularity of politically inflammatory politicians such as Donald Trump, and the increasing fusion of Muslim intolerance and anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel can all be traced to the failure of American leadership under Barack Obama. He will not be missed.

Meanwhile, let us fervently wish for a more pragmatic and less starry-eyed approach from Europe to its immigration crisis in this coming year. If 2015 will be remembered for one thing alone, it will be the disastrous pronunciation by Germany’s Angela Merkel that the welcome mat was out for anyone who wished to stroll in to Europe (in flagrant abuse of the Schengen agreement) from a war-torn Middle East and northern Africa. TV footage clearly shows a preponderance of well-fed, able-bodied, angry young males eager to avail themselves of Europe’s generosity and ‘compassion’, many of whom come ready-equipped with all the vile ideological baggage, prejudices and primitive hatreds of Islamism and the Syrian and other conflicts. Largely unreported in the mainstream European and Australian media is the surge in rapes and robberies that have – again predictably – followed in the wake of Merkel’s idiotic brain-snap.

So welcome to 2016. Let the adventure begin.