They went on big firing sprees around the public service, just absolute slash and burn style, huge spending cuts to the budget, reduction in services, and were getting ready to privitise a lot of public assets that bring in a lot of revenue (things that have been privitised in other states and have turned out to be disasters there, gouging people for essential services, like the power transmission networks). They under-invested in health, public transport, etc.

They'd been voted in I think because there was desire for change, and very quickly the public sentiment changed. Kind of like "oh crap, not like this"... It's very unusual for a Government to only have one term but they were booted out decisively. Since then the party seems even less competent... So they haven't been able to make much of an impact in the last few elections.