Ah Towie, there is no massive debt. It's miniscule. Relative to the rest of the developed world, it's even smaller. In good times you save, as opposed to returning it all in vote buying middle classs welfare as Howard did. There should have been a much larger war chest already saved for the GFC. Australia had never had anything vaguely close to the rivers of gold that Howard was lucky enough to have. He either thought it would last forever or didn't care less if it didn't. Abbott - "We came to believe in the Golden Goose". Don't confuse exceptional boom times with competence. In a downturn you spend and in a GFC you spend hard and fast. Economics 101. All the economic data to date supports the stimulus package action. What people seem to be really struggling with is the fact that the vast majority of a deficit is due to a reduction in tax receipts, not government spending. If you look back through governments of both persuasions over just about any time period, you'll see it's true. Also, don't forget that the coalition have stated that they would have spent only 20b less. Adjust for typical pollie spin and there woulddn't have been much in it at all. Further, if they hadn't of spent the money, we'd be having hundreds of thousands drawing welfare and not paying tax. That is, effectively increase the debt.
Peter
P.S BTW, how can the coalition be fortunate enough to be in power during such a massive boom yet have the infrastructure that the federal government is responsible for go backwwards? Answer - election bribes on a scale hitherto unseen. Whilst GDP has gone up during in the last 10 years, more telling is that productivity (GDP divided by hours worked) has not moved since the nineties. That's the important figure to use as a guage for the health of the economy.
