Australia's Road to Ruin, page-39

"Actually that budget was required at the time to bring ALP debt under control but was sabotaged by the opposition parties resulting in the higher pre Covid debt."

Without the 2014 budget hits the deficit may have remained around $250 billion as you say. HOWEVER it did not amount to a doubling of the deficit over the next 7 years. The LNP have wasted a resource boom yet again, failed to build infrastructure, failed to improve education or health outcomes, failed to address inequality. They have however gutted the NBN** into a shadow of what it should be to please their master in New York.

**. The suburb I live in is pure fibre to the house. The guy next door works in a Telstra fault centre and was telling me that the number of faults or issues relating to speed here are around 5% of pre NBN. I have never had an issue in the 5 years connected. If Australia was pure NBN you could close most of the fault centres. But Abbott said the Internet and NBN is only for downloading porn. Get you news from Foxtel satellite or newscorp papers.