"Our government's spending is out of control and we struggle to retain a surplus in boom economic times."
You are not alone in talking as if the GFC did not happen. If the government had failed to protect Australia from the ravages of the GFC, there won't be any economic boom times. There would have been countless business closures, hundreds of thousands of job losses.
If you had been to the politics forum in the past, this had been debated, argued about countless times in the past.
The government's spending is not out of control.
I will stop here, lest my post is moderated for containing "political" content in the eyes of the moderators, though in reality it is more an economic argument than a political argument.
You also said:
"As well as believing in a "fair go", I also have a disdain for people who bludge off our system, whether they are Australian citizens or refugees."
Yes, there will always be people who exploit our collective generousity, but let's not forget that it is not just the people on the lower rung of our social order who do that, we have well off people putting their hands up for government handouts too.
