well good on you for supporting the tax despite your political...

well good on you for supporting the tax despite your political view - thumbs up for that.

"wasteful debt" is interesting tho...As most of us know negative cycles feed on themselves in a downturn. This is well accepted. The longer and deeper they are allowed to run the more confidence and investment drops creating a negative cycle that feeds on itself until things get so bad it can't get much worse.

If you can break that cycle quickly and decisively you have a chance of stopping it in its tracks. Australia managed to do this with fast, big actions like cash handouts and rushed schemes like the home insulation and school infrastructure schemes. Now on the face of it this spending can certainly appear "wasteful". But you must also consider the alternative - without big, fast acting spending that negative cycle would almost certainly have dragged the whole economy down for an extended period which would have resulted in far more financial pain for the country than the debt that did occur from the big, fast acting stimulus. Things are rarely as simple as they appear...