No major political party in this country is serious about the budget deficit, and would like you to believe that it can’t be brought under control through spending cuts.

Even as the treasurer makes occasional and meek protests that we ‘have a spending problem’, all you’ll hear about from the Libs, Labor, or the Greens, are ways to raise more taxes. There is no vision, no appetite, and no incentive in Canberra to bring spending under control, but that’s exactly what we have to do.

And it’s not that hard. This article in the Australian Financial Review makes it plain that it’s just a matter of winding spending back to the levels they were before we introduced all that ‘temporary spending’ in the wake of the 2008 GFC. Think back 10 years. Were we starving? Was welfare spending inadequate? Was infrastructure falling apart?

I believe it was Milton Friedman who said:

There’s nothing so permanent as a temporary Government program.

It’s hard to argue when you consider that our spending was jacked up by Rudd to ‘deal with the GFC’ and eight years later we’re looking at bigger and bigger deficits for as far as the eye can see. Oh, a word of advice, don’t believe the forward estimates that say we’ll be able to grow our way to surplus in only 4 years… they’ve said that every budget since 2008 and it’s never happened, nor is it about to happen. Such a scenario assumes impossible growth at a time when the global economy is as fragile as its ever been, and there’s good reason to believe things are about to get tougher for us then it ever was in the GFC.

We have a spending problem, and thanks to our out of control spending and the taxing that’s rapidly rising to support it, we’re fast developing an economic problem too.

Solution? Cuts. Big ones. Painful ones. Ones that actually get our budget back into balance effective immediately and keep it that way till the debt is paid. And it can be done.

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