Did anyone else think government spending was going down?

With all the hype about “budget repair” I had made the assumption that government spending was going down. Turns out I am wrong. At the same time that our government is demanding we slash and burn things like foreign aid, it is planning on spending $14 billion dollars more next year than it did this year,  and projects that by the year 2018-19 it will be spending $79 billion more than it  spends at present.

Considered as a proportion of our national income spending stays relatively steady at historically high levels.

This makes a mockery of the claim that foreign aid had to be cut in order to “repair the budget”.  The truth is we just prefer to spend the money on ourselves.  There is a word to describe this, and it’s not “fiscal responsibility”. It’s “greed”.