When a government introduces two big new taxes that actually make the budget $10 billion worse off you know there is something seriously amiss.
This is what the Gillard government has somehow managed to do with its carbon tax and mining tax. This takes a very special kind of economic management, the kind we again saw the evidence of in the recent mid year budget update.
Mark Dreyfus, the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change, needs to be reminded of this fact after the selective amnesia he displayed in his Fairfax National Times blog on 8 December.
Here we are in the middle of a mining boom, with the highest terms of trade in 140 years and an economy that continues to grow, yet Labor presided over a staggering $26 billion blow-out in net debt and $15 billion deterioration in the budget deficit in just six months.
This performance, which is underscored by the four worst budget deficits in our history and the highest levels of government debt recorded by a country mile, makes Dreyfus’ self-serving contribution particularly galling.
He talks about imaginary opposition black holes, yet fails to explain his role as the Climate Change Parliamentary Secretary in the implementation of a carbon tax, which after associated spending, leaves a $4 billion budget shortfall. A real black hole dismissed by Dreyfus and co as "broadly budget neutral".
Nor does he mention the $133 billion in net debt that Labor is racking up, which includes billions wasted in Dreyfus' pet areas such as the disastrous pink batts program and other monumentally wasteful green programs. The parliamentary secretary also failed to mention the compensation cheques he has personally approved for my constituents who fell victim to his dodgy pink batts’ scheme.
And what about the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation, also in the Dreyfus area, which will be funded with more borrowed money and used to support high-risk ventures that the banks would not touch with a barge pole. Another Labor disaster in the making.
And let's not talk about the $50 billion NBN, yet more borrowed money for a project which is set to become this nation's biggest ever white elephant.
The silence is conspicuous also when it comes to the mining tax debacle which is set to create a $6 billion black hole in the budget and the government's refusal to release the modelling and assumptions that sit behind it despite a pledge to "to let the sunshine in".
Instead Dreyfus points to a grossly politicised costings' process following the last election, that notwithstanding the bastardisation of Coalition savings measures, still confirmed that the Opposition would deliver a superior budget bottom line to Labor. He forgot to mention that bit.
I would also ask Mr Dreyfus why does he persist with the government's nonsensical claim about the Coalition having to find $70 billion in savings, when virtually half that figure is wiped out on account of us not proceeding with the vast majority of spending commitment's attached to the mining and carbon taxes? In addition scrapping the carbon and mining taxes rather than create a black hole would improve Labor's budget bottom line by $10 billion.
In all likelihood there will be two budgets between now and the next election and considering the way Labor first told us the budget deficit for this year would be $12 billion, then it was $22 billion, but six months later it is not $37 billion, who knows where we will be in two years time.
Doug Cameron is right, Labor does have a "surplus fetish" because it has never delivered one and while it continues promising them on the never, never, it keeps driving the budget further into the red.
In politics it is what you actually deliver that matters, that's how you are ultimately judged not by your levels of spin and denial.
The government's obsessing with the Coalition, which for the record delivered 10 surpluses out of 12 budgets when last in office, is a tactical diversion from a party with no record to stand on.