Just awful, shallow as a dog dish with contents to match.

Where's my daughter's computer?

Where's my ultrafast broadband?

What in the blue blazes is happening with Telstra?

What happened to the hospital takeover?

So many lies, so much spin.

Had we left it to Turnbull's mob we would be in depresssion now.

Sorry about your daughter's computer, but she has food on the table.

Ask Turnbull's Senate mates about the broadband.

Telstra is a private company now; with a monopoly that the ACCC should be looking at. Would you, if you had to decide, take over the hospitals???

Perhaps these 'promises' were made while in opposition.

Obviously shuffle has never lived through a major depression.

We in our eighties and nineties can put a picture to Henry Lawson's poem of ragged starving children in the rain.

We are fortunate that today we do not starve and the dole or pension will supply our immediate needs if we do not drink or gamble.

This was not so in the early 1930's and the government then considered it was more important to reduce debt than to put some food into the mouths of starving children.

In our maturity we have come to realise that debt is only a figure in a ledger but the memories of starving will go on during the lifetime and it is of higher priority to feed the poor than to reduce the figures in the ledger.

But having grown up with and worked with people who did, the thing that always came through was the fear and dread that these folk had of the depression returning.

The 10-year-old in 1930 was the soldier who went off to fight in1939.

Amazingly I never got any depression talk from my parents and had wrongly assumed somehow they had got through OK.

Only a few years ago after contacting a long lost aunt, my late dad's sister, we found out how tough their family had had it.

This is the same man who struggled as a child through the depression then went and fought in Borneo etc.

As did thousands of others.

The war was the excuse for the debt that should have happened in 1930.

This debt is a long term thing.

I remember Gough Whitlam was in power when the debt for the WW2 was paid off.

In the meantime we had run up debt in the Korean war and then Vietnam.

Probably still in debt for these wars.

As Rod says it is only a number, it is going to cost everyone a little extra (probably in taxation and interest rates) for many years, but surely that is preferable to another. depression.