It's a very good instinct to do the things that you've just been mentioning. We want to build up our infrastructure. We want to build up our defence capacity.
My criticism of the federal government's fiscal course recently is that it hasn't faced some of the trade-offs as squarely as it might have. If you're giving gas tax holidays, for example, or GST holidays, it's sending quite a different message about what you're using your fiscal capacity for. Rather than enhancing your ability to trade with the rest of the world and internally, and rather than enhancing your security, you're encouraging consumption in the day.
That's the difficulty I have. It's not with the increased focus on capital and infrastructure, which I think is entirely appropriate. It's not with some of the steps that have been taken to enhance private sector investment. It's that we haven't faced squarely up to the idea that you really do have to make more choices and maybe keep the federal government's operating expenses better under control, for example, as you're making these big investments on the infrastructure side.
