Spending money attracts attention and encourages support. The hangover will come later when governments have to find the money to pay for the spending spree. 

Campaigning energetically for the Lodge back in 2007, Kevin Rudd suddenly upended the election dynamic with a single sentence.

“This reckless spending must stop,” he insisted.

It’s difficult to overestimate the power those words had in sucking the wind out of incumbent PM John Howard’s sails. All his spending promises suddenly looked irresponsible. He was transformed into a flailing man, attempting to buy what he couldn’t afford.

There was no danger of that happening during either party’s campaign launch yesterday. Both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have identified what they think is the fulcrum for the voters - housing - and both engaged in big spending plans to make swinging, alienated people priced out of the housing market feel supported.

Whether either party’s policies will actually address the fundamental issue that there aren’t enough houses is, to some extent, irrelevant. The key point is that neither has been able to successfully craft a plausible economic narrative that can offer people space to succeed without handouts.

The only danger is that at some point in the distant future, governments may discover they need to pay for all the services they’ve promised. And that’s a longer-term worry for the NDIS.

This is the real issue with all these spending promises.

Both parties will quite correctly point to other nations’ spending and point out that Australia actually does have a quite respectable debt-to-GDP ratio (currently 43.5, down from 43.8 last year). In other words, all the borrowing that was made during COVID is being paid down - although rather slowly - and the country is still better off than most in the OECD.

However this is little comfort as the international economic outlook deteriorates further. The problem is that spending is increasingly concentrated in areas of the economy that do not necessarily generate growth, such as the NDIS.

While such spending is great in creating jobs and building satisfying lives, this is not the way our economy is structured at the moment.

We don’t expect to be looking at the same television screen or using the same computer in five years time, and that’s the way our economy works. Making new ‘stuff’ and tossing out old ‘stuff’ is what adds to GDP.

The problem is that although GDP may be growing, our lives aren’t necessarily improving. If pay one person to care for another, GDP grows. If that same person then cares for two others, GDP grows, but this doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of that care.

We have reached the limits of money. It doesn’t buy things we really need.

These are the issues we really need politicians to focus on.