Exacerbating Australia's housing shortage

Further, the HIA is on record as saying: "The structural shortage of skilled labour in the residential sector is an obstacle preventing an adequate supply of new homes. Addressing this shortage therefore forms a vital component to ensuring Australia's critical housing shortage improves."

The upshot is that of these workers could have been employed in the residential sector, building homes that consumers actually chose to spend their money on, rather than government make-work schemes.

Despite the litany of waste and rorting in the BER, the program will continue for another 18 months, continuing to suck resources out of the private home building sector, adding to the shortfall of houses and driving up prices.

And with the RBA poised to start hiking interest rates in the coming months, it makes no sense for the government to keep its foot planted on the stimulus accelerator while the RBA is hitting the brakes.

The PM would have you believe that thousands of tradesmen would otherwise be left on the scrapheap, collecting unemployment benefits, but the facts show that many of them could have been hard at work stimulating a real private sector recovery, not an artificial one.

So when Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan tell you that their spending saved us from the worst of the GFC, have a look at your latest monthly mortgage statement because you have been paying for it.