Alan, go and tell the Greeks that high debt is the way to solve their problems! Fact is that Australia still runs a regular current account deficit each year, despite some of the best terms of trade ever. We aren't paying our way, but borrowing to bankroll the lifestyle. That is not sustainable. Australia can't just keep growing in population either. Already the city of Perth is highly dependant on gas powered water desalination for its water supplies.
Our soils are some of the poorest in the world and we can't keep mining those soils either, as we do now.

You are confusing nominal and real GDP. If you want to judge the effect of fiscal or monetary policy on aggregate demand you have to use nominal figures.

And if you look it up Australia's nominal GDP was grew at over 10% in the year to 01/07/2008. The US was already in recession in December 2007. Nominal GDP was falling in the UK in the first quarter of 2008. Australia was far better placed to start with (and the RBA has a more forward looking monetary policy and is more flexible with its inflation target).

But don't take my word for it. I'll quote Paul Krugman (of all people) to show that the fiscal stimulus in Australia was not needed:

"This is a curious thing for him to say, because it’s an outright lie; as anyone who has been reading me, Martin Wolf, Brad DeLong, Simon Wren-Lewis, etc. knows, our case has always been that fiscal stimulus is justified only when you’re up against the zero lower bound on interest rates." http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2013/04/22/very-sensitive-people/

"Simon Wren-Lewis is deeply annoyed at the IMF, and understandably so. How can you publish a paper about fiscal adjustment that explicitly takes no account of monetary policy, and claim that it has any relevance to current problems?

The central fact of macro policy in these times isn’t subtle:

In normal times, the central bank can offset fiscal contraction by cutting interest rates. Since late 2008, however, the interest rates the Fed can control have been limited by the zero lower bound. This means that there is no offset to the negative effects of fiscal consolidation — which means that this is not the time to be doing such consolidation, which should wait until we emerge from this condition. We’re in a St. Augustine economy: Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2013/08/24/the-macroeconomics-of-sisyphus/?from=krugman

I disagree with Krugman. I think that monetary policy is still powerful at the zero bound. But even a die-hard Keyensian like Krugman will tell you that fiscal stimulus in Australia was unnecessary!!
You are just relying on correlation to prove causation.

Dudd and Juliar claimed that Labor had saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, but their unemployment figures have been manipulated:

"The government is not running on its record. The Prime Minister is not focused on his achievements. He is running a campaign built on fabrications and future glory. He has been caught lying, without compunction, on multiple occasions. This is not even the most insidious mischief.

The government has manipulated the official statistics. It has compromised the reputation of the Treasury. An example of the endless spin cycle is the manipulation of the unemployment rate, a basic measure of the economy and thus, indirectly, a measure of the government's performance. The official rate is 5.7 per cent. It has been trending up for a year, from 5.2 per cent, a 10 per cent rise in 12 months. The real unemployment rate is higher, about 6.2 per cent according to a study by Andrew Baker of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Baker found that more than 100,000 job-seekers had been moved out of the unemployment ranks by shifting them into training schemes. ''An astonishing 360,000 unemployed people are classified as non-job-seekers,'' Baker wrote in his centre's monograph. ''The number [in training schemes has] skyrocketed from 62,500 in 2009 to 150,000 in 2012 … People on welfare who are not required to look for work will stay on welfare longer.'' He estimates that if the unemployed who are classified as ''non-job-seekers'' was included in the unemployment baseline number, the rate would be 6.2 per cent.

Even the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds something is amiss with Australia's unemployment data, noting recently: ''The non job-seeker population is so large that it needs more analysis and attention.''

Not good, considering that when Rudd came to power in 2007 the official, uncooked, unemployment rate was 4.5 per cent. Despite a resources boom and $300 billion in government deficit spending, the unemployment rate has risen about 37 per cent under Labor."

http://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2013/sp-ag-100413.html

There you go Alan, just for you.

So what really did save Australia's economy?

Whatever it was it was not Labor.

Ludwig;
The interest is not $millions, it is $Billions.
Even at 1% it is $3,000,000,000 a year.
I have a feeling that a lot of it is 2% to 3%.

Just our fuel import bill will soon be $115,000,000 A DAY plus processing in Singapore.

It is about time the pollies realised that we are close to world
wide zero growth. Some countries are already there some are sliding
there a bit slower, but eventually we will all get there.

Sustainable economies are the only way and that demands zero population growth.

Anyone who thinks we can have continous growth is either a madman or an economist.