Reckless government spending is imposing a burden on future generations. The plain fact is that spending across all three levels of government is exceeding $500 billion a year and, while some of this spending is necessary, a lot of it isn't.

The TARGET30 campaign recently launched by the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) has identified areas of waste where government spending is ill targeted (such as welfare for wealthy families) or inefficient (such as welfare for wealthy corporations, aka industry assistance) - and there is more inefficiency and waste yet to be identified.

The growth trend in Australia's public spending is unsustainable. We need to look only at southern Europe to see what happens to countries with bloated, unsustainable public sectors. And while apologists for big government allege that the number of public servants has remained steady in recent years, this does not mean Australia's public sector isn't bloated. Employee-related costs have increased markedly over recent years despite improvements in information technology and electronic/virtual service delivery. In the past four years, workforce costs have grown 31 per cent across state, federal and local governments.

Since the launch of TARGET30, there have been predictable complaints that the CIS is proposing ''savage cuts'' (by Andrew Leigh, federal member for Fraser) in a ''shrill tone'' (by Nadine Flood, national secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union).