It could be worse, Deltaberry: The entire population could decide to just cheat outright on their taxes for a couple of years and that way we could all join Greece in the ****hole.
I agree a heck of a lot of Australian tax money is unproductively spent, but the point is, it is spent, and circulates back into the economy one way or another. Even the ludicrous spending on shiny school canteens and fighter planes that never seem to leave the ground is money spent, and re-spent, and re-spent (ala the economists' wonderous 'multipier').
Of course, I'd much prefer if our tax dollar were more carefully spent and we could get a far better bang for our buck, but lower taxes aren't by default the solution. We still need defence, police, infrastructure, hospitals, schools and all the rest, and few would argue we need less of them.
The size and cost of government increased significantly under Reagan, Thatcher and Howard after all, alongside wonderful tax relief for the better-off, but you have got to ask now, to what end?
If simply cutting taxes alone were the answer, we'd only need bureaucrats to run the world (I mean, how simple is that?). But they can't. They'll just **** it all up against a wall, because they're simply not business people. And yet the world changes every day, we naturally don't trust bureaucrats precisely because they don't have anything but their salaries on the line, and so we elect the worst of all possible choices - professional politicians - to navigate this changing world for us. (I'd much prefer philosopher kings, but they've really been in seriously short supply since Napoleon got clobbered at Waterloo.)
So how clever do you think your preferred politicians really are? Cleverer than mine? I'm willing to bet none of them are really that clever at all, really. Certainly, not as clever as you expect them to be in eliminating all wasteful spending, successfully reducing taxes without social breakdown and yet raising the country to tip-top form. I'm not spouting leftist ideology here, Deltaberry, I just don't believe in any of it. But nor can I trust rightist ideology, which has proven so often unsuccessful too.
How about we dump the ideologies and start asking not who, but what, a good government really needs to do with every cent of our tax dollars?