Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

My response would be that with debt this elevated, we have to be very careful in terms of increasing the amount of borrowing we have. If we were going to borrow more for capital investment, we would have to be sure we were offsetting that somewhere around our current expenditure profile. I would be much more focused on getting the current spending down and making sure that gets back into balance. If that was the case and I could be confident we would be back in balance in the budget, I would be prepared to give a little more room, but there are so many things. One cannot keep borrowing for every project. We have to get the books back in order at some point.

That is not really for the benefit of the bond gods or anything like that, as I have said before. One of the reasons we could react so quickly to the pandemic and pull so hard on the fiscal lever was that we were in such good shape. We had budget surpluses for the two years coming into the pandemic. That is why we were able to respond as quickly as we did. We will have to prepare the economy for these cycles long into the future.