Austerity is primarily about redistributing political power towards rentiers away from workers and the middle classes, and about running national budgets like a kitchen budget.

Some austerians are perfectly capable of believing that austerity is actually expansionary in a general sense.

Others only care that it's expansionary for 'investors' - which it often is.

Neither position is about intelligent conservation of scarce resources, or about innovating to work around the need for conservation.