WHOSE TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT?

The Trillion Dollar Debt

The usual long line of anti-Labor correspondents dominated the Letters Pages of the West Australian newspaper recently. They criticised the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese and his Treasurer, Jim Chalmer,  for giving Australia a gross National debt of one trillion dollars

To provide some balance to these numerous critical correspondents may I introduce a few facts.            The trillion dollar gross debt (one thousand billion dollars) is the product of decisions made by several  governments over more than a decade. Over $600 billion of this debt was incurred by the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison LNP governments from 2013 to 2022. They provided a decade of deficit budgets.

When the LNP formed government in 2013, the gross debt was roughly $280 billion dollars. By 2020 it had risen to $568 billion dollars. That is an increase of around $288 billion dollars prior to the Covid pandemic. As would be expected, debt rose sharply during the pandemic. However, it was Morrison’s well intentioned, but profoundly flawed Covid Recovery Package, that added $320 billion dollars to the debt. When Morrison left office in March 2022 the gross debt was $885.5 billion. A huge increase of $600 billion dollars from what they had inherited from Labor in 2013.

Morrison’s Covid  Recovery Package gave millions of dollars to rich companies that did not need the money, did not ask for it and, sadly, did not have to pay it back. Instead of using it for covid recovery projects they awarded their executives huge bonuses and increased their shareholders’ dividends.            We should remember these facts when the LNP and the West Australian  Newspaper tells us the LNP  are always better money managers than Labor. The facts are otherwise. 

We may also recall that Sir Robert Menzies, gave us ten deficit budgets in a row, from 1957 until he retired in 1966. Sir Robert boasted about these deficits at election time, saying that he was investing in Australia's future. It sems the only time the LNP and the West Australian get really upset about deficit budgets is when they are from Labor governments. A bit like preferential voting. The Liberal Party thinks it is wonderful that it gets the preferential votes of the National Party. Yet, LNP politicians are now highly critical of the fact that Labor was receiving preferential votes from The Greens.

Back to the trillion dollar debt.                                                                                                                In the four years since 2022, when the debt, thanks to Morrison's flawed Covid Recovery Package, had ballooned out to $885 billion,  Albanese’s Labor government has only increased the gross debt by about $15 billion. Not great, maybe, but considerably better than the government that immediately preceded it.                                                                                                                                                      During that time, the Albanese government restored our symbiotic relationship with our greatest trading partner, China.  Despite the terrible damage done to  Australian and world economies  by Trump’s insane high tariffs and his undeclared wars on Venezuela and Iran,  Albanese’s Labor government  tackled inflation and provided increased wages and  tax cuts to middle and low income earners. It also resuscitated a dying, neglected, cash starved Medicare and  pumped more money into government education to fully implement the Gonski education funding reforms, first mooted in 2009. During the decade of LNP government, spending on private school’s was double the rate of spending on government schools. After a decade of LNP climate change denial, Labor has also been on the front foot establishing cheaper and cleaner renewable energy sources.

Unlike the West Australian's regular claque of anti-Labor letter writers complaining loudly about Labor's trillion dollar debt, I know where $600 billion of that debt came from. A fact carefully concealed by these angry letter writers and The West Australian newspaper.  I am very glad that Labor has been in charge of our economy in these worldwide very tough economic times.                                  History tells us it could have been disastrously different.