Some numbers are so large they stop meaning anything. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux set out to make one of them real. Last Thursday, he told listeners, this country’s federal debt passed one trillion dollars, a one with twelve zeros after it, or one thousand billion dollars. And that, he stressed, is the Canberra figure alone.
What A Trillion Looks Like
Jeremy wanted people to sit with the scale. A trillion dollars is not something to shrug off in a headline; it is a debt, he argued, that we, our children and our grandchildren will carry and eventually repay. The sooner that starts, he said, the better, because the interest alone is becoming intolerable.
What troubled him most was how little there is to show for it. The country has run up a trillion dollars in federal debt and received, in his words, nothing much beyond a masterclass in what not to do, government waste and mismanagement on a grand scale.
$569 Million A Week, Just In Interest
Then came the figure Jeremy found most staggering. The interest on that trillion-dollar debt, he said, runs to about $29.6 billion a year. He had done the arithmetic: that is roughly $569.23 million every single week, paid purely in interest, before a cent of the debt itself is touched.
Can the great Australian family, he asked, keep paying $569 million a week in interest? Spread across every man, woman and child, week after week, it is money that buys nothing, builds nothing and repays nothing. It simply services the borrowing.
A Government That Does Not Try
For Jeremy, the debt is not misfortune but mismanagement. This Labor government, he argued, is shocking at handling money, and he is not sure it even tries. The borrowing has climbed, in his telling, while fraudsters rort the NDIS and the country sinks deeper into the red with little to show for it.
His frustration was sharpened by a sense that the problem is being ignored. He noted wryly that when people list what keeps them awake at night, government debt sits about eleventh. All this government has to do, he suggested, is make sure we do not wake up to it, and it can carry on regardless.
The Accountability Question
Jeremy’s deepest concern was political. If a government can preside over mismanagement on this scale, run the national debt to a trillion dollars and still be re-elected, then, he said, God help us. The absence of consequence, in his view, is what lets the pattern continue.
The trillion-dollar milestone, for Jeremy, was not just a number but a test of whether accountability still means anything. A debt that costs $569 million a week to service is, he argued, the clearest possible measure of a government’s record, and one the public should refuse to let drift quietly into the background.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
