To grasp how far the country has slipped, Jeremy Cordeaux argued on this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, you have to remember how good things once were. Just twenty years ago, Australia owed nothing. Today it owes a trillion dollars. The gap between those two points, in his telling, is the entire story.
The Costello Benchmark
Jeremy took listeners back to April 2006, when Treasurer Peter Costello declared Australia debt-free. It was not a slogan but a fact: the nation’s debt had been cleared in full. And Costello, Jeremy noted, went further than balancing the books. Through the sale of Telstra, he set up the Future Fund, a national nest egg to help meet the country’s long-term liabilities.
That, for Jeremy, is the yardstick against which today’s numbers should be measured. A country that once owed nothing, and had savings put aside for the future, now carries a trillion dollars of debt and pays hundreds of millions a week merely to service it.
Eyeing Off The Nest Egg
Jeremy’s admiration for the Future Fund came with a warning. That pool of money, he suggested, is exactly what a government short of cash starts eyeing. He would bet, he said, that the current government looks at it every single day of the week.
The worry is simple. A fund built in the good years to cover future obligations becomes a tempting target when borrowing spirals. Raiding it, in Jeremy’s view, would be the final insult, spending tomorrow’s savings to cover today’s mismanagement.
From Surplus To Servicing Debt
The contrast Jeremy drew was stark. In 2006, the debate was about what to do with a surplus and how to invest for the future. Today, it is whether the great Australian family can keep paying roughly $569 million a week in interest on a trillion-dollar debt.
Nothing about the country’s underlying wealth, he implied, made this inevitable. Australia has the same resources, people and capacity it had in 2006. What changed, in his account, was the management, a switch from paying debt down to piling it on.
Remember What Was Possible
For Jeremy, recalling 2006 was not nostalgia but evidence. It proves, he argued, that a debt-free Australia is no fantasy; it existed within living memory, achieved by deliberate choices to live within the country’s means and plan ahead.
He wondered aloud what Peter Costello would make of the current figures, and said he would love to get him on the Friday show to ask. The trillion-dollar debt, set beside the debt-free Australia of 2006, was for Jeremy the sharpest illustration of a simple truth: the money was managed well once, and it can be again, if the will exists.
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.
