Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

What former Treasurer Peter Costello has also said in the past, what we have said in the past—he is a giant of Australian politics, of course—is that the debt number that is actually the most relevant is government net debt. And government net debt, both in dollar terms and as a share of GDP, is projected to peak in 2018-19 at $375.1 billion and at 19.8 per cent, and then it is projected to reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce to the point where, by 2027-28, it is projected to come down to 8½ per cent of the share of GDP—8½ per cent of the share of GDP. The Labor Party are playing politics, but they cannot go past the fact that, if Labor were still in government, on the policy settings that they left behind after the most shameful period in government in the history of the Commonwealth, debt would be much worse today than what it is. We have made significant progress in reducing the level of debt, compared to what it would have been under Labor.