Australia\u2019s former top treasury official has delivered a blunt warning about the nation\u2019s finances and accused successive governments of losing sight of the dangers posed by persistent defecits and rising spending.<\/p>\n
Martin Parkinson, who served as treasury secretary and later secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, said both Labor and the Coalition had failed to adequately confront Australia\u2019s long-term Budget position.<\/p>\n
He questioned whether the Albanese government could realistically deliver a sustained return to surplus, arguing the economy should be generating stronger Budget outcomes at this point in the economic cycle.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s almost like debt is not an issue for anybody anymore because the concern dissipated during the COVID crisis and nobody\u2019s ever refocused on it,\u201d Dr Parkinson told the Australian Financial Review.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere we are in the economic cycle, we should be running significant structural surpluses, and yet we\u2019ve got a structural, and headline, deficit.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we take the Budget papers as correct, it takes a decade to get back to a headline surplus. Even then, we get a surplus in part because of the assumptions on terminating expiring programs. But we know terminating programs don\u2019t always terminate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are consuming today, and our children are going to pay for it with their tax burden.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s former top treasury official has delivered a blunt warning about the nation\u2019s finances and accused successive governments…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[64,63,99,84,1720],"class_list":["post-858172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-politics","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}