After promising to deliver the first budget surplus since 2007-08,the Morrison government is this year expectinga record deficit of $197.7 billion this financial year. Gross debt is at a record $807 billion and forecast to climb to $1.1 trillion by the end of the decade.
The Reserve Bank has cut official interest rates to a record low of 0.1 per cent while engaging in quantitative easing to support the economy. It is creating more than $160 billion to buy government debt while extending a $200 billion line of credit to commercial banks.
Mr Anderson,who served on the Howard government's expenditure review committee as it produced budget surpluses in all but two of its years in power,said the lessons of the dangers of government debt were being deliberately ignored.
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He said the key message of the 1996 election was that debt was"inter-generational theft"and that had not changed.
"It is so easy to simply borrow and concerns about indebtedness seem to have really weakened. We seem to have this idea you can just print money and throw at any problem we have,"he said in an interview to mark the release of the 2000 cabinet papers by the National Archives of Australia.
"I think this is an absolute slight against the next generation. We desperately need a clear explanation of why we are setting up our children for failure."