James O'Neill and David G

By balance you two mean stacking OLO with loony left rants.. there are plenty of such comments on OLO already. Bishop is entitled to push the Liberal party view and her comments her certainly not extreme or simple propaganda as other posters have suggested.. whether you actually agree with them or not is another matter..

OLO is one of the few websites in Aus with genuinely mixed and diverse opinions, so you will occasionally find articles you disagree with. Sad but true.

@Curmudgeon. It is a curious world view that you have if you see opinion divided into either those you obviously favor such as Ms Bishop's views on the one hand and "looney left rants" on the other. I neither subscribe to most of what Ms Bishop has to say nor to what you are pleased to call the looney left.

There is, and this may come as a surprise to you, a range of opinions on a spectrum. My complaint was that OLO persists in giving space to people like Ms Bishop who are singularly I'll informed on the topics they choose to write on, or the blatantly ignorant and biased such as David Singer.
Both insult our intelligence. While I agree that OLO provides a valuable site that does not preclude it from being better. My simple suggestion was that it begins with better contributors.

Cheryl, if you look more closely you will find the $247 billion is only
one part of the government debt.
I think it is mainly accumulated budget deficits.
To that has to be added the outstanding Aus Govt bonds, NBN costs and
some other off the books debts, such as unfunded super liabilities.
From other reports I have seen the total is some $700 + billion.

Hi Bazz, nope total Gov debt is $247B.

'Debt burden' is a loaded term. Debt is not always perilous as the Coalition would make it. It depends on what 'debt' has achieved in economic terms such as during the GFC. The money could have been better managed in some of this government's programs but that is another side-story.

Conversely there is no point in having a huge surplus as Howard did while letting infrastructure run down and queues in hospitals grow.

The Future Fund was a good idea but could have been further expanded to include partial offset for the ageing population as well not just public service pension commitments.

If the Coalition (and ALP for that matter) is concerned about ageing populations don't encourage the idea of economic growth as being wholly dependent on population growth or that unfettered growth and consumerism is then goal

The argument that Politicians constantly hide behind is that Australia's debt to GDP is relatively low compared to major economies in the world.

This must be attacked at its core! In the state of the GFC and massive international monetary crises Australia cannot afford to take on debts..in fact we must be paying off debt with substantial budgetary spending cuts..it is absurd that we argue about a balanced budget ..when we should rather be arguring about how much surplus we need to be allocating to repaying debt..realive international debt is a furfy! Look at Australia in an absolute sense to sort out our future for generations to come.