"So, how worried should we be about that debt? Much less than Turnbull wants us to be. He is exaggerating the size of the debt, misrepresenting the cause of the debt, exaggerating the difficulty we'll have repaying it, misrepresenting its effect on our prospects and pretending we'll end up with little to show for it...

"Nor is the debt ''massive'' or ''mountainous''. The typical home buyer borrows two or three times their annual income and manages the repayments without great stress. At the projected peak in the net debt of $203 billion in June 2014, it will be equivalent to just 14 per cent of the nation's annual income (the gross domestic product).

"Such a modest, manageable debt - a fraction of the relative size of the net public debts of all the major developed countries - will not take generations to pay off, not that it would matter greatly if it did."

These observations are from an article on the role of government debt in the economy.  Written by respected columnist Ross Gittins in The Age on 8th August , 2009, the complete article can be found here.