Coalition warns next generation will bear the cost as national debt surpasses $1 trillion

The federal oppositon has accused Labor of having no plan to rein in Australia’s debt after the national bill climbed above $1 trillion on Thursday.

Interest payments are now approaching $30 billion a year, with taxpayers spending more to service the debt than on child care, unemployment benefits or the Australian Defence Force.

The milestone reflects roughly $36,000 of debt per person, driven by pandemic-era spending and rising costs of government services.

Deputy Opposition Leader Jane Hume criticised the government’s spending on Sunrise on Friday, claiming it would take 100 years to clear Labor’s debt even if $20,000 was paid off every hour.

“Labor doesn’t have a plan to pay down debt; they only have a plan for more deficits and more debt, and that’s going to cost the next generation,” she said.

Hume argued “only the Coalition has a genuine plan to pay down debt” through its proposed future generations fund, which would use sovereign wealth generated from Australia’s resources to reduce the amount owed.

“The Labor government has received $400 billion in windfall revenue gains just in the last four years. And it’s all been spent. It’s gone,” Hume said.

“Their budget says that they are expecting deficits in every year for the next decade. Now, people at home know that if you’ve racked up a debt, you don’t keep spending on your credit card. But that’s exactly what Labor are doing.”

Health Minister Mark Butler defended the government’s record, acknowledging the trillion-dollar milestone was significant but noting Australia’s debt remained relatively low compared with countries including Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan.

“This is a big headline number; there’s no question about it. We also need to put it in international context… our debt is much lower than other countries we compare ourselves to,” Butler told Sunrise on Friday.

“There’s a constant task of governments to manage that debt, get it down as much as possible, try and find ways to deliver savings in budget so we can have things like the back to back surplusses we delivered early in our term,” he said.

“We’ve got debt down by almost $200 billion against the projections that we inherited back in 2022. But there’s more for us to do. We delivered $60 billion of savings in this year’s budget. More than three-quarters of that came from my portfolio.”

Butler argued Australia’s debt would have passed $1 trillion three years earlier if Labor had followed the trajectory inherited from the former Coalition government.

“It would have been $1.2 trillion if we’d done nothing over the last four or five budgets,” he said.