The independent economist and former Treasury officer Chris Richardson, the leader of Treasury-in-Exile and thus chief apostle of fiscal rectitude, does the country a favour with his eternal campaigning to keep budget deficits and public debt levels low.

It works like Defence, where the retired generals do the talking for the serving generals, whose opinions must be expressed only to their political masters in private.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese deserve some credit for our economic good fortunes.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

But all those people who, only in recent times, have joined the protest march demanding an end to deficit and debt don’t want to do the country any favours. I’m no great admirer of the Albanese government, but that doesn’t make every criticism of its performance reasonable.

According to these partisans’ version of events, the budget was in surplus and doing fine until this terrible government started spending with abandon, plunging the budget into deficit, where it’s likely to stay for the next decade, leading to ever-rising public debt. So should some great global mishap come along, we’d be in deep doo-doo.

The first thing wrong with this narrative is its implication that the prospect of a decade of deficits is all Labor’s doing. There’s nothing new about budget deficits; the budget’s been in deficit for more than two in every three years in the past half-century.

You have to say there’s been an element of good management as well as good luck, for which Chalmers and Albanese deserve some credit.

What’s more, Treasury was projecting a decade of deficits in........

© The Sydney Morning Herald