If there’s one angle on the news that works, it’s: “scare the pants off them.” As one news reader once explained: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

That’s why the AFR today has led with “A decade of budget repair ahead”. I’d change this to: “A decade of debt but don’t worry. Be happy!”

If there’s one thing most normal people don’t get, it’s the world of the Federal Budget, deficits and debt.

Let me show you why. Last Friday we saw the progress score on how the deficit blew out because of the Coronavirus, the related lockdowns and the Government’s rescue programme.

In 2019-20, the national government net debt increased to $491.2 billion (or 24.8% of GDP) and gross debt increased to $684.3 billion (or 34.4% of GDP).

The dollars are scary — who can think $684 billion is a small amount of money? However, we are a $1.4 trillion dollar economy.

So the Government or ‘business’ that runs the economy has debt of about 34.4% of what we produce, if you look at our gross debt. And if we look at the net debt at 24.8% of GDP, which is smaller because we lend a lot of money overseas.

Look at the normal household, which can have debt to what they earn as income. We have people with combined incomes of $200,000 borrowing a million dollars. This is a debt: income ratio of 500%!

The trick when you’re in debt is to keep your job or make sure your business is growing and producing plenty of income to service the debt. And that’s why Josh Frydenberg will be throwing a hell of a lot of money at the economy and raising the debt-to-GDP level to ensure the Australian economy grows like topsy over the next decade.

In reality, if the media was optimistically-inclined, a better headline to “A decade of budget repair” could be “A decade of growth and innovation ahead!”.

The Budget will be handed down Tuesday week and Josh will be throwing money at creating jobs, stimulating businesses to invest and getting crucial, overdue, infrastructure programmes happening.

I’m calling this the “Whatever it takes Budget”, with a sideline that says: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

There’s going to be about $250 million for getting local tourism going to encourage those Aussies who are addicted to overseas travel to discover their own country. In 2018-19, we spent $65 billion overseas. If that was spent here, it would help the economy grow faster than economists are predicting.

And I love the idea that employers will be given financial incentives to employ people. The business owners who haven’t be devastated by the virus (or who might have actually done well) will be potential employers.

The AFR survey said the economists tipped:

• In 2020, the economy has a 4% contraction.
• In 2021, we see a 2.6% expansion.
• Victoria’s second lockdown has held us back.
• Despite Victoria, unemployment should top out around 8% rather than the 10% once forecasted.

Before the pandemic was declared, we were tipped to have a $7 billion surplus this financial year. Now it could be a $200 billion deficit.

The best-case scenario was put out there by Morgans chief economist, Michael Knox, who suggested if a vaccine shows up soon and economies respond positively, with all this planned big budget spending here and in all countries around the world, we could be on the doorstep of a roaring 2020s, like that of the 1920s, which incidentally followed the Spanish flu pandemic that claimed 50 million lives. At last count, we’ve had 995,000 deaths worldwide.

Apart from the big spending, this national economic crisis will put pressure on problem groups in the economy to lift their game. Governments and public servants should be forced to reduce red tape obstacles to growth and jobs.

For example, think of the council barriers to people wanting to spend money on building projects. Think about councils overcharging for restaurants wanting to put tables and chairs outside on a footpath.

The need for jobs and growth should force old and silly practices to be killed off.

Unions will be asked to be more flexible and so many great innovations put forward by business that ended up in the “too hard basket”, might actually see the light of day.

I don’t know how long it will take to repair our Budget because I don’t know how fast we’ll grow, what the tax cuts will be, what change of practices will happen, how we’ll deal with China and who’ll be the US president after November 3.

But one thing I do know is that we need money thrown at the problem. And we need dumb, old, unproductive practices to be canned.

When I first started in radio in 1987 at Triple M, it was after the 1987 stock market crash. We rang one of the world’s most eminent economists, J.K. Galbraith, who was living in Switzerland. I asked him this: “What will the crash do to the world economy?” And he taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. He said to me: “Peter, there are those economists who say they don’t know and then there are those poor fellows who don’t know they don’t know!”

Our world record of nearly 30 years of economic growth without a recession, gives me confidence that we can tackle this Coronavirus economic problem and do ourselves proud, provided sensible realists dominate the policy/spending decisions that governments and businesses will have to make over the next decade.

The great business achievers, like the sports heroes many of us idolize, have shown us that a threat is the best way to see an opportunity that drives future success.

Go Josh! Go Australia! And be happy!