whitlam the worst pm yet!, page-38

leeva1, I don't know off hand what gross debt Whitlam had, but Howard's gross debt was around $50 billion.

But the measure for a surplus is by using the net figure, not the gross. So a government can have a gross debt but still have a net surplus.

So Whitlam's surplus is calculated in the same way as Howard's surplus.

Below is a table of the last 40 odd years with the net debt which shows the years of the surpluses.

(This table shows Whitlam's surplus as 2.7% of GDP in 1975, and not the 2.6% of GDP in my previous post.)