Don’t worry about Australia’s budget position, the Asian head of the International Monetary Fund Anoop Singh insisted yesterday — our debt levels are just 10% of GDP and we maintain a triple-A sovereign debt rating from the three major credit agencies:

“The next budget will lay out the government’s plan to achieve a strong fiscal position … essentially the government has remained keen to return the budget to surplus, and this is a praiseworthy objective that we have supported.”

So why is the Prime Minister telling us to be alert and alarmed — of the “grave and urgent decisions” ahead — while delivering decades of Christmases at once to the Coalition? As Bernard Keane writes today:

“For a government that is flat out communicating even the simple message that it has masterfully managed an economy in unusual and challenging global circumstances, such nuance was certainly beyond Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday.”

Don’t expect the nation’s leading commentators to help explain it — they’re too busy screaming about the falling sky. The Australian Financial Review editorial even has the nerve to suggest the dramatic fall in revenue could have been avoided if only the government had listened:

“The Prime Minister portrays the ‘significant fiscal gap’ as an unfortunate and unforeseeable accident, which ‘wasn’t even forecast a few months ago’. But the Financial Review privately warned the highest level of government about this more than four months ago, only to be dismissed.”

Sorry? Privately warned? When did the AFR become a government economic consultant? What else has it been telling Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan to do?

The only sensible call today came from The Age‘s economics editor Tim Colebatch. He wrote:

“A month before we vote on September 14, Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson and Finance secretary David Tune will release their own uncensored estimates of Australia’s budget position, thanks to Peter Costello’s Charter of Budget Honesty. I think we need to match it now with a similar innovation: the Charter of Newspaper Honesty.

“This would require newspapers to report budget issues accurately, impartially, and without ignoring issues of relevance. That would be a bit of innovation for some of our papers, who, like the North Korean press, feel they have a duty to guide their readers constantly by ensuring that everything is reported through the prism of eternal truths, such as The Gillard government is bad or Government spending is too high.“

Innovation, indeed. If we can’t even trust the government to be honest about its own budget challenges, somebody has to sort fact from hysterical fiction.