I'm a fan of the Howard/Costello Govt, but I think their good management was matched by the good luck of the China Boom.
Contrast the Australian experience with the Blair/Brown government in the UK.
Gordon Brown preached fiscal responsibility. He emphasized the need to get the national debt down to 40% of GDP. He claimed repeatedly that it was OK for the government to borrow at the low point of the "economic cycle", provided they paid it back during the good years.
Of course the problem with that is that you can't know the duration of an economic cycle until after it has happened.
As the 2000s progressed, Gordon Brown somehow convinced himself, the government, and the people that we were in the "lean years" and that now was the time to borrow. In fact, those turned out to be the boom years.
So when the banks imploded, the UK was already in a bad situation regarding government debt.