As Australia heads towards a possible double dissolution election on July 2, Deputy Liberal Leader Julie Bishop has sought to attack Labor's economic record.

"We've never seen such record levels of debt and deficit as were bequeathed to us by the former Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Government, and Bill Shorten was part of all of that," she told Sky News on April 19.

It's not the first time Ms Bishop has made this claim.

Sorry, this video has expired Watch John Barron award Julie Bishop the golden zombie in our wrap-up of fact checking in 2015.

She also made it in early 2015, when she referred to the Abbott government's budget legacy from the previous Labor administration as "the worst set of financial accounts inherited by any incoming government in Australia's history".

Fact Check found that claim to be wrong, but Ms Bishop has continued to repeat it.

At the end of 2015, she even received Fact Check's coveted golden zombie, for the undead claim of the year.

The original claim

Ms Bishop referred to the "set of financial accounts" bequeathed to the Coalition in several different interviews at the beginning of 2015, repeatedly framing her claim in terms of debt and deficit.

The budget papers show that Mr Abbott inherited a $19 billion annual deficit and accumulated net debt of $153 billion when he took office in September 2013.

Fact Check found that whilst these numbers were nominally larger than other budget inheritances, economists said that these actual dollar amounts could not sustain long-term comparisons due to inflation.

"The value of money in different time periods is different and a dollar today may be worth less than a dollar ten or twenty years ago," Sydney University economist Michael Rafferty said.

"If I told you that the average mortgage in 1990 was $200,000, today that figure might be more like $380,000 to $400,000. So nominally, mortgage debt today is nearly double the 1990 figure. But of course incomes have grown in the last 25 years, so if household income has doubled over that time, the amounts are in proportion."

Experts said the only reliable method was to look at the numbers as a percentage of GDP, rather than dollar amounts.

Fact Check considered Ms Bishop's claim in three ways: annual budget deficits in handover years; the accumulation of net debt, the most commonly quoted figure today; and gross debt, the only figure available stretching back to Federation.

Kevin Rudd left Mr Abbott a deficit of 1.2 per cent of GDP, net debt of 10 per cent of GDP and gross debt of 16.9 per cent of GDP.

Fact Check found that large borrowings to fund Australia's participation in World War I and World War II and the impact of the Great Depression led to much higher deficits and levels of accumulated debt than any government has experienced since.

For example, John Curtin's incoming government in 1941 inherited a deficit of 10 per cent of GDP.

When it comes to debt, the gross level received by Mr Abbott was vastly smaller than the 71 per cent inherited by Robert Menzies when he took office in 1949 in the aftermath of World War II and the 50 per cent depression-era level handed over by James Scullin to Joseph Lyons in 1932.

Even in more recent times, John Howard inherited a worse set of accounts relative to GDP than Mr Abbott.

In 1996, Mr Howard was left a deficit of 2.9 per cent of GDP, net debt of 16.8 per cent and gross debt of 21.3 per cent.

So despite Ms Bishop's multiple repetitions of the claim, she was, and is still, wrong.