Kevin Rudd came to power for the first time on December 3rd 2007, just a few months after the global financial crisis commenced, and some time before its severity was truly appreciated by the political classes of any nation. On September 7, he lost office for the last time.
The first election he won was a bad one to win, not because he was blamed for the calamity of the GFC itself of course, but because his entire term was dominated by reacting to it.
That reaction had parts that could be rubbished (everything from the Liberal Party’s favourite farce of the Pink Batts program to my pet hate, the First Home Vendors Boost) but a simple comparison of Australia’s economic performance to that of the rest of the OECD over the last six years shows that his reaction worked – see Figure 1, which shows unemployment in Australia, the US and Ireland. Unemployment never exceeded six per cent here, and growth turned negative for only one quarter. The US, on the other hand, had its longest post-war recession ever, and Europe’s obsession with austerity turned its downturn into a genuine second Great Depression.
