Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

and given the most unprecedented impact in financial and economic terms since the Great Depression of some 75 years ago, and an unprecedented global financial crisis, given the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The collapse of Lehman Brothers highlighted the difficulties that were surfacing and consequently surfaced when Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy almost exactly a year ago. Lehman Brothers was the largest and most high profile casualty of the meltdown that wiped some $1.6 trillion from the balance sheets of the world’s banks.

Looking back, at the time George W Bush was then President of the United States, as I recall. He was certainly no left-of-centre member of the G20, as Mr Hockey recently twitted in a thought bubble that he outlined last week. President Bush warned of the imminent collapse of the entire capitalist system and his administration enacted several US government rescue packages, including the purchase of investment bank Bear Stearns—that is nationalisation, for those socialists in the Liberal opposition—the nationalisation of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the stabilisation of AIG, the American insurance giant. President Bush at the time said:

I’m a market oriented guy, but not when I’m faced with the prospect of a global meltdown.

But, most worrying, those opposite in the Liberal opposition have learnt little from these experiences. They did support the first economic security strategy, albeit somewhat grudgingly— (Time expired)