The world was reeling from the mistakes and inflated greed of a handful of Wall Street bankers and pin-striped City yahoos in London, newspapers were full of doomsayers touting the end of civilisation as we know it, shares were in freefall across the planet, but we had a shedload of free cash to spend on bright plastic things for the kids and a couple of cases of bubbly to see us through to Boxing Day.

Good old Australia.

The cash, you see, was a truly wonderful example of clear and simple thinking from the powers that be over in the cultural desert that is Canberra. Our Federal Government, struck by the seriousness of the world’s financial situation, decided to take a bold, obvious even, move to make sure the tills kept ringing in Australia.

The crisis, credit crunch, call it what you will, you see was supposed to see everyone scuttling home and taking on a puritan mantle. Bread and dripping for a while, dear. Time to tighten our belts and all that.

But, hell, Canberra was having none of that. If the good folk of the states and territories weren’t going to spend their own money, then they could spend some of the Federal Reserve’s.

To be fair, though, our relatively new prime minister had to do something. Like Barack Obama over in Washington, he was new to the power thing. Kevin Rudd had swept away the Liberal monolith that was the John Howard government only at the end of 2007, storming in like a two-buck shop Tony Blair to offer Australia a new direction. And, like Barack, you can picture his dismay when, just after landing the big chair, he realised that the house he’d inherited might need major repairs.

Australia’s a rich country, has been for a while now. Its expansive backyard is full of minerals. Iron, nickel, lead, plutonium, gold, you name it, it’s out there somewhere. And relatively close is the kind of customer entrepreneurs everywhere can only dream of – China, expanding, ambitious and with a seemingly bottomless pit of cash to spend was constantly beating down Australia’s door to snap up whatever ore it could produce.

So imagine poor Kevin’s dismay when all he really wanted to do was put shiny computers in schools, say sorry  to the Aboriginals and zip round the world smiling at world leaders, then he had to deal with an economic crisis and cries of recession from all and sundry.

He and, more recently, Barack must have cursed their seats of power’s previous tenants. At least Gordon Brown knew that he only had himself to blame: the head honchos of Oz and the US found themselves having to sort out someone else’s mess.

And Kev, like Barack, had become number one on a tidal wave of popular support. Australia honestly thought it would be better off under the misspelt Labor government. To suddenly be told that the cash cow was drying up was going to dent that popularity somewhat.

Hence then, the Christmas bonus scheme. Simply, Kevin told ‘low- and middle-income families’ they would get $1,000 per child for Christmas. No strings, just have it. Buy yourself something pretty. And it turned out that ‘low- and middle-income families’ accounted for 93 per cent of the families in Australia. Lots of happy, smiling voters there then. Add in the same bonus for pensioners and you’ve got the popularity stats right back up there.

Financially, though, what you’ve also got is a $3.9 billion injection into the country’s economy. Critics said that the ploy was destined for failure. No one would spend the windfall, they said. They’d all just stick it in their savings accounts, they said.

Did we? Did we hell. The tills rang loud and proud over Christmas and the cash injection did its job. And, happily, it didn’t result in the end of civilisation, as some knuckle-biting worry-heads would have had you believe. They’d said that the Aboriginals – not, note, the upstanding white Bogans that pepper the suburbs – no, the Aboriginals would spend it all on cheap liquor and their ghettos would explode in an orgy of wife-beating, child-molesting and general un-Australianness. That didn’t happen either, not that anyone reported that fact . . .

Still, good move by Kev and his pal Wayne Swan, the treasurer, and, to my mind, the brightest example of how this fledgling Labor government has taken, for want of a less skin-crawling phrase, a pro-active approach to tackling the slump.

Another simple-but-effective example of clear thinking from Kev and Wayne was the grandly-titled Federal Government Deposit Guarantee Scheme. This piece of locking the stable door before the horse bolted legislation fended off the kinds of scenes that peppered the Old Dart when Northern Rock rolled over and lay belly up and mewling. Poor punters of that once-proud financial institution formed long queues outside branches in run-down northern towns to withdraw all the cash they could and, presumably, take it home and hide it under their mattresses.

Kev and Wayne weren’t going to wait for that kind of malarkey to taint their first term in power. Instead they put the FGDG scheme into place and, quite simply, guaranteed all accounts in Australian-owned banks, building societies and credit unions up to $1 million dollars. That meant that if you had your life-savings in the likes of the ANZ or the spoonerism-tastic BankWest and you woke up one morning to hear that your financial institution had done a Northern Rock, you didn’t have to worry – Canberra had you covered. Again, the naysayers moaned a bit, saying Australia’s multi-millionaires would spread their wealth around myriad institutions, thus getting it all covered by the Rudd guarantee, but what’s wrong with that, eh? The end result was a feeling of calm from WA to Queensland and back.

And the – sorry I’m going to use it again – pro-active approach didn’t stop there. As it was in the US, the Australian car industry was having kittens. Our three big players, Holden, Ford and Toyota were looking at their worst sales figures in 30 years, 14.5 per cent down in 2008. In a country that’s slave to the automobile, this wasn’t good. Lenders weren’t helping – they were refusing to get involved with loans for cars – and all in all things were looking bleak for an industry that employed thousands across the country. Kev and Wayne, then, proved once more how deep the Federal Reserve’s pockets were and found $6.2 billion to prop up the automotive monoliths and things in that part of Oz steadied, slightly at least.

While all this was happening, of course, Britain was reeling and becoming a bit panicky about everything. Mortgage lending slumped by 10 per cent, Alistair Darling’s big eyebrows knotted even more than usual as the UK witnessed the biggest drop in GDP since 1990 and talk of a bonafide recession was bandied about.

As Australia naturally looks to Blighty for reassurance on these things, it was hard for the good folk of Perth, Sydney and the other outposts to keep their spirits up, even with their bank accounts covered and the prospect of a very merry Christmas on the back of the breeders’ bonus.

And it didn’t take long for the cracks to begin to show in WA despite the best efforts of Kev and Colin Barnett, the state’s new-but-actually-quite-old premier. After all, WA’s not used to being skint, not in recent times anyway. Mainly thanks to mining, it boasts a GDP bigger than New Zealand’s and the financial muscle generated from that has sparked a building boom that has seen suburbs spring up in northern Perth at a staggering rate.

But in November, it emerged that building approvals had more than halved in 12 months. Yes, there were still $564 million worth of new homes, schools, offices and the like going up, but even the laziest layman could compare that with the £1.32 billion worth that were on the cards in the same month in 2007 and see something was going awry.

When the reports came in, then, that this particular boom was waning, things looked a bit bleak. Interest rate cuts a plenty followed in an attempt to keep things going – they were slashed by three percentage points in 2008, including two big cuts of 1 percentage point each. It was the most aggressive reduction in interest rates by the Reserve since the 1990s recession. Good news for mortgage-holders, but not so good for everyone else. The glut of people who’d foregone the sharemarket for fixed term deposits in bank accounts found themselves looking at interest rates barely above the rate of inflation.

It seemed, then, that the idea of just being able to sit and watch your money grow of its own accord was becoming an impossible dream, a fact borne out by a glut of Australia’s oldies turning to the state for help. In the closing months of 2008, the amount of wrinklies applying for a pension rose by 50 per cent, a fact analysts viewed as being a whole load of grey-haired citizens who had once thought they could do without the $562.10 a fortnight thank you very much suddenly realising that they needed it to pay for their mooring fees.

And each day it seems that more examples are cropping up to prove that however hard Kev tries, he can’t keep the idiocies of bankers thousands of miles away from infesting his beautiful, big island. More and more industries are coming to the fore to lament their woes.

A fine example of the cultural differences of here and back home is that one of the latest to throw their hands up in despair is the pearling industry. Yep, not something Gordon Brown has to worry about, but the coves who make their living harvesting oyster pearls for the likes of landed gentry and Marge Simpson are, as they say over here, doing it tough. You may think this is just a cottage industry that makes little dent in the big picture, but there was a time not long ago that it was worth $200 million a year. That dropped to $140 million two years ago and the chaps who run the operations say this year’s going to be a fraction of that and are having to let their pearlers go left, right and centre.

And WA’s fashion industry’s feeling the pinch too. Their annual show’s been cut and they’re not flying in designers from around the world this time. Not hugely relevant, perhaps, but I just wanted to mention it because the Perth Fashion Festival’s director is called Mariella Harvey-Hanrahan, which is a simply brilliant name that I like saying. Go on, try it. Mariella Harvey-Hanrahan. See?

So, perhaps there is scope for pessimism in WA. After all, things aren’t anywhere as buoyant as they were this time last year. Should we then be cursing our choice? Should we be wishing we’d stayed in Staines, hung on in Hartlepool?

Honestly? Well, we’re no financial experts at Whingeing Pom, but we’re all glad we’re where we are. Over here, we’ve got new boys at the governmental helm who are intent on keeping the country more than ticking over. They have the advantage of being able to blame whatever woes they have to tackle on previous incumbents, leaving them able to be inventive, ambitious. Pro-active, even. Back home, Gord and Al have got to sort their mess out without admitting that it’s one they made themselves. And we all know how willing pollies are to admit mistakes and pull off dramatic u-turns.

And every day there are silver linings glinting through in this remote idyll. Most of them come courtesy of our friends the miners. BHP Billiton, for example, just shrugs nonchalantly at the global economic meltdown and continues to hoover up lucrative metals from beneath the red dirt as though nothing was amiss. They’ve even bit their thumbs at the building recession, announcing recently that they’re going to go ahead with their $500 million skyscraper in the middle of Perth’s CBD even if everyone else is quivering at the idea of throwing up a Nissan hut.

All in all then, you can’t help but think that we’ll weather the storm down here. And, hey, if you have to be skint, you might as well be skint near a beach.