Dutton says the GFC is ‘ancient history’. If only that were true for voters like me

I remember 2009 pretty clearly. I’d just signed my very first lease for a crappy flat with a leaky roof on a main road, and was eking my way through uni by working odd shifts at a cafe and living off a monotonous diet of cous cous and tinned tuna.

Mumford and Sons and Florence and the Machine blasted on rotation from Triple J. Jager Bombs (on good pay weeks) and Passion Pop (on poor weeks) were the drinks of choice, and everything felt – well, it all felt a bit uncertain, to be honest.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

While part of that uncertainty could be attributed to being a young adult, much of it was also due to the Global Financial Crisis, which had begun the year earlier.

In 2009, Andrew Charlton, who is now the federal member for Parramatta, was then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s chief economic adviser. This week, he recounted to the ABC what it was like to have a front-row seat to watch the Australian economy freefall in real-time, and as the government scrambled to stem the bleeding.

“I saw the Australian economy on fire. I saw the Australian share market fall by more than 60 per cent,” Charlton said.

At that same time, Peter Dutton was the opposition minister for health, after serving as the opposition finance minister in 2008, and before that, as assistant treasurer in the Howard government. He was also, as we learnt this week, purchasing shares in a number of Australia’s big four banks – right as Australia’s sharemarket was tumbling, and declared just one day before the Rudd government announced its $4 billion bailout of the banks.

Labor has unsurprisingly spent this week on the attack, saying Dutton has “serious questions” to answer about what he knew when he purchased the shares, when they were sold, and any profit that was pocketed.

On Wednesday, Dutton said he had not been privy to any insider information about the government’s bailout, and said that “a lot of astute investors would have bought bank shares at the time”. He also dismissed it as “ancient history”.

I’ll give it to Dutton: from some angles, the pre-Instagram, solidly pro-iPod territory of late 2008 and early 2009 can feel like ancient history. But it was an era that shaped my generation, and not entirely for the better.

While unemployment didn’t skyrocket in Australia the way it did in other parts of the world during the GFC – it was roughly half that of the early 1990s recession – it did rise, peaking at 5.8 per cent in 2009.

Wage growth also began to stall, and besides a small uplift between late 2010 and early 2013, wages grew at under 3 per cent all the way through until 2022. By anyone’s measure, that’s hardly ancient history.

It’s nearly 13 solid years of stagnation, which impacted young Australians like me, who graduated into this economy, in myriad ways for well over a decade. Paying off university debt took longer. Saving money became harder. Starting a family had to be delayed.

At that same time, the local car manufacturing industry began to limp, which came not too long after Blundstone blamed rising cost pressures for the need to shutter its Tasmanian factory – whose workers I had served from my neighbour’s fish and chip shop during high school.

It’s an era that, honestly, I find difficult to look back on. I was always cold, often hungry, and everything from my job to my relationships and where I lived felt tenuous and uncertain. And I will be far from the only Millennial struggling to square my experience of 2009 with Dutton’s era of astute investing.

The recent revelations about his property trading prowess haven’t helped either. Again, to Millennials who have struggled to get a foot on the home ownership ladder at all, thanks to the market’s near-exponential rise since the early 2010s, learning that the man hoping to be Australia’s next prime minister has made $30 million of property transactions on 26 pieces of real estate over 35 years is a lot to take in.

Millennials, born between about 1981 and 1996, will be among the largest voting cohort this election. By birth year, it’s Millennials like me, born in the early 1990s, who will turn out in the greatest numbers.

It’s worth Peter Dutton keeping that in mind, and perhaps realising that to some of us, the repercussions of those days are anything but ancient history.

Rachel Clun is a former economics correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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