No one would remember the Good Samaritan if hed only had good intentions; he had money as well.

Those words were spoken at the dawn of the neoliberal era in 1980 by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and they sum up the attitude that led to the Global Financial Crisis which celebrates its 10th anniversary today.

The Thatcherite ideology was pretty simple: deregulate financial markets, lower taxes, privatise state-owned industry, let companies and individuals get as rich as they possibly can, and all will be well. Yes it will lead to inequality, but it will also increase wealth; and wealth will drag up the poor people, as Mrs Thatcherput it.

It was an ideology that extended beyond economics. It became a religion.

Britain in the 1970s was in crisis. The quasi-socialist post-war consensus government ownership of industry, a massive welfare state, and a pact between governments and trade unions had hit a wall. Inflation was going crazy, wages were failing to keep up, and efforts to bring the economy under controlby cutting public sectorpay led to massive, nation-crippling industrial action. By the end of the decade the population was sick of unions, and wanted to give Mrs Thatchers radical new vision a whirl.

I was born in London four years after Thatcher came to power, and by the time Ibecame consciousher once-fringeideas were mainstream.

In theenvironment I grew up in, if you didntaccept that there was, in a deep, cross-party sense, no alternative, you were at best a well-meaning naf, at worst a wicked (but obsolete) socialist. London in the 1980sand 90s was a city that really lived by _Wall Street_protagonistGordon Gekkos memorable mantra: Greed, forlack of a better word, is good.

The UK and the US were the epicentresof this ideology. US-based economist Milton Friedman and UK-based economist Friedrich Hayek were the new movements spiritual leaders; Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were its political agents. It quickly spread around the globe.

Australia, it seems, was spared some of the excesses of the new wave that hasbecome known as neoliberalism. That may be because it happened during the Hawke-Keating government, and whilethat government did buy into a good deal of the Thatcherite policies, it managed to implement them in a more conciliatory way.

As a Brit with Aussie parentage, who has grown upin both cultures, Australia has never seemed to me as intensely money-worshipping as the UK was before the GFC.

_Before_being the operative word. The GFC didnt hit Australia nearly as hard as it did the UK, and as a result there doesnt appear to have been a particularly profound ideological shift.

But in the UK the shift is unmissable. The 2008 crash devastated the UKs real economy, not just its share market as in Australia, and the effects are still being felt. The population is utterly disillusioned. Two huge events of recent years demonstrate this: Brexit, and the rise of the UK Labour Partys very left wing leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Brits no longer openly worship money, and those that do worship it do so quietly and shamefully. Thats because of the GFC.

I went back to live in London for 18 months in 2015, and worked as a financial journalist. I was struck by how unflashy the City of London had become. It almost seemed ashamed of itself. Thats not to say the finance industry was actually_better_. But it wasnt as openly arrogant as it used to be.

What Im getting at isits no longer really acceptable to worship money the way it was in the decades leading up to the GFC. This is a huge cultural shift, and we clearly have the GFC to thank for it. It was a hard lesson to learn, and it hit those least responsible for it you know, the poor people the hardest. But that ideological shift away from rampant greed is surelythe one positive legacy of the GFC.

Britain is now paying a high price for itsardent conversiontothe gospel of money. So is the US. Australia has got away with only minor scars partly thanks to good policy, but probably more so because its in Asia and has loads of iron ore.

That puts Australia in a privileged position: while the Brits waste the best part of a decadetrying to figure outBrexit, and the US spend perhaps as long courting disaster under President Trump, Australia can watch and learn the lessons of the GFC and the neoliberal experiment without feeling its pain too harshly.

And hopefully the whole world (climate, economics and geopolitics permitting) will come out the other side a bit less greedy.

This article was published by The New Daily on the 14th of September 2018.