The man with just about the hardest job in the world right now is the finance minister of Greece. It’s teetering on the brink of economic collapse and just this week avoided defaulting on its massive debt by doing a deal with its European creditors.
The man who has to persuade ordinary Greeks that the government knows what it’s doing is finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek Australian former academic, left-wing maverick and style renegade who’s changing the way Europe does business.
Mr Varoufakis lived in Australia for 12 years teaching economics at the University of Sydney. He still makes regular visits to Sydney to see his young daughter. He told ABC there is no doubt that Australia has left an indelible mark on him.
“Most people who know me see that, even better than I can see,” he told ABC. When asked in what way he said: “Well … in the way in which I dismiss nonsense without caring too much about decorum. Maybe I was influenced by my great admiration of Paul Keating, but at the same time, my criticism of him is, this was the “recession you had to have” back in 1991, because I don’t believe that anybody has to have a recession if one calibrates one’s macroeconomic policy correctly. But, yes, the Australian influence is all over me,” Mr Varoufakis said.