Without our addiction to risk, the Aussie government was hardly touched by the downturn.

Arriving in Sydney from the deep economic depression of the Eurozone was a refreshing but curious transition. Not only to the sunny uplands of financial rectitude, but also to a place sheltered from the recessionary storm by an accident of geography and geology.

Having an abundance of some of the word’s most sought after minerals, notably iron ore, and being located as the nearest and most convenient supplier of these riches to the world’s most rapidly growing major economy, China, has stood Australia in very good stead in recent years.

Add in a robust banking system with almost no involvement in the fantasy land of derivatives, sub-prime loans and addiction to risk, and you have the exception that proves most of the rules of the current financial game. Unemployment is a miserly 5% and government debt is only a fraction of the levels endemic throughout Europe.  Business investment is growing strongly. Australia boasts four of the top ten most financially secure banks in the world, according to one credit rating agency.

There is some indication that consumer confidence is recovering from a temporary blip brought on by uncertainty about the timing of the forthcoming general election, now called for next month.

So almost the only clouds on the otherwise sunny wintry horizon are inflation, rising interest rates and much nervousness about one of only two housing bubbles around the globe which has yet to burst (the other being in China).  The Economist’s latest survey of global house prices awards Australia the dubious accolade of having the most over-valued housing in the developed world, based on the relationship to rental values.

Commentators are also niggling away at tales of credit rationing starving small businesses of working capital, just as the wholesale cost of bank funding is escalating to levels which are expected to prompt at least two further interest rate rises in 2010. SME’s are less able to negotiate competitive pricing for their facilities, which makes them far more vulnerable to this upward cost pressure than their larger corporate cousins.

Despite these minor negatives, the glamorous Quay restaurant with its spectacular views of the Sydney Opera House in one direction and the Harbour Bridge in the other seems to have no problem filling all its tables. Even at A$155 per head (nearly £100) for a four course gourmet extravaganza, washed down by top-priced Aussie wines.

Hotels were largely full, as was the flight from Hong Kong, a stark contrast to the two thirds empty planes plying the previously bustling Transatlantic route between London and New York. The air corridor linking Sydney and Melbourne is now the busiest passenger route in the world.

And if there was any doubt that the luck of the Irish has migrated down under, what other government would find a A$5bn revenue windfall hidden away in its books, just after having to concede tax reductions of almost exactly the same magnitude to its vital mining industry and only a few weeks before facing its electorate? The UK’s new Coalition Government can only dream of such good fortune.