How're the Nervous Nellies?

Okay, Boomer, interest rates were much higher back in your day. Geoff Pryor shows then Treasurer Paul Keating in the racing driver’s seat and then Finance Minister Peter Walsh navigating, with Keating deriding nervous backbenchers. To slow things down, mortgage interest rates were raised as high as 17 per cent – briefly – and by the end of 1990 the economy had been tipped into a recession which, in a show of bravado, Keating claimed was ‘the recession we had to have’.