I'm sorry, what?
Australia has basically the strongest and most stable economy in the world. That includes our fundamentals like average joe blow's quality of life and financial situation, as well as the regulatory framework of our financial institutions. Howard largely just maintained the status quo of the Hawke-Keating years in terms of economic policy, with some extra tweaking like the GST (which Hawke initially proposed anyway). I'm not about to give him much credit for coasting on Hawke's reforms and the mining boom, but he sure as heck didn't dig us into a hole or anything (WorkChoices was dead within a year).
If anything, this crisis has been a boon for average joe because it significantly eases food costs, petrol costs, and mortgages costs.
I have absolutely no idea how you can possibly conflate America's financial crash with any sort of 'fuck up' here