Comment: Claims by Australian banks on Greece are tiny

You might think that, after all this time,  local financial entanglement with Greece was near zero - and you'd be right.

Claims by Australian banks on Greece were A$68 million at March 2015 and, interestingly, a considered exposure. These claims in fact bottomed out a mere $1 million in early 2010.

Amusingly, the recorded peak of around $650 million was at the end of December 2008, suggesting Greece was seen as a European safe haven for Australian banks at one stage after the peak of the GFC.

To crib from one Facebook historian, Greece gained its independence in 1832, but found itself stranded on the periphery, having missed out on the centuries of economic development that many of the other European nation states had experienced.

Greece has been borderline a third world nation state since 1832. By 1890 it was basically bankrupt, triggering mass migration to the US.

It has lurched from one economic ruin to the next, defaulting in 1932, and being laid to ruins during World War Two. It made a brief economic recovery between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Never suited to the European integration project, its liability to default was evident from the beginning. The probability of this was only one of many devastating challenges to the European common currency during the genesis of that project.

There is no certainty Greece will vote to break with the Euro.

But experience suggests the grip of liberal ideology can be tight where it should be weak.

The weekend vote is thus as much a telling moment for global finance capital as it is for the far-left Syriza government  - and radicals everywhere.