Ten years on from the global financial crisis, Australian voters are comfortable that the $52bn stimulus package launched by the then Labor government, while politically controversial at the time, kept the country out of recession.

A new poll commissioned by the progressive thinktank, the Australia Institute, in cooperation with Labor’s Chifley Institute, finds 62% of a sample of 1,408 voters believe the stimulus package kept Australia out of recession in contrast to other major developed economies.

The polling has been commissioned before a policy roundtable and a public event at the National Press Club later this month featuring former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan and former British Labour minister Ed Balls.

The two events are part of a joint project by the two organisations to contribute to new economic policy thinking by progressive political.

Swan, who was the Australian treasurer at the time of the crisis, says the event “shone a light on growing inequality and called into question the authority of elites who had created such a flawed system”.

He says when banks and financial institutions got into difficulty, they were bailed out by governments and “the middle class got the bill in the form of austerity”.

Swan says the stimulus package was a huge structural intervention, and without it “the Australian economy would look vastly different today if we had suffered the same skills and capital destruction that dragged down most other developed economies for the last four or five years”.

He argues that after the global financial crisis “an almighty economic and social cloud formed over the developed world from what I call politically inspired inequality, and this cloud now threatens the very political stability of the developed world”.

The executive director of the Australia Institute, Ben Oquist, who is hosting the roundtable event on 17 August, says it is important to use the 10th anniversary of the great recession “to reflect on what went wrong then and what is still going wrong now”.

“Record low wage growth, underemployment and rising inequality all point to the need to reassess economic orthodoxy and begin looking for a new economic direction,” Oquist says.

“Ten years on from the GFC there is now a vigorous debate about what policy prescriptions will deliver strong and inclusive growth”.

“There must be a new conversation about what we can learn from the past and what we must do in the future.”

Malcolm Turnbull has always argued the stimulus spend was excessive, and he’s made the case that China and the budget surpluses left by John Howard were what saved Australia from recession in 2009.

The prime minister said in mid 2016: “I think what shepherded Australia through the GFC successfully was the Chinese stimulus and the large amount of cash that John Howard left in the bank”.

Turnbull argues the Labor spend has left Australia with a huge structural deficit and ballooning debt. The Coalition, then in opposition, strongly criticised the spending undertaking in the home insulation program and the schools refurbishment program as wasteful in the case of schools, and negligent in the case of the pink batts program.

The new poll shows while Australians clearly believe the Labor government took the right path, with 57% of the sample saying people should be proud of the way the government handled the crisis, the residual political controversy of the stimulus program clearly lingers a decade on.

Forty-eight per cent of the poll sample said they thought borrowing was the right thing to do to fund the stimulus, while 31% thought it was not the right thing to do.

Forty-two per cent of the sample disagreed with the statement that GFC policies were poorly designed and excessive, while 37% agreed.

The roundtable event featuring Swan and Balls will examine issues such as whether the current treasury would recommend the same Keynesian polices the Australian treasury recommended in response to the financial crisis, and whether the current government would implement a stimulatory intervention in any new financial meltdown.

It will also examine current prudential regulation and the performance of regulators in the financial services industry.

• Wayne Swan and Ed Balls will appear at Melbourne town hall on 22 August in conversation with Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor. Tickets are available here