The head of policy and research at APRA, Charles Littrell, has warned Australia's political leaders they need to support aggressive prudential supervision.In a speech yesterday, to an APEC Regional Symposium examining the global financial crisis, Littrell argued that future financial crises were both inevitable and "potentially, partially avoidable and manageable".But, he said, the aggressive intervention necessary to avoid or minimise crises would be "impossible without broad public sector support, most of all from politicians across the political spectrum.""Show me a country where the politicians listen to bankers more than they listen to regulators," he said, "[and] I will show you a country which is guaranteed to have a banking crisis."Littrell's speech follows another from APRA chief John Laker and banking supervision chief Wayne Byres emphasising the importance of maintaining a political mandate for aggressive supervision over the coming years. But Littrell's statement goes farther than any previous APRA statement.The recent speeches suggest the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority has identified lack of political support as a leading threat to the success of prudential supervision over the next decade. These concerns may have been amplified by the current government's willingness last year to back away from proposed resource tax reforms in the face of pressure from mining firms.Littrell suggested that the right approach to avoiding financial crises was "something like the discipline practised by non-drinking alcoholics". Regulators must keep repeating that "we are not going to become light-touch regulators," he said.Littrell listed two critical steps to avoiding or minimising future shocks: preparing the regulator and the industry for the next crisis; and building "whole of public sector capacity" to support supervision. This supervision would be "necessarily intrusive", he said.He also warned that allowing finance ministries to promote finance industry development too often led to laxity among banks. This was "the most common prelude to a financial crisis", he said.