It is telling that when former Treasury secretary turned NAB chairman Ken Henry wanted to discredit the Turnbull government's new bank levy, he said it was "reminiscent of the sorts of taxes that we had in Australia before the big tax reform started in 1983".

Bob Hawke's high-impact treasurer has achieved a unique Australian double: remembered as the nation's single-most transformative treasurer, despite his subsequent rise to be prime minister.

Keating sees the two posts as contiguous, from a reform perspective.

"I wanted to give the country a new economic engine and a kindly social wage to match - that is, an economic engine and a soul," Keating explains.

"We had to find new ways of delivering growth, and we did this by embracing openness."

Unlike the other treasurers discussed here, Keating weathered both ends of the economic pineapple during his tenure: boom, and bust.

His description of the early 1990s contraction as "the recession we had to have" propelled him to infamy.

But it drove him forward as well. The near-death political lesson proving instructive on the multiple ways in which punitive interest rates inhibit activity but strain the socio-political fabric also.

More than a decade and a half later, Wayne Swan would remember the human costs of a slow and overly cautious stimulatory pivot as he moved aggressively ahead of the GFC in late 2008.

It is no coincidence then that this was both the last recession Australia has experienced to date and therefore the starting point of this current record growth span.

But as Keating says, it was no accident either. He argues that the key economic and financial reforms enacted from 1983 onwards - including a floating dollar, and finance sector reforms freeing up the banks in multiple ways - both facilitated the rapid wealth accumulation and fuelled the speculative property bubble.

More broadly, Keating nominates three distinct phases for his reforms as "opening up the financial, the product markets, and then the labour markets, in that order".

"The first change I made was to move to the floating exchange rate which we've seen protect us in growth all through this long period of growth for instance in the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the exchange rate went down to US48?? ... and then when the terms of trade really rocked in 2003-05, the exchange rate went to $US1.10.

"In other words double the value in that time, to protect us from a surge of inflationary income in order to maintain our economic growth."

Thus, it was exchange rate rather than the interest rate which became "the fundamental shock absorber".

"That protected the Australian economy through the Asian crisis by falling to US48?? and then it protected it again a decade later when the terms of trade through the China purchases went through the roof."

Subsequent changes obliterated tariff barriers, opening up the economy to competition, and providing Australian consumers the best of what the world had to offer.

Keating bristles at the idea that this was mere neo-liberalism like that pursued by Britain's Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in the US. Rather, it was a distinctly Australian solution of free market economics and interventionist social policy, based on a grand contract in which everyone could take a stake in the game through employment, universal health insurance, training, the goal of wealth accumulation, and a proper retirement income.

"There was no orthodoxy in existence at the entry into the Hawke government to address national problems ??? the changes made to Australia were made by the cabinet itself, none of the new economic or social framework popped out of some Treasury or prime minister and cabinet printer".

Peter Costello, 1996-2007

"Why has there been a very long period of unbroken growth?" Peter Costello asks rhetorically. "The answer is actually, we managed to avoid the downturns that affected the rest of the world, that's the technical answer."

If Paul Keating's policies unshackled and enlivened the economy, it would fall to his Liberal successor to helm the long period for consolidation.

In his time as treasurer Costello would enact further reform such as the GST, and undertake budgetary and financial system reinforcement which would prove critical in insulating Australia against a trio of international shocks - two of them on his watch (the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the US dotcom bust in 2000-2001) and another following his departure.

Wayne Swan would stare down the gravest challenge to growth in 2008 by pulling some genuinely far-sighted policy levers, but Costello's previous work provided him with the fiscal headroom and regulatory rigour to do so.

Indeed, while Costello acknowledges the importance of Keating's big reforms, he believes the politically fraught changes he introduced over nearly a dozen years as John Howard's treasurer set the conditions to ensure Australia's banks did not even make losses during 2008-09, let alone collapse.

"Back in the 1980s, our credit rating had slipped, twice, [whereas] we recovered a triple-A credit rating, we strengthened our budget so when the financial crisis came along in 2008 we were well placed to survive it."

The "very favourable terms of trade" in the key GFC years also helped. Costello credits financial sector deregulation, privatisation, and trade reforms during the Hawke-Keating years, but points also to the big politico-economic fights of his time, including paying back $96 billion in debt, the acute political pain of introducing an economy-wide goods and services tax, and creating the Future Fund.

None of that was easy because he wasn't just battling Labor, but often Howard too.

"I had constant fights with Howard in the latter years particularly ??? I did 10 surplus budgets, we paid off all debt, and then we were still delivering surplus budgets when we had no debt so we locked it into the Future Fund and he wanted to spend more because he thought you could win more votes by spending it," he says.

Another crucial advantage was strong banks which, unlike institutions in the UK and US, were subject to stringent prudential regulation through APRA (created in 1998). Each of these, Costello argues, played a critical role in the 2008 shock that stopped other economies dead.

"The first thing we had was a triple-A credit rating. Going into a financial crisis you want to be the best-rated credit risk in the world.

"The second thing is because we had a triple-A credit rating, our banks had a double-A credit rating, so, our banks had the highest rating they could have."

His point? That the top rating was a direct result of the debt-free position.

Wayne Swan, 2007-2013

No treasurer has stared down such a clear and present danger to Australia's prosperity as Wayne Swan, and no other forced to so dramatically remake himself in office.

It was in the back of his mind, even as he sought to rein in spending, that the outlook was becoming unstable, noting with some wryness that if he had listened to press gallery experts he would have cut spending even harder and "driven the economy in the wall".

The rookie treasurer was preparing his first budget in the summer of 2008 as the initial tremors of what would become a full-scale financial crisis reverberated through Western economies.

Even before the events of March 2008 with the US Federal Reserve's rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns, and later the collapse of Lehmann Bothers in September, Swan had watched the run on Northern Rock in the UK uneasily.

Unnoticed above decks, the risks aligning against an Australian economy were swinging silently to the downside.

Following an IMF meeting in Washington in April in which the mood among economic ministers remained surprisingly bullish, Swan had sought his own reassurances only to be told by a well-connected hedge fund insider that Bear Stearns was just the entree.

"This is not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but just the end of the beginning," Swan recalls being told.

Politically this was rotten luck for a new government which hoped to accentuate its strident claim to conservative economic management by being noticeably tough.

The adverse conditions would demand the opposite, but not yet. Remember the context.

Voters had just made a momentous decision to dispatch the competent Howard government. Sustained economic growth turbocharged by a resources boom had flooded the federal coffers with company tax receipts - rivers of gold which the wily Howard had used to great effect politically in the form of a suite of family payments, dubbed middle-class welfare.

But Swan and Kevin Rudd had stolen Howard's clothes by running as "economic conservatives".

This, rather than the yet-to-be-named GFC, was the atmosphere as Swan crafted his first budget focused on fighting inflation, paring back expectations, and guarding against overheating - especially in the housing sector.

Many forget that as late as February and March 2008, the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted mortgage rates as it fretted about inflation.

Yet in that same year fears of overheating would be a fond reminiscence, as Labor threw the switch to rescue with the words of Treasury secretary Ken Henry ringing in its ears: "Go hard, go early, go households."

First there was a package of $10.4 billion in cash handouts to keep pre-Christmas spending alive, and then in February came another $42 billion which contained a further $12.7 billion in handouts, as well as other billions for schools, housing, and home insulation.

Both sides of policy, fiscal, and monetary would be conscripted to the cause, with the cash rate tumbling in consecutive 100 basis point cuts from 7.25 per cent to 4.0 per cent between September 2008 and April 2009.

Emergency conditions brought an emergency response.

It was bold. It was adventurous. And it worked.

Joe Hockey, 2013 - 2015

Joe Hockey came to the post at an interesting moment, economically and politically.

Leading a barnstorming take-no-prisoners opposition, his leader Tony Abbott had ruthlessly capitalised on Labor's pathological divisions and along with Hockey, had whipped up a frenzy over a claimed "debt and deficit" disaster.

The voters' verdict in September 2013 was emphatic.

Electorally, Labor had succumbed to the firefighter's dilemma: having saved the house during the GFC emergency five years before, it struggled to explain the water damage much less, a repair bill that would linger for years.

Abbott had even sewn doubts about whether there would been an emergency at all as he threw terms like debt crisis around like confetti.

It fell to the Hockey to craft the dramatic remedial action such rhetoric demanded in the name of budget repair.

His first budget would be a game-changer, although not in the way the pair had hoped.

Yet for all of its perceived savagery, it was a more nuanced plan than was understood because many of its harsh spending cuts were staged to ramp up in the latter years.

"Every treasurer fears recession," he explains. "For those of us that lived through one as adults, it is a harrowing experience."

Hockey wanted to be true to the promise of paying off debt and eliminating the deficit but he knew that growth was never assured.

"There were many moments when recession was possible," Hockey said.

Not only were the expectations of tough medicine high, but the global situation remained precarious with post-GFC growth refusing to bounce back and new risks abounding, such as a China slow-down.

"I inherited an economy heavily reliant on revenue from iron ore at prices between $60-$90 a tonne. Instead iron ore fell to below $40 a tonne with low wage growth, and low business and consumer confidence."

Suddenly, Hockey was struggling with the same revenue write-down problems Swan had encountered.

Help came from the economy itself, Hockey argues.

"Rising property prices and low mortgage repayments helped cushion the blow of low wage growth."

Now ambassador to Washington, Hockey argues Australia's exceptional run of unbroken growth has always been a work in progress, even if it did begin with Paul Keating's big changes, and continue on with Peter Costello's GST.

"They were very important but the reform did not stop, contrary to perceptions. Every part of our economy has been subject to change whether we liked it or not. Some reform has been driven by government, some by technology, some by external factors. That ability to cope with change from commodity recessions to the advent of the mobile phone has inoculated our momentum," he says.

Did he blow it? Not by his estimation. "Many of the initiatives from the 2014 and 2015 budgets from Asset Recycling to the Small Business Instant asset write-off are helping to deliver growth today."

Can we keep growing?

"The best way to avoid another recession is to take appropriate actions today. That was the aim of the 2014 and 2015 budgets."

But he admits it is a remarkable story. "Australia is the only country in the developed world where no one younger than their mid-40s has had to find a job or keep a job in a recession."