In the early days of the Hawke Government, when Labor and a dynamic young treasurer, Paul Keating, kept confounding a hostile and suspicious business community with market-friendly policies, the cartoonist Patrick Cook would draw the then former treasurer John Howard as a battle scarred veteran.
Howard was covered in plasters and bandages of the battles — of which the legends grew — that he'd had with his prime minister Malcolm Fraser, to try to push a deregulatory agenda that was then sweeping other parts of the Western world.
By the time Paul Keating was handing down budgets, Cook's Howard had been reduced to a legless but heavily medalled old warrior on a skateboard, glumly looking on as his Zegna-suited successor strolled past, declaring nonchalantly there was "nothing to it".