Ask Peter Costello, and he'll tell you the arrival of the GST to Australia's taxation system was mammoth.
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In fact, it was the biggest thing that could be done.
"There'd been nothing like it before, and there will be nothing like it again," he says.
In some ways, Australia's longest-serving treasurer makes the GST sound like the end of history, at least when it comes to tax reform.
Some people ask him whether there will be another change of that dimension to the nation's tax system.
"My answer to that is you only have to introduce a GST once," he says.
Cabinet documents from 1998 and 1999, released on Wednesday by the National Archives of Australia, show once was hard enough. The government had to get across the detail, and persuade voters of the GST's merits.
A broad-based consumption tax had been on and off political agendas since the idea emerged in a review commissioned by the McMahon government. It was part of the Coalition's defeated 1993 election platform.
It required the government to register businesses with Australian Business Numbers. A massive educational campaign was needed. The Coalition was also reforming business and personal income tax, and abolished a series of state taxes.
"I say you can't do this stuff again. And that's why I don't think there will be a tax reform like it again," Mr Costello says.
"But of course doing it made it so dangerous."
Mr Costello admits he had help introducing the goods and services tax over several years starting in 1997. Some of this came from the Australian Public Service.
He draws two lessons from what then-prime minister John Howard called the Coalition's "great tax adventure", an effort that nearly threw it out of government after one term.
One is that governments cannot just release a report and call for tax reform. There must be a political plan.
"And you've got to have a timetable. With our political plan, there was," Mr Costello says.
"Explain how the current system is broken, explain what is necessary to fix it, ask all people to bear the cost, make sure that the vulnerable are compensated, show that tax reform will produce wider benefits, neutralise potential opponents."
READ MORE - 1998-99 CABINET PAPERS:
The other lesson is to have a policy. In this case, it was the GST. Despite the Howard government's early tension with the public service, the two found a working chemistry as they developed the tax.
Mr Costello gives public servants some of the credit for his signature reform.
He shares Prime Minister Scott Morrison's view of the government's relationship with the public service: "It's up to the elected MPs and the cabinet to set the policy." Public servants are there to implement it, he says.
Once the Howard government decided to put a GST at the centre of its agenda, the Treasurer set his bureaucrats to work.
His goal was to have the policy ready on August 13, 1998. He wanted to take his birthday off the next day, having worked every day the previous 12 months, including Christmas Day.
Ken Henry headed the tax reform unit tasked with developing the GST.
"Where the public service comes in is, and very helpful here, was modelling the changes, how will this affect the economy generally, how will this affect the consumer price index, how will this affect low income earners," Mr Costello says.
"That was where the public service was at its best, not deciding the policy but providing back-up to implement the policy.
"We had a group that set the policy, then we had a dedicated unit of the Treasury, taken outside the Treasury, put in a different building, just working on the nuts and bolts.
"They would come up and report to me on a weekly basis or a fortnightly basis on how progress was going and I would send them back to do some more work on this and more work on that, they'd come back after they'd modelled it all."
Paul Strangio, a political historian at Monash University, says the cabinet documents show the detail involved in the tax reform task.
The Coalition had to master the detail, he says. Paul Keating had famously seized on the complexity of the consumption tax it took to the 1993 election.
"Getting all those bits in place was fundamental and it's the departments, led by Costello, that do that work," Associate Professor Strangio says.
"It's a massive undertaking and the public service, Treasury, the Tax Office, Finance and Administration, they're intimately involved in that design."
The Howard government had a rocky start with the federal bureaucracy, sacking six departmental secretaries and cutting about 30,000 public service jobs.
Mr Costello kept on Ted Evans, appointed by the Keating government, as Treasury secretary. Asked about the sackings of the other mandarins, he says: "I just thought 'that's up to the prime Minister'. I didn't know them all."
He is sceptical the dismissals had any long-term consequences for the public service.
"Turnover is always a good thing in my view, it's not a bad thing."
The cuts to bureaucrat numbers were not a hit on the public service, he says.
"It was really to balance the budget, that we had to cut programs, to cut expenditure, to balance the budget, and when you cut programs, inevitably you cut public service numbers because they deliver the programs," he says.
"It was a hit on spending generally."
The relationship between the government and public servants changed as the Coalition turned its efforts towards tax reform, Professor Strangio says.
"You get a sense of a settling, and I think departments that are brought on board for a big policy reform agenda, that's an important moment for them, it gives them a sense of doing something productive," he says.
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Mr Costello used new software at the time, Microsoft PowerPoint, to explain the GST to the cabinet. A computer model gave a full distributional analysis, showing in each decile how the tax put people in front or behind.
He shares an anecdote: "I remember coming out of that cabinet meeting after seven hours and I said to one of my senior colleagues 'what do you think, you reckon it's a goer?' and the colleague said 'dunno, but I like the colours'.
Associate Professor Strangio says the Howard government became masterful at balancing policy with politics.
Seventeen days after releasing its tax reform plan, the Coalition called an election five months early to campaign on the back of the policy.
"In my view the 1998 election was the closest thing to a single-issue election we have ever had in Australian history," Mr Costello says.
"It was the GST election. GST dominated everything."
The Coalition was re-elected in October 1998, despite losing the two-party preferred vote. It returned to Parliament introducing a series of tax bills within three months, aiming to legislate a new tax system by June 30, 1999.
Unable to secure crossbench Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine's vote, the government gained the passage of its tax reforms in an amended form with the support of the Australian Democrats.