It was some detour John Fraser took on his way to becoming Australia's most powerful economic policy bureaucrat. The journey from his last day as a deputy secretary of the federal Treasury, in the time of the Keating government, to the day in January this year, when he took up his appointment by the Abbott government as secretary of the Treasury, was 22 years.

It was two decades during which Fraser lived a completely different existence in a completely different world. He wound up in London, in one of the highest-paying investment banking jobs in the world. He was 41 when he left Canberra and 63 when he returned.