When asked to name the business people who impressed him the most during his long political career, Paul Keating starts with Keith Campbell, the former head of the Hooker real estate company. Campbell’s landmark financial system review in the late 1970s laid out the intellectual case for Labor’s financial deregulation and the floating of the dollar.

Rod Carnegie, now 91, also draws praise from Keating in an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review to mark his 80th birthday. Carnegie set up McKinsey in Australia and sought to Australianise CRA, now known as Rio Tinto, in the 1980s. “He was a progressive thinking guy and an economic nationalist,” Keating says.