Public Sector Informant: David Morgan, one of Australia's crucial unelected leaders

A new biography of famed Hawke-era Treasury official David Morgan powerfully bears out this message.

Morgan's life story to date, as written by a judiciously admiring Oliver Brown, reminds us of the disproportionate influence wielded by a tight group of political, union and bureaucratic heavyweights at a crucial time in the 1980s.

This was the decade when a heady brew of financial deregulation, bold tax-reform proposals and grinding fiscal consolidation was proffered to a dazzled nation.

Paul Keating, the factional warrior who became treasurer after the change of government in 1983, provided the heft. Union acceptance of the ditching of old-fashioned Labor verities was secured through accord agreements with the ACTU, where its secretary, Bill Kelty, and Garry Weaven ("the godfather of industry superannuation") were figures to be reckoned with.

And the attention to fine-grained plans and detail, without which no grand economic strategy can ever take off, was supplied by Morgan and his colleagues, who put in long hours at the Treasury building.

Morgan, his biographer demonstrates, turns out to be a flamboyant exponent of meritocracy and ambition.

At Melbourne High School in the early 1960s, he was the protege of an inspirational economics teacher named Neville Drohan.

At La Trobe University, he gravitated to the economics classes of Professor Donald Whitehead. Whitehead was pro-Liberal, but inspirational nonetheless.

Later on, in the stagflation years of the 1970s, Morgan joined the federal Treasury and then worked for the International Monetary Fund, as well as helping with the Mathews inquiry into inflation and taxation. He completed a PhD in tax policy at the London School of Economics. Such a record bespoke a growing body of expertise and contacts.

The contacts already included Kelty and Weaven, fellow students of his at La Trobe. They all steered wisely clear of the student radicalism of the early 1970s.

The rebarbative John Stone, on becoming Treasury secretary in 1979, already rated Morgan as a devoted disciple. He wanted the younger man to help him with enforcing exchange-rate controls and a strict "inflation first" strategy.

In 1980, Stone offered, and Morgan willingly accepted, a return stint in the Treasury's senior ranks in Canberra. But, by now, Morgan was seasoned enough to know when to ditch, as well as when to acquire, a sponsor. In 1984, Stone left the Treasury but Morgan stayed on.

With Keating, a neighbour of his in Red Hill, there was now a "close friendship". Together, the two me - politician and adviser cum tutor - set out to tackle the twin evils of inflation and unemployment simultaneously rather than sequentially, as advocated by the discarded Stone.

As the 1980s progressed, Morgan's blooming became ever more glorious. He became a deputy secretary at the Treasury. He married his local federal Labor MP, Ros Kelly.

After seven exciting years with Keating, Morgan left the Treasury at the end of 1989 and morphed into a senior Westpac banker. Kelly's Labor career sputtered out in 1994-95 with the sports grants affair.

Morgan finished up as Westpac's chief executive. He then joined a private-equity firm and has ended up in London.

Our current climate of resentment and suspicion directed towards public figures tends to breed nostalgia for the 1980s, when reason and reform seemingly held greater sway. The Hawke-Keating era has been glamorised by wordsmiths such as Don Watson and Paul Kelly, both of whom once mixed in the same circles as Morgan.

And yet the aura of faded serenity is false. Progress in Canberra back in the 1980s had to be fought for and worked for. There needed to be an unwearying vigilance in nailing down the finer points of proposed policy changes.

This is where Morgan and his public service colleagues came into their own. They did not need to be elected for them to play a key role in shaping the Australia we live in.