While it is inevitable the announcement Labor MHRs, Linda Burney and Brendan O'Connor, won't be seeking re-election will focus attention on the looming reshuffle it would be remiss not to acknowledge their many decades of service.
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Both are conviction politicians whose commitment to ensuring the ALP remained true to Ben Chifley's vision of it as the light on the hill informed every aspect of their political careers.
Mr O'Connor, whose Irish parents migrated to Australia in the late 1960s, found his initial calling in the union movement. He was the assistant national secretary of the Australian Services Union from 1993 to 2001.
A member of the Labor left, he was elected as the member for the Victorian seat of Burke in 2001. Following a redistribution he was returned as the member for Gorton in 2004. He held many different portfolios and shadow portfolios during a career that spanned more than two decades.
And, as the Prime Minister noted on Thursday, much of that time was spent in the political wilderness.
"Brendan has been determined, as those of us who sat in opposition for nine years ... to make sure that every single day counted as a minister," he said.
Mr O'Connor was appointed as the Minister for Skills and Training following Labor's 2022 victory. He has overseen the establishment of Jobs and Skills Australia, negotiated the National Skills Agreement and reinvigorated TAFE at a time when there is an acute shortage of skilled tradespeople.
And, like many of the MPs who make personal sacrifices in order to spend time in Canberra, he has endured heartache. His wife Jodi died of breast cancer in 2018.
Ms Burney's journey has, if anything, been even more remarkable.
Born on Anzac Day in 1957 in a small town near Leeton in the Riverina to parents of Wiradjuri and Scottish descent, she did not meet her father or other Indigenous members of her family until the 1980s.
In her inaugural speech to the NSW Legislative Assembly as the Member for Canterbury in 2003 she spoke of what it meant to grow up visibly Indigenous in regional Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
"Growing up as an Aboriginal child looking into the mirror of our country was difficult and alienating," she said. "Your reflection in the mirror was at best ugly and distorted, and at worst non-existent."
Ms Burney, the first Indigenous person to be elected to the NSW Parliament, the first Indigenous woman to be elected to the House of Representatives and the first Indigenous woman to serve as the Minister for Indigenous Australians, has done more to change that than almost any other living Australian.
A good friend of Ken Wyatt, her predecessor in the Morrison government, she is respected by Indigenous campaigners across the spectrum. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the opposition Indigenous Affairs spokeswoman, acknowledged this on Thursday.
She said that while the two had been opposite sides of the Voice debate Ms Burney "[had] been driven by a burning desire to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians".
Ms Burney, who was trolled mercilessly by "no" campaigners in the leadup to last October's referendum, said while the defeat was disappointing she accepted the outcome.
"There are silver linings in that outcome," she said. "The silver lining of six-and-a-half million Australians saying 'yes', and the silver lining of a new generation of young Indigenous leaders coming through."
Ms Burney and Mr O'Connor have worked for the Australian people, not just a political party. They have left this country a better place.
