Throughout most of his university years, Australia’s newly-elected Prime Minister was assistant to a well known Melbourne undertaker. His style was idiosyncratic. He would remove all of his clothes before dressing the day’s corpses in a variety of pantomime costumes. One of his workmates at the time alleges he tampered with the elder pauper corpses, the ones he dressed as Robert Menzies. After a lacklustre career in law and theatre restaurant acting, he made a name for himself co-designing two key Howard government policies: the Pacific Solution and WorkChoices.