When Australians next cast their vote in a federal election, probably around   September 2016, the odds are short they will know a lot more about the minutiae of the nation's tax system than they do now.
Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison have fired the starting gun on what appears, at least in its early stages, to be the most genuine debate about tax reform since the goods and services tax was proposed in the late 1990s.
Strap yourself in, Australia. We are about to talk, and talk, and talk, about tax. And it might even be interesting.
Labor, when last in government, landed significant tax reforms; a price on carbon, a resources rent tax and a tripling of the tax free threshold among them. 
But the party squibbed debate about the GST and saw its carbon and mining taxes repealed, in part at least because it lost the public debate.
Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, meanwhile, failed to engage in a tax debate as well, although Hockey gave a smattering of speeches on the subject of tax reform and launched a white paper process.
But a concatenation of factors, including personal unpopularity following the 2014 budget, political spot fires across myriad issues, and a Prime Minister's Office that tightly controlled government messaging conspired to stymie a proper debate about tax.
Now the landscape has changed. When Turnbull and co say "everything is on the table", they actually mean it.
On the GST, changes being modelled include raising the consumption tax to 15 per cent and broadening it to include exempt items such as fresh food, health care and education; broadening the base of what is taxed but keeping the rate at 10 per cent; raising the rate to 15 per cent but keeping the current exemptions or raising the rate to 12.5 per cent.
Tax firm KPMG has estimated broadening the base and keeping the rate at 10 per cent would raise about $12.1 billion in additional revenue in 2015-16; a 15 per cent GST with current exemptions would raise $26 billion extra revenue; a 15 per cent GST extended to include health and education would raise $36.8 billion and a 15 per cent GST that included fresh food, health and education would raise as much as $42.9 billion extra in just one year (about $57 billion in GST will be collected and distributed to the states in 2015-16).
More broadly, personal income tax cuts, cuts to the company tax rate, additional money for the states to cover an $80 billion, 10-year funding shortfall for schools and hospitals created by the first Abbott-Hockey budget in 2014, deficit reduction measures and cuts to superannuation tax breaks are all in the mix as the government pulls together a sweeping package that it hopes will create a more efficient and sustainable tax system.
Thus far, Turnbull has said that possible GST changes "certainly have to be part of a suite of measures. No one's suggesting doing it in isolation", and that "fairness is absolutely critical. Any package of reforms which is not and is not seen as fair will not and cannot achieve the public support without which it simply will not succeed". That means that other changes, such as possible cuts to superannuation tax concessions for high income earners - a policy already proposed by Labor - are also on the table.
Whatever reform package the government ends up presenting to voters, Turnbull said this week in his first major economic speech, "the object of the taxation system is plainly to raise the revenue the government needs for its services it provides. But it must do so in a manner that backs Australians to work, save and invest - that backs them in rather than holds them back".
Treasurer Morrison promised that any changes in the tax mix won't increase the overall federal total tax take - a pledge that will go some way to assuaging the concerns of Liberal economic dries - and has only dismissed calls from the Labor states of Queensland and Victoria to instead consider raising the Medicare levy to cover that $80 billion shortfall.
Thus having kick-started the discussion, the government is now trying to not own or control it.
So what, exactly, is going on?
A Liberal strategist explains: "We are not scared of people expressing ideas and views. Until the government has a position this is how it's going to be".
NATSEM modelling prepared for and released by the Australian Council of Social Services this week, which again demonstrated that the GST is regressive, and that lifting the rate to 15 per cent would hit low-income households hardest, was welcomed as a valuable input to a wide-ranging debate, rather than being attacked as the view of a sectional lobby group with a vested interest.
ACOSS boss Cassandra Goldie said the agency was not opposed to an increase in the GST but it should not be a "starting point" for tax reform, given that it would hit low and middle-income earners the hardest. "Raising the GST to fund cuts to personal income tax across the board, as some advocate, is a recipe for more inequality, not a stronger economy," she says.
At the other end of the spectrum, in its submission to Treasury, KPMG argues for a raft of reforms including a GST rise to 15 per cent, a reduction in business tax and discounts on personal capital income.
But KPMG national managing tax partner David Linke acknowledges that, to achieve it, "there have to be trade-offs to deal with the fairness issues", and nominates changes to negative gearing, for example.
"So the big question is how do you get an agreement on an increase in GST? To do the shift, business needs to give a few things up - that's how you get agreement from ACOSS."
Labor has prepared tax policies that would see super tax breaks for the very rich reduced and a multi-national tax policy that would see big firms pay more to the tax office.
But as Bill Shorten stated on Friday, "Labor is resolutely opposed to making Australians pay more for what they need most. We will not support increasing a regressive GST that inflicts the heaviest punishment upon those least able to afford it. Let's be really clear, jacking up the GST to 15 per cent is not innovative, not agile, nor creative.
"Increasing the GST is not tax reform, especially not when the extra revenue is already being spent in five different directions".
The battlelines have been drawn.
Labor strategists advance the theory that internal debate within the Coalition is already getting "messy", with Queensland Senator Ian Macdonald opposing a rise to 15 per cent, Nationals MPs are arguing any broadening of the base should not apply to fresh food, and that Turnbull and Morrison are already losing control of the terms of the debate.
But the Liberal strategist responds: "This debate about tax will be frustrating for the close observers in the press gallery but you can't rush this, people have to have their say, people have to feel involved and valued.
"Just because we haven't run a process like this for a long time in this country doesn't mean it's not the right way to do it".
The Turnbull government, like Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello, wants to have the tax debate first, rather than first settling on a tax reform package and then selling it to people.
"Reform should not be seen as once-a-decade-or-two convulsion of incumbent-threatening change, accompanied by hyperbolic scare campaigns ... it should be seen as a change of political culture that sees us like the sailor surrounded by the uncertainty of the sea and the wind, who knows only two things for sure: where she needs to go and that she has the skill to get there," Turnbull said this week.
"Above all, it requires us to be open and honest about our circumstances, explaining both the challenges and the opportunities."
Or, as Morrison put it, the government will not make the mistake of being "rushed to failure" in this debate.
One man who knows more than most about what does - and does not - work when reforming Australia's tax system is former senior public servant Allan Behm, who also served as chief of staff to Labor climate change minister Greg Combet when the carbon tax was introduced.
The author of the book No, Minister, in   July lamented that "governments must articulate what their values are, but Abbott is not doing it and nor is Shorten".
He sees cause for optimism in Turnbull's approach to reform, thus far, because "this is a bloke who has a set of values that he can articulate" and "he and Morrison are both now saying the economic issue is the relationship between revenue and expenditure, whereas under Abbott-Hockey and to an extent with Gillard and Swan, they said the problem with the economy was only expenditure".
"The argument that we shouldn't pay more taxes is the right argument, but we should be paying better taxes," Behm says.
"Turnbull is getting concepts into people's minds and Labor will find it extremely difficult to deal with him because they have lost the taste for articulating the values on which their policies would be argued.
"Turnbull is not using the ideologue's play book, he is putting out rational ideas."
The Coalition's political strategy is a high-risk, high reward one.
The political hard heads the prime minister has surrounded himself with, including Howard-era veterans such as Tony Nutt, Arthur Sinodinos and Tony O'Leary, know that now, in the government's honeymoon period, is the time to bank political capital before hard decisions are taken next year and Labor's political attack bites.
As Howard's experience shows, Turnbull and his team have a mammoth task ahead.
Get the balance right and a better tax system beckons - as does electoral reward.
Get it wrong, and political annihilation and a Shorten government awaits.