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Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe had become a household name.
But not for reasons he would have liked.
He will be remembered as the governor who was in charge of Australia's central bank during the COVID pandemic, an unprecedented health and economic crisis.
He saw the unemployment rate fall to its lowest level in 50 years without a wages explosion, a phenomenon that's still not completely understood.
But he'll also be remembered for saying interest rates wouldn't rise from 0.1 per cent "until 2024 at the earliest", before then switching strategies, in May 2022, to lift rates by 4 percentage points over the next 13 months.
That about-face on rates distressed thousands of home-buyers who had not counted on rates rising so early.
With public anger mounting, he apologised in late 2022.
"I'm sorry that people listened to what we've said and acted on that, and now find themselves in a position they don't want to be in," he told parliamentarians.
It will unfortunately be part of his legacy.
A term of extreme halves
Dr Lowe's seven-year term as governor ends on September 17.
Looking back, his reign can be divided into distinct halves.
When he became governor in September 2016, headline inflation was just 1.3 per cent and the cash rate target was 1.5 per cent.
Globally, economists had been worried that advanced economies may have slipped into a low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest rate trap, dubbed "secular stagnation".
For the next four years, inflation in Australia barely managed to rise above 2 per cent.
Dr Lowe used his early public appearances as governor to encourage workers to take advantage of a then-5.5 per cent unemployment rate and start demanding higher wages, to warn businesses that record-low wages growth was "threatening social cohesion", and calling on governments to invest more on infrastructure to cope with rapid population growth.
He kept the cash rate target at 1.5 per cent all the way through until mid-2019.
But with economic activity and inflation still too weak, he cut the cash rate to 0.75 per cent in the back half of 2019, hoping that it would be enough to finally encourage meaningful growth.
But then everything changed.
Towards the end of 2019, intense bushfires erupted on Australia's east coast early in the fire season, and they turned into one of this country's worst disasters.
And a few months later, in early 2020, the COVID pandemic arrived from overseas.
With Australians still traumatised by the bushfires, policymakers had to rush to respond to the pandemic with no policy blueprint to guide them.
Dr Lowe's RBA board cut the cash rate target to 0.5 per cent in early March 2020, and to 0.25 per cent two weeks later.
The federal government closed the international border, lockdowns were introduced across the country, and the multi-billion-dollar JobKeeper program was cobbled together and rolled out to keep people alive.
Governments did what they could to contain the unknown virus through the winter and spring of 2020.
Then in November 2020, Dr Lowe cut the cash rate target one last time — to 0.1 per cent — as part of a larger policy package from the RBA designed to support job creation on the other side of the lockdowns.
He said the Board would not increase the cash rate from 0.1 per cent until inflation was back within the 2 to 3 per cent target range, and it would require significant gains in employment and materially higher wages growth.
"Given the outlook, the Board is not expecting to increase the cash rate for at least three years," he said.
Then in February 2021, he reiterated that those conditions were unlikely to be met "until 2024 at the earliest", and he repeated a variation of that line every month until October 2021.
His comments coincided with a record surge in property prices.
But then the RBA's communications changed.
In November 2021, Dr Lowe dropped "2024" from his monthly interest rate statement. The bank said it could imagine a scenario in which an increase in the cash rate in 2023 "could be warranted", although it didn't think the latest forecasts warranted a rate increase in 2022.
Inflation was creeping up.
In the last three months of 2021, annual inflation was running at 3.5 per cent. It hit 5.1 per cent three months later.
In May 2022, the RBA began to lift interest rates.
The largest rate hikes since the 1990s
Australians found it jarring to switch from hearing about "no rate rises until 2024", to a sudden rate rise in May 2022.
The rate rise occurred weeks out from the federal election.
The Labor Party won that election, with Anthony Albanese becoming prime minister and Jim Chalmers, treasurer.
Then in June and July, the RBA lifted rates twice again.
Later in July, Mr Chalmers announced a review of the RBA, delivering on a commitment he'd made in the election campaign.
And the RBA's rate hikes kept coming.
By November 2022, when Dr Lowe appeared before a parliamentary committee in Canberra, the cash rate target had been lifted from 0.1 per cent to 2.85 per cent over seven months.
He'd also become a household name, appearing regularly as the villain in satirical stories on the Betoota Advocate website.
He took the opportunity to apologise to Australians, saying with the benefit of hindsight he should have been clearer with his messaging and emphasised the caveats that were always attached to his 2024 cash rate guidance.
"People did not hear the caveats in what we said," he told senators.
"We didn't get across the caveats clearly enough, and the community heard '2024'. They didn't hear the conditionality.
"That's a failure on our part, we didn't communicate the caveats clearly enough, and we've certainly learned from that."
By that stage, the RBA was forecasting inflation to peak at 8 per cent by the end of 2022.
And by June 2023, the cash rate target had been lifted to 4.1 per cent — an increase of 4 percentage points in 13-months.
Cost-of-living crisis, housing, and the coda to a career
The mistake on forward guidance came to colour the public's perception of Dr Lowe towards the end of his term as governor.
And in a sharp reversal on the start of his term, he spent his last couple of years telling workers to temper their wage demands, and to cop high inflation on the chin, even as they suffered the worst real wage declines on record.
As stories accumulated about the housing and rent crisis, he angered some people by saying that higher interest rates would help to alleviate rental pressures in the short term by forcing people to "economise" on their housing.
"The way that this ends up fixing itself, unfortunately, is through higher housing prices and higher rents," he explained in May 2023.
"Because as rents go up people decide not to move out of home, or you don't have that home office, you [get] a flatmate.
"The increase in supply can't happen immediately, but higher prices do lead people to economise on housing."
In July 2023, after he'd already been informed that his term as governor wouldn't be extended, he then announced changes to the way the RBA Board operates.
In response to the recommendations from the RBA Review, he said from 2024 the RBA Board would only meet eight times a year, rather than 11, but the meetings would go for longer.
He said RBA board members would have more opportunities to meet with RBA staff ahead of meetings.
He said the RBA governor would hold a press conference after every rates meeting, in a bid to improve the bank's communication.
But he'd leave some other changes to be made at a later date.
Two days later, Treasurer Chalmers announced that Dr Lowe would be replaced by deputy RBA governor, Michele Bullock.