Or of being told that it was the service as a whole, rather than its leadership which was responsible for a depressing history of failure and lack of imagination at the program implementation level. And about being reproved for arrogance, ignorance and complacency, and for allegedly failing to compete with higher standards in the private sector.

The public service – even the idea of public service – is getting a bad press these days, but never more than from its own leadership. Past and present secretaries of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Finance and Treasury, public service commissioners and other of the inner sanctums worry aloud about a service said to be prone to failure in many of its programs; said to be timid, cautious and risk averse.

There are umpteen passing and scathing references to notorious past, present and future public administration debacles, from the pink batts affair, alleged mismanagement of the school building program, VET Fee Help, ehealth, and the census, the administration from Canberra of Aboriginal affairs, and the meltdown of taxation computers and umpteen procurement or outsourcing debacles.

Small "g" government, it seems, is pretty hopeless. It hasn't adapted to change. It's run out of ideas. It's failing to give big G government the advice it needs. It's pretty inefficient, but even worse, it's ineffective. Ineffective in delivering the desired outcomes. Ineffective at changing the lives of ordinary Australians in the way that ministers have wanted and intended.

That's a pretty scathing analysis, and anyone familiar with what is going on knows that, whatever the reason, there's more than a germ of truth in the overall indictment. And those delivering the message are the experts, right? The people who would know? Indeed, the very practitioners wryly admitting that their craft and their vocation is not up to scratch.

But what if it were not true?

What if most of the real problems of modern public administration, apart from the perpetual (but worsening) cupidity, ignorance and incompetence of the political establishment, was in its most senior public service leadership. In failings in the character, calibre and the prevailing ideas of the leadership departments such as Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury, Finance, and the Public Service Commission. In deficiencies of a new culture of top-down management and bottom-up accountability?

It's worth remembering, of course, that an inefficient or an ineffective public service, of whatever origin, is hardly the primary problem of the Turnbull government. While the big G government is in lots of trouble, that is not primarily because it has been listening to bad public service advice, or because public servants have let it down. The government's primary problems are at the political level, not at the administrative level. Even with issues of revenue and expenditure.

But it is hard to escape the feeling that if only the public service was given half a chance it too would be messing up with gay abandon, not least for focusing on many of the wrong things while ignoring major long term public policy problems. The only problem is that most of the disasters in waiting won't be able to be called problems in risk management, blamed on the worker bees or blamed on mere poor implementation. The fault will lie with leadership – or the absence of it – at the highest level.

Have a foreboding that the acquisition of new jet aircraft from the United States has been shaping for procurement disaster, even before Donald Trump's intervention the other day? Sensing that government is more preoccupied with getting the politics right on South Australia than getting the best possible submarine purchase or defence outcome for Australia? Appreciate that the bureaucracy is almost entirely out of the loop on long-term climate change policy? Suspect that it won't be long before the immigration private army is enforcing pass laws? Can't wait for the next computer procurement disaster to bring Australia to a halt? Considering how expectations can be managed for further downgrades of the national broadband scheme? Or about whether it really is a good idea to reverse the onus of proof with possible welfare overpayments? Wondering about containing the human and social costs of our concentration camps, and of the brutalisation of the people in the agencies called upon to implement the government's policies?

Most of the real scandals of poor public administration and waste of taxpayer money over the past few decades do not come, as per the narratives issuing from the senior public service, from the actions or omissions of well-meaning but bumbling and over-cautious middle level public servants, hopelessly out of their depth.

Instead it comes from impositions and assumptions by well-paid and self-confident public servants in the central departments. These are, increasingly, the folk who are devising the magical solutions to all of the government's problems, then imposing them on line departments, though neatly sidestepping any accountability or responsibility when their glib confections fail. These, not line agency bureaucrats, are the folk who have designed and demanded rortfests such as the VET fee-help scheme, the latest government on-line fiascos or which give aid and comfort to the pork-barreling and logrolling of Barnaby Joyce.

Just the same officers in central agencies have liaised most closely with the ministers and the minders, and have been the ones most eager to promote quick and dirty fixes, to adopt and enforce government by slogan, and to reject (as hidebound and overcautious) any practical or experienced advice from people who actually work at the coalface and know something of the issues.

The germs of both the home insulation and the school building program, for example, began in the Treasury, and without any real regard for the need for insulation or new facilities in schools. They were among a number of fixes – probably good ones – gamed in worst case scenario planning for the possibility of a global financial crisis, when there was a risk that the engine room of the economy might seize for want of liquidity.

Both Treasury and the Reserve Bank knew from bitter experience that some previous institutional responses to a slowing or paralysed economy had delivered medicine (cash and jobs) into the right places too slowly and with too little flexibility. Indeed the major effect (as now) of some previous stimulus programs, such as the One Nation program, had been more than a year behind time in greasing the wheels of the economy.

The supreme urgency of flooding every nook and cranny of the nation with cash was made manifest at the time. Treasury had no great faith that any of the building programs would achieve much, so far as improving education outcomes of reducing energy demand. For Treasury, any such outcomes would be at best serendipitous compared with the primary intended outcome of maintaining employment levels and consumer confidence. Writing about it in this newspaper before a dollar had been spent, I doubted that school libraries, cafeterias or halls (or an equally silly computer giveaway going on at the same time) were serious priorities, in educational terms anyway. From Treasury's point of view, the money might as well go to digging and filling in holes, provided the money went out quickly.

The programs, imagined for another purpose, were handed over as faits-accompli to line-agencies ill-equipped and ill-organised (in major part because of administrative retrenchment imposed by Finance) to manage new programs. They were tasks for the agencies, not owned by them, and it was quickly made clear that anything in the way of agency efforts to provide any structure, process or cautious but deliberate control, would be regarded as timewasting, sabotage or failure to be on board.

No delay was brooked, no objection considered by the officers in the central agencies. As if to reinforce the point, Mark Arbib a now-burst political skyrocket (the Sam Dastyari of his time) was put in to harry officials and to demand action, action and action.

Reports from umpteen inquiries, some very tendentious, into what is said to have gone wrong had public servants in line agencies hung out to dry. There has been a roving innuendo that ministers and line officials were personally responsible for the failures of supervision of some young Queensland workers who didn't know that one should not hammer nails into electrical wiring. But what is singularly missing from the discussion is the culpability of PM&C, Finance and Treasury. Or what, if anything, they learnt from their mistakes.

No doubt lessons were learnt. There's a whole new industry engaged in generating meaningless tosh about risk assessment, to go alongside other faddish tosh on regulatory impact, health and safety impact, and so on. There's talk of rewarding public servants who accept measured risks, and of not publishing them if things do not work out. But it's out the window in a thrice when a prime minister demands that heads must roll, and any public servant leery of going out on a limb can find ample precedent for extreme caution. When the shit hits the fan the actual architects of disaster will be far away, no doubt devising fresh fixes and solutions for fresh problems.

Bureaucratic leaders must accept responsibility for the fact that the administration is no longer the major engine room of ideas in government. Agencies have run down their policy expertise, and, as often as not, their corporate memory. Advice-giving, particularly about new programs and initiatives, and a good deal of the critical review of existing policies and programs has been outsourced to consultants, many of whom are a good deal less independent, disinterested and focused on the public interest than even a deficient public service. And even when it is not, more and more is being devised by task forces led by central agencies trying to "fix" a public relations problem of government.

A good deal of even good bureaucratic advice coming to ministers, is being given a deep political tinge by the ministerial advisory system, as often as not without the administration having the opportunity to contest the information and opinions finally reaching the minister's ear. Many policy and program ideas come from the political engine rooms, dealing with perceptions of a need to be seen to be doing something. As often as not, the ideas are half-baked short-term ones that have not been thought through, or connected. A number of other schemes are essentially confected by public relations people, and announced before they have any real substance. This is one of the reasons why Turnbull government has come to resemble the Gillard government – with major announcements made on one day, then retracted within hours once it has become clear that there has been some counter reaction.

It is not, of course, the fault of bureaucrats that politicians are susceptible to silly ideas, or that they reject good and well thought out advice from whatever source, including the bureaucracy. One never knows – or won't for 20 years – exactly what was being said to ministers about the merits and pitfalls of particular ideas. One can imagine that a good many senior central agency advisers have counselled frankly against particular projects of government, even as, their advice having been rejected, they have loyally attempted to make the decision work.

But if government is not listening even to its top bureaucratic advisers, there is something seriously awry. Ken Henry, as Treasury secretary under John Howard, once got into trouble for discussing the fact that Treasury had been completely bypassed during a quick and dirty Murray River scheme devised, for public relations purposes, by Howard and Malcolm Turnbull. When Treasury advice was being ignored, or not even sought, Treasury officials had to work even harder to be heard, with arguments so cogent that they could not be ignored, he said.

It may not be the fault of PM&C that its prime minister lacks the charisma, authority and power or will to do anything much. Or that he will retreat at a million miles an hour once he realises that there is any party opposition to any of his ideas.

But what ought to be disturbing is the possibility that PM&C, Finance and Treasury can't any longer win the arguments, can't devise the tactics and the strategies that can make good policy and programs possible, and cannot polish the turds that even the senior ministers so regularly insist on producing. Ineffective advisers must accept at least some responsibility for a sense of drift. Just as disturbing is the idea that the most senior advisers to government seem not to have an alternative agenda just for sorting out some of the government's messes.

Chabrias, an Athenian of 2400 years ago, once remarked that armies of deer commanded by a few lions were more to be feared than armies of lions commanded by deer. Australians are being invited, without much in the way of evidence, to assume they have the former.