However that may be, it's been a while since a departmental secretary or anyone else has spoken with such eloquence and insight about the public service. Virtually every sentence of Varghese's speech contains an acute observation or suggestion, and it is entirely free of the clotted cliches and deadening jargon of much contemporary public administration commentary. He has made many recent reports – there's no need to name names – look exactly as they are: worse than third rate.

It's enough to say that, for anyone who gives a fig about Commonwealth public administration, Varghese's speech is manna from heaven. He sees "two key elements" of a "strong public service in a liberal democracy":

Varghese does not believe the "public service has become politicised" but that "retaining an apolitical public service is not helped by the disturbing trend for incoming governments to sack some secretaries", which he says is "highly corrosive of the culture of impartial service". A secretary, he says, needs to "weigh up how political considerations may shape the thinking of a minister because ... advice has to recommend a practical way forward" but that "it is not the job of a secretary to tailor advice to suit a political agenda".

Although he worries that "the combination of a relentless news cycle, social media that can often distort the centre of gravity of a policy issue and the technology of interconnectedness has weakened our capacity to reflect", Varghese says that lost ground will not be regained "by radically reinventing ourselves". Rather, he argues: "We must rebuild ... a capacity for deep policy thinking" incrementally and that "we cannot delegate this work to think tanks ... It is best done through a close partnership between ministers and their public servants" by, among other things, "working with the grain of our organisations", encouraging reasonable risk-taking backed by ministers, and by promoting and living within clear values.

While these excerpts do not do justice to the depth of Varghese's analysis, they give a sense of his drift. What is clear is that he has exposed the fallacies of those who would like to see much more policy-advising turned into Hollywood-style productions, where crowds of meretricious players are brought in to flit and strut across the stage and then be heard no more, leaving their messes for others to clean up. And Varghese's views are a marked counterpoint with those who, in order to pay obeisance to the mixed blessing of employment "flexibility", want to increase, for its own sake, the number of fixed-period and temporary employees.

It's difficult to understand how any sentient being could imagine that more flit-in, flit-out staffing could work with the grain of public service organisations to rehabilitate long-term, deep-thinking policy capacity in partnership with ministers. The opposite effect is most likely. Why should public servants waste their time with long-term policy thinking when the odds favour much more major policy tasks being given to meretricious players? If that were to happen, the prospects of so-called permanent officials working more closely with ministers in the longer-term public interest would be reduced.

Public service policy-advising is a craft that takes time and experience to nurture and learn. It can't be dragged in off the streets from think tanks, or any other tanks, and be made instantly to function effectively. Moreover, many who should know better fail to recognise that it takes time for people to become proficient in even the simplest of jobs – probably six to 12 months for most. Thus, greater use of short-term engagements means employing people when they are least efficient and tossing them aside at the point when their efficiency begins to peak. For these and other reasons, the long-term policy has been to reduce temporary employment; now those in charge of that policy, aided by witless external reviewers, want to turn the clock back and, in doing so, make public service agencies less efficient. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

These matters go to the heart of the nature of the public service that is best for the country: one where much more policy development and advising is done by short-term secondments of people from outside or by building up in-house policy capacity and using outsiders to supplement this. There will always be a need to obtain advice from people outside the public service, but adopting a Hollywood model is madness.

With the kind of diplomatic style one might expect, Varghese has made his position clear and it should be heeded. A good place to begin would be to put the recent reports by Peter Shergold and Sandra McPhee in the duds section of the archives, and get on with an intelligent conversion of Varghese's thoughts into practical measures to rehabilitate those parts of the public service where performance has fallen away. As he says, this work should not be outsourced to well-meaning consultants or others.

Varghese's speech is also a revelation on things it doesn't say. For example, it apportions no blame to the Freedom of Information Act for any decline in the quality of policy advice to ministers and governments.

The Public Service Commissioner, John Lloyd, has not been so reluctant. In comments displaying startling ignorance of the reasons for introducing this legislation, Lloyd maintains its influence has been "pernicious" in that it has made public servants more "cautious" and "advice more circumspect". These claims have reportedly been echoed by the heads of the Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. As these claims have been unsupported by any evidence, let's consider a few facts.

According to reports from the cashed-starved Office of Australian Information Commissioner, 35,550 requests were made under the FOI Act in 2014-15. About 75 per cent of these were to the departments of Immigration, Human Services and Veterans' Affairs seeking material related to personal benefits or services. Indeed, about 85 per cent of all requests were for personal information.

Exemptions from disclosure for cabinet and related documents were claimed in 0.02 per cent of cases and for deliberative-process documents in 0.12 per cent of cases, the vast majority of which sought personal information. It is unclear how many requests for exemption were successful. What is clear, however, is that the number of requests for these categories of documents is a miniscule fraction of the total number that would be prepared in any year: a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of 1 per cent.

PM&C and the Treasury received 241 and 212 requests respectively – that is, 0.13 per cent of those lodged in 2014-15. In the former, access was successfully refused in 70 per cent of cases; the Information Commissioner has not published the corresponding figure for the Treasury.

PM&C was asked how many of the cases where access to documents was granted in full or in part related to cabinet and related documents or documents prepared as part of deliberative processes. The department said it could not answer the question because it "would involve an unreasonable diversion" of its resources. But if its secretary, Martin Parkinson, is concerned that the disclosure of such documents is having an adverse effect of the willingness of his officials to provide comprehensive written advice, it would seem he has not asked his staff to provide him with information related to the extent of the risk to which his department is being exposed.

The Treasury was more forthcoming. In response to a query, it said that, since July 1, 2015, it had received two requests for cabinet and related documents, including briefing notes to the Treasurer. In both cases, access was successfully denied. So while Treasury secretary John Fraser rends his garments about the "pernicious" effects of the FOI Act on the quality of public service advice, it seems the sct is providing his department with comprehensive protection against disclosure of such documents.

The plain-enough fact of the matter is that the case against the FOI Act and the perceived need to tighten its protection against certain categories of policy documents is a beat-up. Those arguing the case have not backed up their claims, for the likely reason that they can't. The secretary of another department may have let the cat out of the bag when she reportedly said that further restrictions on disclosure would make her life easier. Well, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, the father of the act, had some useful advice about that when he paraphrased George Bernard Shaw to the effect that life was not meant to be easy. And nor should the ease of officials provide a strong counterweight to democratic accountability and citizens' rights.

The kind of claims about the imagined ill-effects of the FOI Act were laid before a recent major review of the act conducted by Allan Hawke. He did not accept them and nor should anyone else.

If anything, there's a good argument for certain cabinet material now protected by the act to be routinely disclosed – for example, business cases and feasibility studies for major infrastructure projects. Indeed, the chairman of Infrastructure Australia, Mark Birrell, has urged just such a course. Not only would this help the public better understand what is going on but it would also apply a tighter discipline to the consideration of these matters by public officials and so lift their professional standards. Further restricting FOI disclosures would do nothing to improve long-term, deep thinking about policy – it would most likely further degrade it.

Any public servants, and there may be only a handful, who are so worried about the FOI disclosure of policy-advising material and restrict what they prepare accordingly are living in a fool's hell; they're making an unnecessary contribution to the decline Varghese sees. Of course, policy-advising documents need to be protected, however the FOI Act and other legislation provides perfectly adequate protection that should not be tightened.

Worse, the vilification of FOI is a distraction from the real likely causes of weaker policy capacity, some of which Varghese has highlighted:

Improving policy-advising needs to look at these sorts of things and not be distracted into irrelevancies like FOI legislation.

Varghese entered the public service under the then administrative trainee scheme 38 years ago. He's almost served, with remission, four life sentences. His parting shot has exposed public administration's false prophets and he's pointed to a better way. He may be pleased to be going but it won't be so good when he's gone.

Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant. pdg@home.netspeed.com.au