David Brown helped to move one of the last major public service departments from Melbourne to Canberra in the late 1980s.

Now retired, Mr Brown described the price of the move as "frightfully expensive".

"The people who were staying in Melbourne, they were given 12 months notice [about the move] and they were offered virtually unlimited training courses in that period for any course they nominated for, it could have been gardening," Mr Brown said.

"Families were given a couple of weekends in Canberra, all expenses paid, they were flown up, I think they might have been given a government car or a hire car for the weekend so they could just look around, they were put up in motels."

And the expenses continued to mount after the move, Mr Brown said.

"[After people moved] there was a disruption, particularly to children in their more senior years of high school and I think we even paid for some of the kids to stay in Melbourne to finish their education," he said.

"Because we had the split central office, nearly everybody was flying back and forth between Canberra and Melbourne. Anyone who had a significant job in IT was going back and forth. The pilots strike in the 80s was a disaster for us."

However Mr Brown said the real cost was the loss of corporate knowledge the department suffered.

"The unconsidered cost to the department though was the incredible loss of corporate knowledge. Because IT had always been in Melbourne they knew what mistakes they'd made and not to do them again. Of course when the functions came to Canberra we didn't have the depth of experience they did so we of course made the same mistakes," Mr Brown said,

"To me it's not a terribly sensible decision because it costs an awful lot of money, you disrupt people's lives, you disrupt the organisation.

"I would say to people don't panic, it'll go away. Cooler heads will prevail."

Undoubtedly many public servants and their families will be hoping cooler heads prevail sooner rather than later.

On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce dismissed a report from the Productivity Commission that found forcing public servants to move from cities to country Australia was no miracle cure for regional economic woes.

Retired economist Gerald Tan - whose wife works for the Department of Social Services, one of the branches of government that could be split up and moved - said government needed to take into account the economic and social cost of uprooting families.

"The Nats want to do this purely for political purposes there's no economic rationale to it. It doesn't make any economic sense and most of all it's going to have tremendous economic, social and other costs on the people who are actually going to be affected by it," Mr Tan said.

"If the Libs let the Nats get their way it's going to be a tremendous upheaval for people like us because we've left everything behind and decided to settle in Canberra, and the prospect of uprooting ourselves and going to an unknown future is very daunting.

"We're in a bit of a quandary because there are diminishing alternatives as far as the work is concerned. I'm sure quite a few people are in the same boat as we are because job opportunities in other areas, even non-regional areas, the other major cities, are very limited."