When there is regime change in the United States, many of the departing administration's best thinkers, policy wonks and ideas people do not join unemployment queues or return to their home towns. Many stay in Washington, some as lawyers and lobbyists, while others go to foundations, think tanks and academies. These institutions are not only keen to access their close knowledge of the system, but eager to work with them in planning how it may work better next time. In the next administration, many of these people slip back into government, well up with developments and brimming with ideas. Even during an administration, there is considerable traffic, both ways, between government and universities.

There was a time when the ANU particularly its urban research unit operated a sort of government in exile, when Labor was in the wilderness in the 1960s and after the fall of Whitlam in 1975. A number of former ministers, even prime ministers, found their way there; so too did any number of activist bureaucrats now anathema in government. From the ANU came many of the ideas around Medibank, and urban and regional development. Likewise, the ANU has always seemed a refuge for former departmental secretaries who feel they have more to contribute, including in advice to government.

This is somewhat different from the way in which, in recent decades, universities have tried, with varying degrees of success, to enter the consultancy racket, a process aided by the way many departments deliberately ran down their research and policy development units.

Here's more Moran: '' By and large, I believe the public service gives good advice on incremental policy improvement. Where we fall down is in long-term, transformational thinking; the big picture stuff. We are still more reactive than proactive; more inward than outward-looking. We are allergic to risk, sometimes infected by a culture of timidity.

''We should take the Prime Minister at his word when he said in his speech to the [senior executive service] last year, 'We cannot afford a public service culture where all you do is tell the government what you think the government wants to hear.'

''I appreciate that encouraging public servants to think strategically, and with a whole-of-government mindset, must begin at the top. The APS still generates too much policy within single departments and agencies to address challenges that span a range of departments and agencies. We need to shake up our old structures and practices by creating policy teams within and across departments both to increase the competition of ideas within the APS, and to ensure we have the right people for the right problem.

''We are one APS, and in my view we need to bring more meaning to that statement. The APS is not a collection of separate institutions. It is a mutually reinforcing and cohesive whole. Public servants share core skills and techniques. We should see ourselves as a group of public service professionals and we should take pride in that profession.

''We should also extend that professional connection across different public services. The APS is part of a broader professional family of public services across Australia which will need to work together to address modern challenges.

''In my view, part of giving real voice to the concept of one-APS and building a broader professional ethos must involve knocking down barriers which prevent mobility. We need to enhance the mobility of APS officers, enabling them to move across departments without sacrificing pay or conditions.

''Beyond that, we also need to bring in more outside specialists, sometimes on short-term contracts ... We must work with people from the private and community sectors, think tanks, academics, stakeholders and members of the public. And we need to carve out time for thinkers within the APS to enable them to do long-term, creative work; and put them in touch with people who are up to date on the latest in public sector management.''

All nice and mostly unexceptionable stuff, apart from the faith, hardly ever confirmed by experience, that fundamental problems will be cured by lateral recruitment, particularly from the private sector.

The problem here is not about the public sector being level with the private sector (even if it should be, which generally it should not), but whether most private sector managers are of public sector calibre or standard . It seems unlikely that Moran will focus much on the role of ''efficiency dividends'' in stripping investment and reinvestment in training and development.

Behind it all is the fact that the public service is ageing, and that a high proportion of its leaders will soon retire. The public service is no longer a career service. While it has always sought the best and the brightest, that has been far more difficult with decentralised recruitment, heavy propaganda against any notion of an administrative vocation, and ample evidence both of politicisation, lack of protection of integrity and, at times sometimes even from Rudd himself capricious appointment policies.

It's difficult to see just what problem is motivating the new attention to the backroom, but it is always welcome.

As Moran concedes, the bureaucracy has handled the consequences of the financial crisis fairly well, even if it had carelessly let slip a lot of the organisational expertise and experience it had accumulated on such matters in the early 1990s.

Few predicted a global financial crisis when imagining priority tasks for the public service even in 2006. Who knows what new challenges it has to be ready for next year, let alone in 2020?

Jack Waterford is Editor-at-Large.