He's in his home city, Melbourne, following his tenure in one of the federal government's highest paid jobs. The new-found distance has thrown into sharper relief the insularity that can grip the national capital – what Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls the city's "bubble".

Few outside Canberra last week would have been aware of the first budget estimates hearings in a long time that hadn't brought Mr Lloyd head-to-head with Labor's leading interrogator, Penny Wong. His former boss was defending him instead.

Liberal senator and former public service minister Eric Abetz, unhappy with the conduct of the investigation that found his appointee failed to meet high ethical standards, drew on his legal training in a cross-examination of the inquiry's results. He nevertheless failed to land any blows.

Mr Lloyd's grievances with the investigation, and Senator Abetz's, are well-aired. They believe its scope changed unfairly and that the former public service commissioner needed more time to respond. Mr Lloyd says the ex-ombudsman contracted to conduct the probe, John McMillan, had a potential conflict of interest because he criticised his stance on freedom of information in 2015.

A week after Senator Abetz argued Mr Lloyd's case in questions to merit protection commissioner Linda Waugh, who delivered the findings, the argument appears to be over. Professor McMillan denies the FOI comments posed a potential conflict, as they were not a personal criticism. Ms Waugh agrees, and says Mr Lloyd had enough time to respond to the allegations, and that he was never told the inquiry's scope was set in the way he believes.

The newly-retired public service commission chief on Tuesday again criticised its finding he breached the public service code of conduct by emailing a document to a pro-free market think tank detailing what he called "generous" provisions in the federal bureaucracy's enterprise agreements. He also doesn't plan to take his complaint further.

"I think that's it now, I've made my points. I found it pretty unsatisfactory I have to say, the way it was conducted," he said.

"It ended up being a minor sort of finding. Most of the complaints were dismissed. That's the way it is these days, with these sorts of jobs."

Mr Lloyd strikes a philosophical note about the outcome, and he's unequivocal he would still send the email to the Institute of Public Affairs, where he is a member and a former director, if he could repeat his time.

"The document wasn't prepared for the IPA. It was there, they asked for it, we sent it to a media organisation as well, and I'd do the same thing again."

The episode, which in May brought on a day-long stand-off at a Senate estimates hearing with Labor senators, doesn't appear to loom large in his hindsight. Mr Lloyd denies the inquiry influenced the timing of his retirement, which he says he flagged with Prime Minister's department secretary Martin Parkinson some time before.

"It was unfortunate with those complaints, but that was outside my control, at the end. You prefer that didn't happen, but it happened, and you've just got to cope with it. No big deal in the end."

Mr Lloyd rejects any charges of hypocrisy in sending emails to the IPA despite promoting social media rules that could get bureaucrats into trouble for expressing partisan views on Facebook and Twitter, and that warn about political comments in emails.

"If a public servant's attacked in a personal way, personal smears, in the Senate and things like that, you just don't sit there and suck it all up and say nothing. You've got a right to answer it, and to comment on it," he said.

"I think public servants should perhaps at times hit back a bit harder.

"One of the regrets I've had is I didn't have more opportunity to defend public servants against unfair attacks and smears by politicians and others. That's the way they operate. I mean, over my career the ALP and the unions flick over to personal attacks very quickly, and that's been my experience for a long, long time. I've always tried to avoid going back on personal smears in a like manner.

"I've attacked at times union policies, but never personalised it."

Mr Lloyd's departure in August drew a close to years sparring with the Community and Public Sector Union and Labor, which each marked his exit by offering withering reviews of his term as public service commissioner. On the Coalition's side, Senator Abetz released a media statement lauding Mr Lloyd's tenure as one that reduced the size of government and made the public service more efficient.

The CPSU's Nadine Flood said Mr Lloyd had attacked and undermined the federal bureaucracy, used his time in office to promote ideological preoccupations, and stopped departments reaching fair deals with staff. Labor's workplace relations spokesman Brendan O'Connor said he had presided over a chaotic and unfair approach to enterprise bargaining.

In response, Mr Lloyd says the ALP had targeted him since his days leading the Coalition-created construction industry watchdog.

"The ALP's always been out to attack me and question my capacity and approach. That's been going on for a long time when I was Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, so that was always going to be part of the role I assumed when I got the job, they'd be trying to bring me down in that sort of way, and attack me in that manner."

Mr Lloyd, who played a pivotal role during a protracted round of negotiations from 2014 to 2017 over new federal bureaucracy workplace deals, is scathing about the main public sector union in reply.

He speaks in terms marginally softer than the CPSU's: Its leadership was inept, it took an intransigent position, it had a negative campaign that didn't serve its members well, and it was wrong to reject workplace agreement offers made after the Coalition government lifted its wage cap from 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent.

"There was no point in engaging with them because they were not going to be constructive," Mr Lloyd said.

CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood describes his criticisms as "laughable" and says there were more than 250,000 votes against the enterprise agreements offered on Mr Lloyd’s watch.

"It is Mr Lloyd and the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government who’ve been intransigent since day one in their approach to the Commonwealth public sector," she said.

"They insisted that existing content had to be slashed from APS agreements, and that no new content could be added to agreements even on such fundamental issues as family violence leave."

The union had negotiated hundreds of workplace agreements with both Coalition and Labor governments, Ms Flood said.

For his part, Mr Lloyd believes the union has overstated the level of industrial conflict in the last round of bargaining.

The workplace bargaining policy, imposed as the Abbott government made deep cuts and reduced the budget deficit, forced agencies to negotiate pay rises that were offset by productivity gains. Mr Lloyd rates it as among the more successful bargaining policies implemented by governments.

"The policy is quite appropriate for the times," he said.

"It's consistent with an approach taken by governments, both Coalition and Labor, to have some coordination. To do that, the policy's pretty clear.

"The government stayed its course, it didn't waver. That's what I've got to be conscious of, about what the government expects, so we delivered that."

Inflation had been running at about 2 per cent or a bit lower, most wage rises were at about the same figure, and pay growth for bureaucrats had been higher than cost of living increases previously, Mr Lloyd said.

"This next round of agreements is going very smoothly. A number of agencies have got them up."

He counts his work implementing the policy for the Coalition among his achievements. Asked about his legacy, he describes his term as one focused on modernising the Australian Public Service to attract and keep talented staff.  Looking back, he said the bureaucracy took a more considered approach to developing talent under his leadership of the commission overseeing its workforce.

Asked about the possibility of a change in government next year, Mr Lloyd won't be drawn on how Labor's policies could affect the public service. Without referring to the ALP's plan to abolish the cap on staff numbers, he earlier cautioned that any attempts to remove it would need to consider how hiring would be controlled.

His exit from the commissioner's role coincided with the beginning of the major review into the bureaucracy led by businessman David Thodey, a project that could echo long after his retirement. Mr Lloyd hopes it will look at the structure of government, and the cycle that turns the public service into a collection of mega departments and then divides it into smaller agencies.

Mr Lloyd admits the review's mission – to make the public service "fit for the future" – is a broad task. That future holds some potential setbacks for agencies, he says, and one of them might be posed by their location in Canberra itself. He regrets not doing more to encourage public servants to leave the city to meet constituents and stakeholders.

"As the public service is in Canberra, I think it's very important that senior public servants are out and about, and are known around the country in their particular area in which they provide advice to government," he said.

"That means getting out of Canberra, getting out of the office and engaging with people, and being aware that sometimes we can be trapped by a cosy relationship that will develop between the industry association ... and public servants.

"I've found in my career that the innovators often don't belong to those traditional areas, those traditional bodies, and tend to be doing things on their own, and it's important to be taking broad soundings and being very familiar with what are the developments and issues in the area in which you are advising."

A public service concentrated mostly in Canberra could find it hard to compete with workplaces in Sydney and Melbourne for staff, Mr Lloyd said. The bureaucracy may have to respond by getting better at swapping staff with the private sector. Meanwhile, it would have to keep adapting to a job market where potential recruits were attracted to temporary, casual and part-time jobs, while keeping a core of full-time bureaucrats, he said.

"Workplaces are going to change, technology's going to continue to impact. People are going to want more flexibility."