The alternative prime minister, Bill Shorten, has given no encouragement to people anticipating some with relish mass sackings of departmental heads, or of any substantial changes in portfolio responsibilities. It is expected that Treasury secretary Phil Gaetjens will be invited to go, on the grounds that he was too closely associated with Scott Morrison, with whom he worked as chief of staff when Morrison was Treasurer. No one else is expected to be sacked, perhaps because the fact that hardly anyone can recall the name of any senior public servant other than Mike Pezzullo is a testament to the lack of impression they have been making.

It is possible, though by no means certain, that Martin Parkinson, head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, will tender his resignation. This would be on the basis that a practice, now 25 years old, of holding that a new prime minister can have a new most senior bureaucratic adviser if he wants has morphed into a convention.

Parkinson, indeed, may prove to be the only PM&C secretary since Sir John Bunting to have survived two prime ministerial shipwrecks, though his entitlement to this distinction may be in contest given the brevity of Morrison's reign and the sense that Morrison never really "got" the public service or its potential for advancing the interests of the community and, particularly, the political party in government.

Some of the lack of bureaucratic anxiety about a Labor government comes from the fact that a good number of the senior Shorten ministers will be people experienced as ministers during the Rudd-Gillard years, even if few (except perhaps Shorten himself) show public scars, or strong public association with, some of the nightmares of that time in government. It is arguable, indeed, that the general calibre of the potential Shorten cabinet is at least the equal of the Morrison frontbench, particularly when one considers the contribution from the Nationals.

But another factor may be the sense, within the bureaucracy, that a Shorten administration involves at most shifts of emphasis rather than fundamental change. It will be business as usual in most of the agencies. Labor has been at pains to promise not much change, if any at all, on defence and foreign policy, domestic national security, abuse of the rights of boat people, and immigration. Those in charge of economic management have a taxation agenda and revenue and expenditure plans differing from the present government, but these are rather more refinements of existing policies rather than lurches in new directions.

Labor plans in social security, aged care, the NDIS, and the operations of Centrelink involve some marked changes of emphasis, but not much, alas, in the bureaucratic structures presently administering such schemes. These include the ghastly robo-debt operations, and the cold impersonality and inhumaneness represented by waiting on phones for hours on end. Shorten promises a more trained NDIS workforce, through reinvestment in vocational training, but that will take its time to have any great impact.

If the Shorten government has anything much in the way of an agenda in Indigenous affairs, it has not been vouchsafed either to the Australian people or the objects of the intrusive and generally unwelcome ministrations of the experts in Canberra.

Tony Abbott brought the Indigenous affairs bureaucracy into PM&C as a symbol of his personal attention and dedication to the physical, spiritual and moral improvement of Aboriginal people, but experience has demonstrated no discernible benefit to Aboriginal people, whether from the meddling but sporadic enthusiasms of Abbott, or the general indifference of Turnbull and Morrison. The agency has become almost invisible. Outcomes particularly, but not exclusively, measured by Closing the Gap statistics are worse than before.

Waterford's Law actually a postulation, if yet to be disproved after 50 years is that each successive minister for Indigenous affairs is worse than the immediate predecessor. This has remained true, with the achievements of Nigel Scullion being behind, if only by a short half head, those of Jenny Macklin, previously the champion non-achiever. Both Scullion and Macklin are leaving the national stage with this election perhaps by itself a rare red-letter moment for Aboriginal affairs.

I have high hopes for Pat Dodson, who will probably be minister if a Shorten government is elected, but a very early test of his leadership will turn on re-energising local Aboriginal organisation, politics and service delivery. That almost certainly involves decentralising power, abolishing "engagement" for real consultation, increasing rather than reducing local autonomy and solutions, and reducing the white cronyism and rent-seeking that has characterised the present administration. At the moment it is doubtful that 10 per cent of all expenditure notionally on Indigenous affairs ends up as income for, or net transfer of goods to, Aboriginal people.

Again, a Shorten government would have significant ambitions with climate change, with water management in the eastern states, with TAFE and early childhood education, and with its plans to reduce out-of-pocket costs for cancer diagnosis and treatment - but the machinery-of-government changes these involve are not substantial. In general, the bureaucracy has the capacity and imagination to do what is necessary, provided the political will persists. None of the "challenges" in these involve anything much that is innovative, nimble, flexible, "disruptive" or resilient.

The Hayne royal commission, and a number of similar inquiries, have re-established the need to bolster the quantity and quality of regulation, particularly, but not exclusively, in commerce, banking and the financial system. Likewise, Shorten has committed himself to more measures to attack fraud and corruption, as well as, it is to be hoped, criminal investigation and the prosecution process. If Shorten has any sense, he will not allow the Attorney-General's department to be the lead agency in this process, because it has been shown over the years to have its own institutional interests against reforms of this type, quite apart from its recent experience of obeying a minister in playing a dead bat to anything smacking of accountability or transparency.

Public servants preparing the red and the blue books the briefing materials prepared during the caretaker period either for new ministers after a change of government, or new ministers in a continuing government have the advantage that the present Labor administration has probably prepared and published more policy material outlining, particularly, its economic objectives, but also policies in health, education and welfare than anyone since Dr John Hewson published Fightback in 1992 for the 1993 election. (And before that, one would have to go to Whitlam in 1969 and 1972.)

Strictly, I am a firm believer in the continuity of the public administration through a change of government. I think the public service was damaged by the Night of the Long Knives, by which the Howard government dispatched half a dozen secretaries in 1996, and when Tony Abbott removed other secretaries including the Secretary of Treasury, Martin Parkinson, in 2013. Parkinson was an object of suspicion among the ideological warriors surrounding Abbott because he had been detached from Treasury in 2007 by Kevin Rudd to head a department of climate change which, as these warriors knew, did not exist.

The Abbott government's antipathy to anyone in any sort of public post carrying the stain of having been appointed by a Labor administration extended widely into the vast array of boards, commissions and other patronage jobs filled, as terms expired, by the incumbent ministers. Although there is always a sprinkling of party hacks and retired insiders in such statutory and independent bodies, the overwhelming proportion of those appointed used to be appointed for expertise and experience, rather than political pedigree. Indeed Senator John Faulkner, as "minister for integrity" in the Rudd government, established protocols by which most boards were appointed through a public-service merit process. This seems to have gone by the way, with recent Coalition governments opting for barefaced patronage, the conscious stacking of boards with cultural and ideological warriors, as well as party friends, relatives and donors. Under successive Coalition attorneys-general, this has extended to appointments to quasi-judicial posts, such as immigration and administrative appeals tribunals.

John Howard and Tony Abbott operated on the principle that the government of the day has a right to fill such posts with people more than sympathetic to their aims and outlook. They did not hesitate to put pressure to resign on people appointed by earlier governments, and showed themselves increasingly without shame in putting their own partisans on boards and committees, even when (as in the case of ABC commissioners) there was supposedly a legislated system by which board members were proposed by an independent committee. Turnbull and Morrison continued that approach.

Does this mean that an incoming Shorten government would be entitled to ask the patronage members of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to resign, on the basis of its "right" to have the "independent" "second look" at decisions carried out by people broadly sympathetic to the new government's views? Of course it could do this as a virtue in its own right, choosing instead from among nominees put forward for their background, knowledge and independence. That might be justifiable given the patent unsuitability of some chosen in recent times. It would be possible for a take-no-prisoners new ministry to choose from among its own mates, cronies, party donors, and friends and relations. Would this be a good thing?

Some would identify this with the Washington system, by which an incoming administration can place in most of the senior executive positions people of its choice. Under Donald Trump, the system is acquiring another flourish the right to appoint someone to an office includes the right not to make any appointment with the result that there are whole areas in the American administration with no one in charge, to the general satisfaction of limited-government zealots and people hostile to the idea of government surveillance of environmental protection and human rights abuses.

Until the Abbott government there was a general convention that governments did not have access to the papers of previous governments, nor conduct inquiries into their sins of thought, word and deed. Thus, for example, Kevin Rudd did not pursue into government clear signs of Coalition collusion with the Iraqi wheat-for-arms rorts. Bob Hawke in 1983 did not pursue National Party links with the meat-substitution scandals, and in 1977 then attorney-general Bob Ellicott was effectively forced to resign by Malcolm Fraser because of Ellicott's determination to pursue inquiries into the Overseas Loans Affair.

I would never make such a convention an absolute rule, if only because I believe that nemesis - or an ICAC - as well as the prison system should eventually catch up with corrupt politicians. But there are good reasons for caution about turning new governments into standing commissions of inquiry into old governments, as well as the politics of payback. That might be demonstrated by the Abbott government's unsuccessful attempts to smear Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten via a royal commission into trade unions, and to fix on Kevin Rudd the moral and perhaps criminal responsibility for the fact that several Queensland labourers died while installing home insulation.

Whether with stacking boards, commissions and tribunals, or with setting up partisan royal commissions (perhaps into discretions for au pairs, leaks about police raids on union offices, or the giving of indecent sums of money to miners so as to save the Great Barrier Reef), there are good arguments that the new government should be principled and adhere to the old conventions. That is certainly what I would recommend.

Yet the Labor warrior is surely entitled to ask why one side of politics should be allowed to trash settled convention, debase and corrupt important public institutions and abuse the processes of law while the other is expected to be virtuous and decent. It is not as if the establishment whether it is the political establishment, or the collective (and generally conservative) good men and women of the institutions, or the electorate at large punish clear abuses of power and principle. As often as not, these days, some sections of the media are cheering on the tearing of the national fabric, even as they aver or imply that the wicked socialists are tearing up the rule book.

As parties with long histories of playing foul fall into opposition sometimes because their patterns of abuse have eroded their reputation they are given to finding virtue all over again, if only from observing the new rulers doing what they did. Australia is in need of an outgoing government that can claim to have left the nation better off, its successor ambitious to do even better.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com