Ms Leon was one of the five departmental secretaries dumped by the Morrison government after last year's election win as part of its planned shake-up of the APS.

The intention was to rationalise the service by reducing the number of departments; presumably in the hope of creating as-yet-unspecified synergies and cost savings.

Given comments made by the Prime Minister on the need to achieve public sector savings in order to bring the budget "back into the black" a week out from the 2019 poll, it was widely presumed the rationalisation of departments would be used to cut staffing levels.

It would be wrong, as some will attempt to do, to dismiss Ms Leon as a disgruntled former APS employee out to badmouth those who ended her career.

Her record of service, and her restraint up until now, suggests she formed her views after a period of considerable reflection based on personal experience.

Those conclusions will come as no surprise to anybody who has been keeping a weather eye on the relations between the LNP governments and the APS since 2013.

Ms Leon's principal concern is the rejection of in-house expertise by senior figures in government who have then spent up big on consultants to obtain the advice they want to hear.

"We have seen an attack on expertise in the last decade where to be an expert was almost to be reviled," she said.

"Government was sick of experts and all their pesky evidence and so on that was not necessarily in alignment with their more favoured decision-making process, which is anecdote."

One of the ironies of the coronavirus crisis is that, for the first time in many years, the government has been forced into a corner where it has had no alternative but to seek the best possible advice it could, from both economic and medical experts, and to act on it.

As a result we have fared better over the past three months than almost any other nation on Earth. In America, where Donald Trump has contested the advice of his experts every step of the way, and worse, forced them into indulging his wild and dangerous ideas about science and medical treatment, outcomes have been disastrous.

If the Morrison government had taken the same approach to decision-making in regard to COVID-19 that it adopted for allocating sports grants and setting energy and climate change policy, the nation would have been in more strife than the early settlers by now.

We are extremely fortunate that instead of going off in search of a consultant who could tell the relevant ministers what they wanted to hear, as opposed to what they needed to know, the government was willing to run with the advice of the chief medical officer, Dr Brendan Murphy, and his peers.

People such as this do not get appointed by accident. They know what they are on about and they need to be listened to.

The point recent governments seem to have missed is that every department has its Brendan Murphys; the subject matter experts who can tell you what should be done when circumstances demand it.

If the PM were to listen to Ms Leon, he would realise COVID-19 has provided an opportunity to reset the relationship between the legislative arm of government and its professional advisers. Unfortunately, that may be too much to hope for.