The current contagion has seen the Morrison government change from what seemed to have been reflex habits of its short life thus far, and "snap back" to greater reliance on policy advice and the provision of services from the public service.

On policy advice, Renée Leon, a former secretary recently sacked by the Prime Minister without explanation, is reported as saying that the "government was certainly sick of experts with all their pesky evidence....which was not necessarily in alignment with their more favoured decision making input, which is anecdote". To stress the point, Ms Leon adds that ministers regard independent advice from the public service as an affront if it does not accord with their views.

In the face of the virus contagion, the government appears to be accepting all professional medical advice from its servants with Professor Brendan Murphy becoming the country's most famous person, a risky position in which to be. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister may have taken the economic advice of officials and morphed into the king of the country's Keynesians.

The altering context appears to have stimulated rumblings about what functions governments should have performed by their agencies and what by others.

In the last 30 years or so the drift of the neoliberal policies ushered in by Hawke-Keating governments has seen:

Some of these changes have been overwhelmingly successful. With others, it's harder to tell. A few have been on the nose and much worse.

The leader of the opposition, Anthony Albanese, has been among those who've rumbled about who should perform government tasks. He's done so in another of his "Vision Statements", documents of incorrigible inscrutability full of decent objectives although with little about how they might be achieved. That's the problem with Vision Statements - they're too long on "the what" and too short on "the how". As the poet Longfellow wrote in his verse "The Legend Beautiful", "Hads't thou stayed, I must have fled. That is what the Vision said."

Anyway, Mr Albanese as Visionist says "We should start by restoring public sector jobs....The contracting out of essential public services is not in the national interest and must stop. It's time to put human beings and human dignity back into human services." That could mean everything or nothing. Whatever, its meaning is obscure except perhaps to its author.

No governments are ever self-sufficient and the boundaries between what functions are performed for them by public or private sector organisations is fluid. For example, in many countries there is a preference for having government employees (loosely speaking) solely responsible for the application of military and police powers although some have been prepared to tolerate and even encourage the hazards of mercenary forces and vigilantes. In Australia, prisons have usually been operated by government organisations although that is no longer always the case. It boils down to what communities expect and are prepared to tolerate with the sum of these sentiments having a significant threshold influence of who does governments' work.

What else? Mr Albanese's notion of keeping "essential public services" in house is not helpful. Among other things, it begs the question of what is essential and gives rise to the hope that any government would not indulge in the non-essential. This is a variant on the notion of "core functions" which is also not of much practical use except to say that policy advising is integral to public services. As the former Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary, Martin Parkinson once wisely said, if policy work is largely given away, the whole box and dice could be packed up, or words to that effect. Or as Ms Leon claims, "Some ministers have not understood that it is perfectly all right to get advice from the public service and disagree with it, but they ought get that advice". And the public service should be given the chance to comment on advice ministers quite properly get from others.

So what criteria might be taken into account in deciding whether or not to outsource functions for which the government remains responsible?

First, ideological considerations should be banished as much as possible. During the Howard government at the urging of the Department of Finance and in the face of almost united opposition from other departments, a range of computing services was outsourced for little other than ideological reasons. It was a disaster. Thus, if governments are indifferent about whether the public service or private or other organisations could do the job, the essential question should be what works best.

Second, a function should not be outsourced if it is not possible to maintain the same level of openness and accountability as if it were to remain within the public service and with no nonsense about "commercial-in-confidence" or other fake excuses for secrecy.

Third, functions should not be entrusted to private providers unless the markets in which they operate are effective and properly competitive and where, if a provider fails, a function can readily be taken over by another or quickly brought back into the public sector.

Fourth, governments should be vigilant not to allow themselves to be captured by outside providers whereby they become so ignorant of the workings of functions that they are unable to draw up effective statements of requirement still less judge if what is being provided is best value for money or anything else - what economists like to refer to as problems arising from "information asymmetry" where outside providers hold all the cards.

Presumably, Mr Albanese (or anyone else) doesn't want the Commonwealth to buy back Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, the Serum Laboratories, the airports and so on. He would need a whole lot more money than the government's pandemic "package" if he were to do so. He may also not want to nationalise the provision of aged care services or fill all call centres with public servants and give them back their cleaning, catering, grounds and building maintenance jobs.

For the rest, Mr Albanese or Mr Morrison would do well to base views about who should perform government functions on the kinds of criteria listed above and what gives best value for money. There are good questions about who is best to help people to find jobs, provide legal services and the like.

Whatever is done on those fronts, it is imperative that the guardians of merit staffing in the public service, the public service commission and departmental secretaries, meet responsibilities which they are presently evading. The use of contractors and labour hire firms to do ordinary public service jobs is wrong in principle and probably in law. It's not just their cost or that the published figure of numbers of staff in departments is under-stated by who knows - up to 50 000. Such considerations are secondary. The main point is that the will of the parliament as expressed in the Public Service Act is being worked around, merit staffing is being relegated and the doors are being opened wide to nepotism and corruption with serious implications for efficiency, effectiveness and propriety.