The past six months of national emergency has been the Australian Public Service's mythbusting moment.

The tired caricature of the public service as a cosseted, lazy, sclerotic and unresponsive behemoth ill-suited to the pressures and demands of modern society has lost a lot of paint.

In the crucible of crises that have swept the nation since last December the APS has shown itself to be responsive and adaptable.

Even as the smoke of destructive blazes lingered in the air above communities along the eastern seaboard devastated by bushfire, Services Australia and other agencies were getting teams in on the ground to provide emergency funding and support.

As the bushfire royal commission is hearing, the response has been neither flawless nor seamless. Some of those burnt out continue to live in tents and caravans.

But, given the scale of destruction, it is creditable that many more have been assisted to begin rebuilding their lives and communities.

The APS' nimbleness has been again on display during the COVID-19 emergency.

Groups like the chief operating officers committee, originally set up early this year to help the Secretaries Board to implement APS reforms, quickly changed their focus to harness and coordinate ideas and resources from across the public service to support the pandemic response.

Numerous cross-department taskforces were established to build up the National Medical Stockpile. Treasury, the Australian Taxation Office, Finance and Services Australia worked together to rapidly build and implement massive assistance programs like JobKeeper and JobSeeker. Thousands of public servants put up their hands to be redeployed to help Centrelink and the ATO respond to an enormous surge in demand for government services.

When the emergency passes, reviews will inevitably find flaws and gaps in the response.

But they will also likely find much to approve of in the way the APS has been able to quickly mobilise resources and innovate at a time of great national need.

This whole-of-government moment has also shone the light on another persistent idea, that ministers have to constantly battle against the tendency of departments and agencies to be siloed and inward-looking.

Recently departed Human Services secretary Renée Leon has challenged this notion and turned it on its head.

In her recent interview with The Conversation and contentgroup, Ms Leon said that in fact governments shape the APS in their own image.

The "whatever it takes" approach at the executive level of government during the COVID emergency has liberated the APS to embrace a genuinely whole-of-government approach to the challenges thrown up by the pandemic.

Similarly, this period of license could steadily unwind as the crisis period passes and ministers and their offices revert to politics as usual and a narrower understanding of interests re-emerges.

Ms Leon warns that "in normal times the incentives for the public service are very much on the vertical", and departmental actions are anchored around what their minister wants.

"Unless the government sets a whole-of-government set of priorities, then we will revert back to each department doing whatever the latest thing that their minister wants," she says. "The public service is perfectly capable of bringing together taskforces and working across boundaries, but we have had a bit of a vacuum of whole-of-government priority-setting for quite some time."

Fading political interest in interdepartmental cooperation and coordination could well rob many recent APS innovations in this vein of momentum.

To the dictum that the public gets the government it votes for might be added that governments shape the public service in their own image.