Yet no one in authority appears to give a stuff - the Prime Minister, the Public Service Minister, the nominal head of the public service, the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, other secretaries of departments, the self-promoting and unaccountable Secretaries Board and the Public Service Commissioner. And why should they? These are the people who have created this mess and kept it bubbling.

Of course, the Thodey report was silent on this issue. Remember how Thodey was supposed to set the public service up for decades? It is now a mere discontenting relic of what might have been.

The Public Service Commissioner, the officer principally responsible for the integrity of public service staffing, apparently can't smell the stench. He's provided no advice to departments on the use of labour hire/contractors and his office says that "It is at the discretion of APS agency heads to determine the composition of their agency's workforce".

The logic of that irresponsible stance is that if agencies decided to use labour hire/contractors for 99.9 per cent of their workforces, the commissioner would see no evil, contenting himself with the thought that "it's at the discretion of agency heads ... blah, blah." There's a legitimate place for consultants and, to a lesser extent, labour hire and contractors, to do work for the public service but this should be at the margins. It's now flooding the margins and oozing copiously over them.

How many contractors and labour hire staff are working in the public service engaged in duties indistinguishable from public servants employed under the Public Service Act? No one seems to know or care but it's almost certainly well into the tens of thousands.

When the Public Service Commission's State of the Service report claims an "employee head count" at June 2019 of 147,237, that could be short by 50,000 to 60,000. Similarly, staff numbers in departmental annual reports can be taken with a grain of salt. Such reporting to Parliament is not a cosy fit with laws requiring officials not to provide "false or misleading information".

Some say these abuses have been forced by staff ceilings but that's improbable. Without a nod and a wink from ministers, how could heads of agencies be so insolent as to flout government staffing limits by adding a large number of other staff who are not employed under the Public Service Act?

Maybe it's cheaper in terms of immediate staff costs; often it will be more costly. Whatever, this is a third order consideration distracting from the main point.

It's more likely that agency heads are using labour hire/contractors to avoid those pesky provisions of the Public Service Act requiring applicants for appointment to be considered on merit. That's just more red tape to be evaded by agile and innovative agency "leaders".

Let's get a labour hire company to provide a thousand or so where individuals can be got rid of for any reasons by leaning on the provider rather than having to bother with laws regulating the dismissal of public servants. As George Gershwin might ask, "who could ask for anything more?"

Section 67 of the constitution says that "Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the appointment and removal ... of officers of the executive government of the Commonwealth shall be vested in the Governor-General in Council unless the appointment is delegated...or by a law of the Commonwealth to another authority." In the public service, powers to appoint and remove staff are now provided by the Parliament in the Public Service Act and the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act.

Section 3 of the Public Service Act provides "a legal framework for the effective and fair employment of ... APS employees" and sets out their "rights and obligations".

Section 10A of the act says that:

"the usual basis for engagement is as an ongoing APS employee";

all engagements should be "based on merit" and be free from "patronage and favouritism"; and

"all members of the Australian community [should be] ... given reasonable opportunity" to apply for public service jobs.

The use of labour hire/contractors as a means of recruiting tens of thousands of people to do work indistinguishable from that performed by public servants is a flagrant abuse of these laws.

Contractors are supervising staff and likely exercising financial and staffing powers. In all the circumstances, who could blame them if, when faced by the need to get people in, they recruit people from their firms rather than go through the merit recruitment provisions of the Public Service Act. Thus things become insidious.

To ice the cake, contractors are apparently being hired via Commonwealth procurement rules whose provisions preclude "the engagement of employees." Abuse is being heaped on abuse.

Section 67, the Public Service Act and other legislation regulating the employment of Commonwealth officials can be traced back to reform movements in Britain in the middle of the 19th century that sought to rid the civil service of nepotism, favouritism and corruption and their consequences - incompetence, inefficiency and bad government and public administration acutely parodied in Dickens's Office of Circumlocution.

The Public Service Commission is a distant child of these reforms - an independent agency responsible for keeping departments and agencies on the straight and narrow.

It's not that labour hire and contractors are in anyway unworthy. There's no reason to believe they're anything other than fine people.

The point is they are employed in the public service without being assessed according to the merit staffing provisions of the Public Service Act. They are not subject to the values and code of conduct in that Act or its disciplinary provisions and they owe their loyalty to their private employers who govern their tenure.

Further, as labour hire and contractors appear to make up 20 to 30 per cent of the public service workforce, the legal requirement that "all members of the Australian community" be given a reasonable chance to apply for public service jobs is being significantly constrained.

Secretaries of departments and heads of agencies and a negligent Public Service Commission are taking the public service back to Britain in the 19th century with all its risks, costs and perfidity. Whether what they've been up to is illegal is an open question; there's a reasonable prospect much of it is.

What's beyond doubt is that the widescale use of labour hire and contractors in recent years is gravely offensive to the underpinning principles of public service employment laws and the related provisions in the constitution. All the while the authority with responsibility for seeing that these laws are respected, consoles itself with the pathetic thought that "it's at the discretion of agency heads to determine the composition of their agency's workforce ...".

It's all very well for central management authorities in the public service to be issuing revised guidance on public comment by officials, introducing new "professional streams of employment" and, in a burst of optimism, trying to train ministerial staff without tending to the structural problems affecting that category. But this is like doing the dusting while important parts of the house's foundations are crumbling and much of the joint is ablaze.

Fixing this awful problem is largely in the hands of those who have created it - the officials in charge of Commonwealth agencies. In polite society people who make messes usually clean them up. In this case, the public interest should not hold its breath waiting for that courtesy. Ministers, however, should know well that bad public administration means bad politics. If they care for their wellbeing they should drag the system into line pronto.