On the whole, the jurisdictions have managed pretty well, notwithstanding pot shots from an ever-expanding army of armchair "experts". It might be argued that some jurisdictions have been over-eager to jump to the Black Death approach to quarantine, unnecessarily shutting down major cities for a handful of cases of the earlier strains of the virus. And it might be argued that NSW should have locked down earlier with the current outbreak, given the evidence from other countries that the Delta variant was a different beast from the earlier strains.

But nothing can take away from the internationally competitive performance of the jurisdictions in keeping us safe, apart perhaps from the second wave in Victoria which made manifest the then shortfalls in testing and contact tracing in that state, which combined with the Commonwealth's failure with its responsibilities for quarantine and aged care, led to that state being responsible for 20,722 of the total 31,017 cases in Australia and 820 of the 910 COVID-19 deaths.

But past successes notwithstanding, the future depends not just on periodic lockdowns, testing and contact tracing and public compliance with sound public health practices, but also - critically - on quarantine and vaccinations.

So, why does the Commonwealth struggle with service delivery? First and foremost, because its activities often centre on policy, funding, regulation and the like, and not - with a few notable exceptions - on service delivery, whereas service delivery is core business for the jurisdictions. And, changes in recent decades may well have weakened the Commonwealth's ability to deliver on its responsibilities. The approach to the public service, particularly in the Commonwealth, seems to wander in a limbo land between the traditional British mandarin approach and the rather more political USA approach where the top layers of the bureaucracy change with each incoming administration.

In Australia, the days of the permanent heads of departments acting as mandarins with expertise and continuity of tenure are gone, and they may be dismissed without cause or shunted around the public service at the whim of the government. Those who imagine that this short leash is conducive to frank and fearless advice to ministers are living in a parallel universe, and nowadays the temptation is for ministers to choose heads of departments who will tell them what they want to hear. If the government is heading down the wrong track, you would hope that someone would draw that to their attention.

Worse, a mythology has grown up that public administration is a generic skill and that those in charge can be moved around the gazette ladder at will. It sometimes almost appears that knowing something about the business you are in could be seen as a disadvantage. Some hold that senior officials need to be moved on every couple of years - just when they are starting to get their feet under the desk and learning the intricacies of the business.

Public service needs to be seen as a demanding and prestigious calling requiring both generic skills in public administration combined with specific skills for individual departments. For each position in the public service, the first question ought to be, what further training does this person need to be able to fulfil their specific responsibilities - and then make sure they are provided with that training. My own experience, over many decades, has been that very few of those placed in charge of delivering on the onerous roles of running state or Commonwealth health departments were fully equipped for the job, and many of them might, inter alia, have benefited from a short course in public health - as the current COVID-19 challenge makes clear.

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Critically, the Commonwealth appears extraordinarily weak in planning expertise. It should have been obvious that the Commonwealth needed to have a well thought out and up-to-date plan for a future pandemic. If they did have one, it was manifestly not up to scratch or else out of date. Morrison's COVID-19 "plan" might pass muster as yet another unfunded roadmap but it certainly isn't a plan in any meaningful sense of the word.

Most, if not all, jurisdictional health departments have a research and planning department but if the Commonwealth has such a section it is very well hidden or ineffective. Nowhere is the Commonwealth's lack of planning skills more evident than in the field of Aboriginal health. "Plans" are more like pictures painted in the sky of what a better world might look like, but they lack any adequate consideration of the real world issues of services required to achieve targets and goals, or the funding and workforce or other necessities of a proper plan. Over the years there have been far too many frameworks, road maps, "implementation" plans, almost all of them unfunded, and the sad reality is that unfunded policy is not worth a crumpet. By contrast, funded policy - as in cancer screening, HIV control and other matters - has been an outstanding success.

There is a long road ahead with COVID-19 but dealing with the manifest shortfalls highlighted by our COVID-19 experience could have benefits in fields beyond that immediate national threat. We will be better placed to meet these wider challenges, if there was a major shift towards training our public servants, particularly in planning skills, but also on a broader range of issues, so public servants can fully and more effectively discharge their responsibilities, and there is a strong argument for reverting to a more independent and less political model of public administration.