In the interests of the citizenry, the mess deserved to be cleaned up and the new government, notably through the Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher, has followed through to an extent.

While there has been significant investment in the public service, progress on important fronts has not been rapid and in some instances it's been one step forward and half a step back, for example:

The amendment bill would have the Secretaries Board determine the "purpose" of the public service. That is to say, employees will decide the "purpose" of an organisation essentially created by the Parliament. It got sillier when someone decided to have a deliberative committee of 40 persons come up with eight purpose statement options one of which would be selected by the Secretaries Board.

Happily the board has belatedly realised the nonsense of the deliberative committee and dropped it like a hot spud.

More recently a bill has been introduced to abolish the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This drastic action is a consequence of the corrupting politicisation of appointments to the tribunal under earlier regimes. While the bill proposes improvements in appointment procedures, they appear to leave open the possibility of the kind of shenanigans that stuffed up the tribunal.

That is to say, there appears only to be a half fix in the offing. A month ago the minister was asked to clarify this but he and his Department didn't take up the chance - they've got lots on their plate, it might charitably be assumed.

In a major speech last November, Senator Gallagher foreshadowed, among other things, changes to appointment procedures for senior officials. She has in her back pocket related recommendations from the 2019 Thodey review and, presumably, the results of a study she commissioned almost 18 months ago on how to do statutory appointments.

Six months since the minister's speech, apart from the Attorney- General's proposals on the AAT, nothing on senior appointments has been forthcoming.

Maybe the minister's good intentions have collided with the curious views of the Public Service Commissioner, Dr Gordon de Brouwer. He's reported as saying that he doesn't think integrity issues in the senior ranks can be linked to the appointment process. "It's really, I think, fundamentally about culture and behaviour and personal attributes of leaders that's actually more important" he says.

But hang on, the Public Service Commissioner promulgates a host of detailed procedures governing appointments and promotions in the public service as a whole.

They're to see that the culture, behaviour and personal attributes of those seeking selection are appropriate for the positions to be filled. And so that should be for the most senior selections where Dr de Brouwer seems to have things inside-out and even upside-down.

Allowance might be made for sceptics to suspect that those now slaving away trying to get the public service on a more even keel think that words can speak louder than actions. See, for example, the Secretaries Board charter of "leadership behaviours" which misrepresented the Public Service Act.

Well, rhetoric won't do it.

A former chairman of the former Public Service Board and one of the country's foremost public administration analysts, Dr Peter Wilenski, was fond of saying that to improve to the public service, it was necessary to change laws, procedures and structures. Right culture and behaviour then followed.

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Thus, those responsible for public service reform should concentrate on the main game - that is, fixing up primary legislation, most notably the Public Service Act, in ways that close off as much as possible opportunities to repeat the bad habits of the 21^st century. So the government could:

There's much more but that these would be a good start.

In 2022, Dr de Brouwer's predecessor at the Public Service Commission, predicted "public service reform on steroids". It's not obvious such boosting medication has been taken in sufficient quantities thus far.