Government is about 30 per cent of the economy and directly gate keeps, through regulation and oversight, well over 50 per cent. Yet as a sector, it receives surprisingly little attention from the Parliament, ministers or commentators, other than as a part of the political horse race that preoccupies daily attention.

For years, a small coterie of academics, government watchers, and a series of reviews – 18 in the last decade – had been reporting how the 150,000 strong federal public service was struggling to be effective in modern times. The consensus was that at a time of rapid and major change in community expectations, technology, geopolitics and workplace automation, the public service was stuck in a pre-internet, insular and siloed world.