If culture trumps strategy, then the report of the so-called Australian Public Service (APS) hierarchy and classification review currently under deliberation by the federal secretaries board is arguably one of the most important initiatives to come out of the Thodey reform program.

David Thodey’s seminal 2019 paper described a type of learned helplessness that had eaten away at the confidence of the federal public service, fuelled by the increasingly political environment public servants are operating in and a deeply hierarchical culture that makes rapid decision-making highly problematic.