The role and activities of the public service

Recent speeches made by public service heads point to a need to reskill the public service, to think in terms of systems (rather than piecemeal), to look beyond economics for policy advice, for the public service to acknowledge that it ‘endures’ beyond governments, that it needs to look ‘over the horizon’, and, have regard for ‘the national interest’. As auditorgeneral for Australia, Ian McPhee pointed to ‘soft spots’ including monitoring and responding to change, getting lost in the weeds, and performance measurement for programs and outcomes (McPhee 2015); and his successor points to a continuing need to use a series