Beneath the budget headlines, a slower rearrangement of the Australian Public Service is underway — one that will outlast this parliament, and most likely the next. A briefing on what is changing, who is changing it, and why so little of it has been written about.
The most consequential changes to the public service are rarely announced. They appear, instead, in the marginalia: a renamed branch, a new "delivery unit", a quiet redirection of funding from one program area to another.
A shifting centre
For most of the last decade, the centre of the public service has been a question of furniture — which agencies report to whom, and through what office. The current rearrangement is different. It is operating on the temperament of the service.
Implications
The implications fall in three places: in how policy is made, in how the public encounters government, and in what kind of person chooses, or stays, in the work.