He writes that this failure to begin to address the massive systemic malfunctions inherited from Scott Morrison “is astonishing and criminally negligent.

“The Morrison government’s corrupted idea of government almost caused orderly government to collapse… but Labor has yet to show any great reforming enthusiasm, or higher ideals of public stewardship.”

He points out that most Morrison-era public servants remain in office, even those who have shown corrupt or unethical behaviour or are “without significant achievements in any form of public administration”.

“Some, indeed, will have been promoted,” he says.

On a more sinister note, Waterford remarks that some senior public servants “will have become as useful, responsive and willing to look in the other direction for Labor ministers as they were previously for coalition ministers, and will have become indispensable to this government.”

The bottom line is that the Albanese government, slow to act on issues in its own bureaucratic ranks, now owns the systemic issues within the public service which flowed from “Morrison’s abandonment of honest government”.

“A few inquiries are not enough to claim a momentum for change,” Waterford writes. “The public forgets, and governments become focused on new problems.”

OzSAGE, an independent network of Australian public health experts that take a particular interest in Covid-19, recently published a paper that provides tacit support for the Waterford thesis.

All guns blazing, OzSAGE blew apart a recent National Cabinet statement on Covid saying it had “serious inaccuracies…not supported by the evidence or current real-life experiences.”

According to OzSAGE, in dealing with Covid the government is communicating “a false belief that nothing further can be done and that Australians must now learn to ‘live with’ the virus and revert to pre-Covid behaviours….

“This approach will lead to greater disease transmission and continuing avoidable morbidity and excess deaths, with inevitable negative impacts on the community and economy.”

It attacked the National Cabinet for its “misleading narrative that the pandemic is now manageable and in a stable state” and criticised the statement for being“contradictory and inaccurate.

While Waterford did not specifically address Covid in his article, he would find much to like and little to disagree with in the OzSAGE critique.

“The Albanese government has surrendered almost all of the moral advantage it held over the public administration, and most of the moral advantage it held over the coalition,” he says.

“So bad was the Morrison government and its facilitation squad that we needed to do more than throw the bastards out.

“We needed a thorough clean-out, including of many of the public servants, mostly senior ones, who had badly let the public interest down. We needed new leadership.”

So what does this reluctance to mean in practice?

Primarily, because of the centrality of the public service in delivering the laws and policies the government espouses, Labor is now stuck with a dubious bureaucratic inheritance.

Instead of restoring the “established rules [governing] proper financial and legal stewardship of public resources, and open, transparent and accountable decision-making” Labor has decided to retain the same personnel, systems and most of the policies that underpinned Morrison's administration.

And these were the personnel, the system and the policies that Waterford argues “corrupted basic processes of good and honest government and made all too many senior public servants complicit in, or silent about, illegal and unconstitutional processes.

“Everything bad that occurred was facilitated by senior public servants, almost all of whom are still in the same positions now.

“As things stand under the new, and mostly old, public service senior leaders, none have anything to fear for their manifest failures,” says Waterford.

And that’s how the old guard in Health kept riding high in the saddle when Labor took over.

Despite the manifest failure of December 2021, when the doors were thrown open to allow the then new Omicron virus untrammelled spread, those responsible were kept on and are still able to lie to citizens.

They do this through the artifice of National Cabinet, spreading the dangerous falsehood that “the crisis phase has passed and the risks of widespread Covid-19 deaths overwhelming health system capacity and a significant economic shock from Covid-19 have subsided.”

As OzSAGE commented, this was a “false and unconscionable” lie. The facts bear this out.

Waterford writes that the failure to begin to address the massive and systemic malfunctions inherited from Morrison “is astonishing and criminally negligent”.

Because most of these malfunctions remain embedded in the bureaucracy.

With no real effort being made to expose them and put them to rights, they await as time bombs clothed in rhetoric like ‘Covid exceptionalism needs to be replaced by enduring structural change in our approach to respiratory illness’.

“This is not a public health principle,” argues OzSAGE. “Public health experts know what to do, but we need our leadership to start the country on the right path rather than just wish this disease was like any other. It is not.”

The challenge for Anthony Albanese and his ministers is that they will need to deal with more than Covid remaining a threat contrary to government propaganda.

They are faced with many other structural, systemic and personnel problems still parked within a virtually untouched – and seemingly untouchable - public service.

It's a hidden menace within the body politic, and it will create many complex problems for the Albanese government.