Prime Minister needs to respect the Australian Public Service
When Tony Abbott famously made himself the Minister for Women in the 2013 cabinet it didn't end well for him, the Coalition or the gender.
The move managed to focus even more attention on the fact there was only one woman, Julie Bishop, in his 19 member cabinet.
Scott Morrison.
It is to be hoped Scott Morrison's equally unexpected move to designate himself Public Service Minister, is more productive.
That said, the bar is quite low given the adversarial nature of the relationship between the public service and the Coalition during the Michaelia Cash's tenure as the Minister Assisting The Prime Minister for the Public Service from September 2015 to December last year.
The obvious Achilles's heel in the Coalition's latest attempt to bring the public service into line, which commenced with Scott Morrison's performance target warning to departmental chiefs last week, was identified by academic Stephen Mills on Tuesday.
Dr Mills suggested the returning government may be unduly obsessed with service delivery.
"If Morrison's view of the public service is, as I suspect it is, merely about service delivery, rather than policy advice, I think that's not a healthy sign," he said.
The APS has always had two core, and equally important, responsibilities.
These are to implement the decisions and policies of the government of the day, and to ensure that government is given frank and fearless advice.
While Mr Morrison and assistant minister for the public service and cabinet, Greg Hunt, have spoken at length on the former, they have only touched lightly on the latter.
"Are we (the public service) really focused on getting services to people so their lives can be better? Are we getting the answers to people?" Mr Hunt asked on Monday.
While most public servants would say they are doing the very best they can with what they have, the fact does remain there have been some notable failures, particularly in the areas of social services and the roll-out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Nobody in the government has been willing to acknowledge their own actions have contributed to confusion, low morale and inadequate resourcing.
It is the ongoing issues with the latter, for example, that prompted Mr Morrison to name former assistant treasurer, Stuart Robert, as the NDIS minister.
Mr Robert, not Mr Hunt as might have been unexpected, has also been tasked with the creation of Service Australia, a new agency modeled on a NSW program to make it easier for citizens to use government services.
The one thing nobody in the government has been willing to do to date is to acknowledge that their own actions, which have included an adversarial approach to industrial relations, have often contributed to confusion, low morale, inadequate resourcing, and mixed messages across many departments.
The extension of the "efficiency dividend", an obvious cost cutting measure announced just days out from the poll, is hardly going to help either.
It is a given that the Australian Public Service is populated by a host of clever and experienced people who would be able to identify positive ways forward in their own areas of interest.
Public servants are less likely to want to give bold and honest advice to their minister if the government appears unlikely to listen and act on it.
Whether or not Mr Morrison and his newly elected government are prepared to seek their "frank and fearless" advice and then to act on it remains to be seen.