Mark Kenny | When frank and fearless gets fast and fawning

Think sports rorts, robodebt, NDIS corruption, aged care neglect, the PwC tax scandal (and the consultants' gravy-train it exposed) and Scott Morrison's secret ministries. This list is far from exhaustive and to be fair, they do pre-date the current government.

Each represents public "disservice" rather than public service.

The latest journey into the S-bend of woeful administration, the Pezzullo Affair, adds to the misery of failures by our generously paid mandarins and elected officials. Lapses of commission and omission, of mendacity or indifference, which track uncomfortably closely with waning civic faith in the effectiveness of orthodox government.

The publication of Michael Pezzullo's putatively secret WhatsApp exchanges with a Liberal powerbroker and self-styled Morrison-whisperer, lays bare a disturbing truth about the main game in the capital.

That is that the scheming intrigue of professional politics has leached into the supposedly apolitical public service.

It has been true for a while. Top mandarins have looked increasingly like political staffers, prostrating themselves to please their ministers, and conspiring to circumvent checks and balances designed to protect the demos - freedom-of-information rules, inquisitive journalists, and their own responsibility to call out bad policy.

Still, it was shocking to read the extent of the Home Affairs secretary's sustained campaign to ingratiate himself as a conservative fellow-traveller and an unyielding security hawk.

The hundreds of messages over several years shows an intent to minimise paper trails, to bad-mouth competitors, and to actively shape party-political outcomes.

That Pezzullo's position became immediately untenable upon these revelations, is beyond credible debate. Who could rely on the impartiality of his advice, the fidelity of his motives, or take seriously any ideological neutrality he might project? And that's leaving aside the unprofessionalism.

It is not just the openly political statements in these reported messages, such as "you need a right winger" (as Home Affairs minister if Dutton gets elevated to PM) or his scathing character assessments of rivals, departments, and Liberal moderates. It is his eagerness to parlay these acid critiques in a searing currency of influence and advancement.

Add to this his plotting to have Australia follow the Trump administration's lead in recognising Jerusalem Israel's capital and his seemingly seething contempt for the public's right to know. Each bespeaks illiberal sympathies of which few voters could be aware.

The rise and preferment of angular hyper-ambitious secretaries such as Pezzullo and Kathryn Campbell of robodebt notoriety, are acute symptoms of a more chronic malaise afflicting a service that is structurally frayed and ethically adrift.

Central to this malady is that the bureaucrats closest to the top are both paid too much, and removed too easily. This particular combination creates an unhealthy incentive to keep ministers sweet even if that means advocating poor or unlawful solutions. The shining idyll of "frank and fearless" too easily descends into fast and fawning.

Ironically, this is not dissimilar to the power-dynamic between prominent media barons and their editors. Of all the employees at a newspaper or broadcast network, it tends to be the highest paid and most senior people who are least secure. Pretty soon explicit instructions from above are unnecessary - successful editors are those who survive, and those who do, speak the owner's language.

The culture of any organisation is set from the top. If the departmental secretary exhibits an unwillingness to tell governments what they might find irksome, why would anyone down the chain?

The late Canadian political scientist Peter Aucoin - a globally renowned expert in contemporary public administration - had warned more than a decade ago of the challenges created by "new political governance".

This was the interplay of an ever more aggressive and intrusive media, the public's desire for greater transparency sparking the proliferation of new oversight and investigatory bodies, and the expansion of permanent special interest lobbies.

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Aucoin implied that these together raised the cadence of governing and invited, perversely, a set of responses in the forms of administration in which politics and issues-management dominates. A kind of common defensiveness comes to be shared by minister and bureaucrat alike.

In the heightened exchanges between the governing and governed, crucial demarcations between elected politicians and their administrators - never completely settled in any event - become further blurred. Or in bad cases, obliterated.

As Aucoin put it, ministers would not ask top public servants to engage in open political campaigning but they might increasingly expect them to become vigorous defenders of government policy, to become what he termed, "promiscuously or serially partisan".

The implications for an already straining public trust are dire.

Writing in the 1970s, the German social theorist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas, described a coming "legitimation" crisis in the modern state marked by the evaporation of wider belief in administrative functions, institutions, and leaders entrusted with balancing off competing interests and upholding the integrity of the system.

The issues at stake here go beyond the dollar costs of substandard programs, and even beyond the horrendous individual tragedies of callous policy. They go to the rise of hopelessness and envy as government loses its moral and practical authority to fix problems. Global warming and reconciliation come to mind. A society that, in its rancour, can no longer agree what it is for, only what it is against.

In other words, a true legitimation crisis.