As a minister, I saw exactly where public servants wasted the most time and money

The bureaucratic bubble talks to itself rather than achieve anything.

It also sucks out money that could be spent addressing core problems. It's found generally in the upper-middle echelons.

One of the great privileges of being a federal minister is the opportunity to work with our best public servants. If you're a car enthusiast, it's like driving a Ferrari; for an admirer of great musicians, it's like playing with Yo-Yo Ma.

Not every public servant gets to that level and, like in every occupation, there are crooks and duds. They're not a problem particular to bureaucracies.

Governments are partly to blame. Wanting to flag a commitment to a cause and to look like they're actually doing something government will establish an office for this or that or an ambassador for that project.

The idea for this will have come from the bureaucracy but the buck stops with the person who accepts the advice.

Announcements are made, photos taken, interviews given. We can all rest assured because "something is being done".

Not anything useful; but something. The government is on to the problem.

People are appointed, office space allocated, ditto support staff, salaries and travel entitlements sorted out.

At this point nothing has happened about said policy issue. Nothing at all.

A government might have an ambassador or envoy for women, for Indigenous people, or whatever.

The ambassadors, of course, have to get to know others of their kind. Travel and meetings are required. Bear in mind, at this point, still nothing has changed in real terms.

It may be that said ambassadors think a big meeting to show solidarity on the matter at hand is important. A location will be selected and without wishing to be cynical, whilst it won't be the Maldives or Sorrento, it won't be anywhere ostentatiously Third World either.

The achievement out of this meeting will be a communique. It's a fancy name for an agreed statement which was drawn up and largely agreed on before anyone stepped on a plane.

At the meeting, there'll be one or two nitpickers who hold out for a seemingly inconsequential word change and everyone else will be just wanting the whole thing to end.

When that wonderful moment of release arrives bureaucrats from around the world will make speeches (to each other) about how wonderful everyone has been.

Can you imagine a senior bureaucrat wallowing in tears of joy and pride that his or her fellow bureaucrats have recognised the effort she put into this talkfest, which has still made no material difference to anyone?

This happens. I've seen it. I've cringed at being sucked into going to the stupid meeting.

And, yes, I've seen one of our bureaucrats so immersed in their own genius that they let a few tears fall.

The feeling you get when outrage is combined with embarrassment is difficult to describe.

You know, as a minister, this is not the time nor your place to suggest professional help may be required.

Imagine this in every department at every level of government.

It's your money going to people talking, maybe about a good cause, but nothing much is happening. Bureaucrats are talking to bureaucrats.

Another way one might potentially throw money down the drain is to insist that every department, statutory authority or recipient of government funds have a plan to give priority to whatever it is the government wants to focus on at the time.

Plans sound important. They imply forethought, consideration and offer the promise of being a plan to actually do something useful.

Take sustainability, for example.

Who doesn't want everyone to behave in a practicably sustainable fashion?

Nobody I know. Thus, insisting that every government-funded body has a sustainability plan sounds good ... on a glib level. So the local health service may need one.

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Not being flush with experts in the field, they will either turn to a consultant or engage someone short-term or part-time in-house to work out a suitable plan for them.

There will be a sudden flush of people who have a degree in something vaguely related to the environment and they'll be hanging out their shingle like there's no tomorrow.

In one format or another, they get employed to come up with a plan.

The organisation has to do the work associated with their employment. That in itself is not a five-minute job.

Then the consultant adviser has to get familiar with what the organisation does and how it does it.

With that knowledge in hand they then come up with ideas of what the organisation could do to be more sustainable. Just a reminder, up until now, nothing has changed other than taxpayers' money being expended on bureaucracy.

The organisation may be doing whatever it can.

There's nothing new to do. It may need to change a few things. It may throw money into the gutter and buy carbon credits. Just paying to keep being bad.

Still, nothing has changed. But buckets of money have been spent in a bureaucratic sense. No doubt there'll be an annual reporting exercise, but with everyone reporting, you can guess how effectively the probably newly employed compliance people are at picking apart the nice-sounding words in the report to detect defalcation.

Oh, and did I mention all this money being spent is not going into the core business of being a health service? It's going on developing a plan.

This happened with Reconciliation Action Plans. Everyone had to have one. Anyone who appeared vaguely related to an Indigenous person was an instant expert. That might sound harsh, but since the plans were a new thing, it was a bit hard to claim expertise with a straight face. How many organisations spent oceans of time and money developing these plans? What do you think came of it?

The answer is apart from oceans of time and money being wasted not much. Nothing really changed on the ground. Still, people were comforted that there was a plan.

The point is these public servants are predominately good people.

They have been badly tasked by governments. Yes, some fabulous senior public servants, like those I was lucky enough to work with, might have come up with or gone along with some of these silly ideas.

They want a bigger department after all. Don't forget that public servants, just like everyone else, work better when given challenging and interesting work.

Spare a thought for how this affects the talented young aspiring mandarins. There's a collective responsibility here. Ministers and governments have to work with the bureaucracy. Ministers and departmental secretaries are in an odd type of partnership.

They have different responsibilities but should be heading toward the same goal.

In these examples, we see how bureaucracies can set themselves up and be set up by governments to appear as though they are doing something useful.

What they're actually doing is shovelling taxpayers' money away from needy projects and into a bureaucratic black hole with the same result as if it went in the gutter. But don't worry. They had a plan.