The important thing to remember about our democracy is that it is representative. Another important thing to think about is that Government employees are public SERVANTS (who are also members of the public). As well, the APS is only about 15% of the voting population.

A servant does as directed. If the servant is employed to advise, then she offers the best possible advice she can, making every effort to ensure the advice is as complete and as well-informed as possible. It may not be unbiased, because we all have some cognitive bias, but if there are several advisors it should be reasonably sure that the biases will average to zero, making one important assumption, which is that the pool of advisors contains a high level of diversity of experience and background and that they are all equally equipped and motivated to explore the problem fully. If they all come from one school of thought or one ideological idiom, or some are trying to give the answers that they think are wanted then the biases will not average to zero and the summed advice will be flawed and produce skewed understanding of problems within Government, causing bad policy and legislation. That's without even considering the capacity of some politicians to screw up even the best advice or ignore it if they don't like it.

Conversely, if the population of APS employees has views that are representative of the public at large, then there is no public benefit in their expression of those views. If they are not representative, then there may be a question about whether their advice will produce policy in the broad public interest and then we need to think about how to address that problem.

I think we've had exactly that situation evolve within the APS and government departments generally, so that the public find themselves constantly struggling to comply with laws and regulations that they know don't make sense and political parties try to sell themselves with tiny cosmetic policy differences all based on the same biased advice because there's no other choice, which just add to the madness. Professional advisors use standard models and tools; focus groups, narrow sociometrics because that's what's safe, easy and repeatable and is easy to pad out with weasel words. They have an underlying reductionist conception of analysis which focusses on one or two parts of complex problems. As a result, a policy to fix one set of problems leads to a bigger set of problems somewhere else in the system, because there are no isolated problems, but they proudly point to their policy as a success because the narrow set of metrics it was designed around have moved to the targetted range. Bonuses all round, promotion track greased and everybody's happy except the people outside tripping over the mounds of new red tape and trying not to fall foul of the crowds of enforcers that every new policy requires.

"Independent" reports by exterenal advisors like Goldman Sachs and their ilk are no better, because they hire people with an APS background and affiliations to write them.

To be honest, I reckon public servants have far too much to say, not too little. The sense of entitlement to ram ill-considered views down people's throats using emotional manipulation and an assumed authority is palpable.