(Image: Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire)

The word “service” is too often maligned. Bad service. Expensive service. A cheap, quick service. Dodgy service. Second-rate service. 

Increasingly it’s been used to describe shoddy or substandard work complaints aimed at everyone and anyone — from hairdressers to lawyers, restaurants to insurance companies and airlines.

But this week, as word bubbles filled with the attributes of Queen Elizabeth II floated across media headlines and presidential tributes, “service” sat atop all others: grace, dignity, poise and serenity.

It was the queen’s steady service over her 70-year reign that stood out, gathering accolades and acclamation on talkback in central Queensland and on the world stage in Washington. Perhaps it was former Australian prime minister Paul Keating who said it best:

With her passing, her example of public service remains with us as a lesson in dedication to a lifelong mission in what she saw as the value of what is both enduringly good and right.

Keating has always had a way with words, good and bad. But his tribute cut to the heart of why this leader of more than a dozen Commonwealth realms also won the support of so many who have actively campaigned for Australia to become a republic.

“She was an exemplar of public leadership, married for a lifetime to political restraint, remaining always, the constitutional monarch,” Keating said. For a lifetime, she “instinctively attached herself to the public good against what she recognised as a tidal wave of private interest and private reward”.

That service remained steady through decades as her family became the subject of ridicule and court cases, and her biggest support — Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh — died. It’s a lesson we could all learn, particularly in how we see our own public service, those servants of the people whose job it is to be the innovators and implementers of good policy.

Only a couple of decades ago, both at a Commonwealth and state level, our public service was seen as a goal for clever young graduates and strategic wise heads. 

Stories of directors-general arguing against the woeful policy to ministers would pop up repeatedly. So would proactive policy, developed inside our public service, that grew cities and plans and a future. Parents would encourage their children to “aim” for the public service, a job requiring dedication and hard work, but which would deliver stability, good conditions and a strong future.

Its people were at the heart of that narrative. Independent. Not lured by the big bucks that contractors with tiny footholds in government offered. Career trajectories that were safe, despite a merry-go-round of different governments.

What we’ve seen over the past decade is a constant chipping away at that. Clever young graduates being stolen by those companies now earning squillions through government contracts. A roundabout of public service leaders as new governments put their own “man” (because it usually is a man) in the job. A diminution in independence, which has now been raised by royal commissions or reviews or inquiries in almost every state — and another strong reason why we need a Commonwealth integrity body, with the speed of yesterday.

Ironically, the Albanese government policy promise of a national anti-corruption commission (and the parliamentary discussions around it) will be delayed by the queen’s death and the period of mourning.

But perhaps the best nod to Queen Elizabeth II would be a rethink of how we see public “service”. Bigger pay packets to compete with private enterprise. Non-political leaders who will stare down a minister, without fear or favour, because it’s the right thing to do. Career trajectories for school-leavers and graduates who are boarding planes to head up organisations and companies and start-ups across the globe. A service that puts the taxpayer at its centre and rewards those who deliver it.

That would be a service to us all.