It would have been good if the government had accepted all of the robodebt royal commission's views.
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It balked at the final "observation" of the commission that "confidentiality should only be maintained over any Cabinet documents or parts of Cabinet documents where it is reasonably justified for an identifiable public interest reason".
One of the lessons of the robodebt scandal is that openness improves government so it is regrettable that the Albanese government didn't go the whole way.
All the same, its acceptance of the bulk of the recommendations is welcome.
The scheme to send false tax bills to vulnerable people was a scandal in anybody's book. As the Minister for Public Service Katy Gallagher put it: "There's no doubt that the illegal robodebt scheme was a shameful chapter in public administration in Australia."
Quite.
There are broad lessons to be learned.
One of them is that public servants need to be able to challenge ministerial instructions which seem to them to be clearly wrong, and to do so without fear of harm to their careers.
There was, for example, clear evidence within the Department of Human Services that the automatic system behind robodebt gave unjust calculations.
It determined welfare-recipients' liabilities not by what their actual incomes were but on some sort of computer-generated average.
The department knew that this meant false bills being generated - but nothing was done.
As the royal commission concluded about the now-departed head of the Department of Human Services: "When exposed to information that brought to light the illegality of income averaging, she did nothing of substance."
This particular issue brings into clear focus the central dilemma for the highest public servants.
Public servants are servants of the public - but they are also in a practical, day-to-day way the servants of the government elected by the public.
It is not the job of public servants to make government policy. It is the job of public servants to implement policy made by elected governments.
But what if that policy is illegal? Public servants cannot be expected to aid illegality. "I was just obeying orders" is not a defence.
The royal commission stated that senior leaders were "excessively responsive to government, undermining the concept of impartiality and frank and fearless advice".
In recent years, there seems to have been an unwelcome tendency by politicians to want public servants who are like-minded. Ministers have not seemed to want "frank and fearless advice" about their policies.
This development hasn't just happened in Australia but in Britain and the United States as well. It may be because of the rise of non-consensual, ideological politics. Ministers with absolute certainty do not want public servants conveying doubt and complexity.
To some extent, it is sensible for a minister to want senior civil servants with whom he or she can work easily. Like minds make for a smoother day.
But like minds may also make for worse policy. Ministers with strong views need to be confronted by strong counter-arguments.
The royal commission does not have specific recommendations on how to get "frank and fearless" public servants who are, nonetheless, constructive and helpful to ministers.
But we need to step back from this recent unhelpful, ideological climate where ministers expect public servants to be, in effect, part of their political team, sharing their ideology.
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