Rear Window
Pezzullo, like Campbell, has brought shame on the Public Service. Mike Pezzullo must be removed to restore integrity and protect our democracy.
Michael Pezzullo: the life and genius of a geopolitical savant
Myriam RobinColumnistThe fact that Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo used a back-channel with a party political operative to bitch about ministers and other department heads is staggering. The fact that he did the same about journalists, Senate estimates and other avenues of democratic scrutiny is not.
Long before The Age and Sydney Morning Herald published a cache of messages between Pezzullo and Liberal powerbroker and businessman Scott Briggs, the Home Affairs chief was already a controversial figure. Though he has his supporters, on both sides of the aisle, who’ve depicted him as a geopolitical savant.
Home Affairs department secretary Mike Pezzullo: long hailed a geopolitical savant. Michael Quelch
While other mandarins wither and dissemble under parliamentary scrutiny, the Home Affairs chief hit back. While others confine themselves, in public comments, to the pedestrian task of explaining and delivering policy or defending their decision-making, Pezzullo ponders the dark and darkening nature of the globalised world.
Mind you, no one rises to the top of a major federal department without reading, or thinking, or being an all-round very clever person of deep experience and generally sound instincts. Pezzullo may be unusually gifted, but we’re well-primed to think that, given his whole public posture is designed to tell of his genius.
Hence, his regular missives to staff on Anzac Day on the nature and likelihood of war, or his wide-ranging speeches mixing references to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke with his responses to Mamamia articles.
True story: in 2017 he congratulated Bec Judd’s astute decision to wear flats to the AFL grand final, in case she had to run from a terrorist attack. “Well done Ms Judd. You’re an ornament, in that respect, and we look up to you for making that judgment,” he said.
Meanwhile, in the years that Pezzullo has run it (and mailed out a wonky summer reading list to staff), the militarised Home Affairs has been a magnet for scandal and failure. Not that Pezzullo believes that makes him fair game.
In 2019, when Senator Rex Patrick criticised Home Affairs for pursuing a leak to journalist Annika Smethurst (suggesting there was a double standard about which leaks were pursued), Pezzullo called him personally to register his displeasure at suggestions he was adverse to media scrutiny, and suggest Patrick should confine his commentary to the minister. The then-minister, Peter Dutton, later said the contact was “inappropriate”.
Earlier when Greens senator Jordon Steele-John attacked Pezzullo in the Senate for his role in the 2018 encryption laws, describing him as a man of “dangerous ideas [and] radical disposition” in comments he had to partially withdraw, Pezzullo wrote a formal letter complaining at the screed, which he said was “untroubled by facts or logic” and didn’t deserve or need a response (which he nonetheless evidently felt compelled to give).
Pezzullo’s willingness to take on critical or even just snarky journalism is also long-established. The ABC’s reporting on allegations a child on Nauru was raped, he said, was “advocacy masquerading as journalism”.
When then-Canberra Times scribe Noel Towell noted Pezzullo having referred staff to an opinion piece by Scott Morrison in The Australian, Pezzullo told the Senate the report was inaccurate, then called Towell a “bottom feeder”.
His rage at whoever leaked Smethurst a story about plans to extend the spying powers of the Australian Signals Directorate is well-known. As is his off-the-cuff remark that they should “go to jail for that”.
The leak, he added, was designed to play into “a Canberra game about which agency is asking other agencies to expand its powers and remits”. Recent revelations have shown Pezzullo willing to play political games of his own.
The point is, Pezzullo has only been caught talking about ministers and bureaucratic rivals the way he’s long sniped about others. In his position, and given who he was talking to, it’s damnably poor judgment. But in tone, it’s all too familiar.