Mike Pezzullo and the trashing of the Australian Public Service

There are few things sadder in public administration than a public servant who thinks they’re a political player — a bureaucrat convinced they should be participating in the power games of elected officials, and that they have some political nous to bring to the table.

Mike Pezzullo now stands revealed as one of those pathetic figures, a man who thought not merely that it was appropriate to be exchanging a large volume of political texts with a Liberal powerbroker, but that he brought some political insight and smarts to the conversation.

Pezzullo should have resigned last night, when the story — a fantastic get by Nine’s Nick McKenzie, Michael Bachelard and Amelia Ballinger — of his exchanges with Liberal identity Scott Briggs emerged. But as his responses to critical auditor-general reports have often shown, Pezzullo has never been big on accepting responsibility — including when caught out by the media, whom Pezzullo describes as “bottom feeders“.

His minister, Clare O’Neill, has referred him to the Australian Public Service Commission. So we’ll have to wait to see if Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer thinks sending free character assessments of senior ministers, lobbying for appointments to his own portfolio and engaging in partisan commentary — not to mention lobbying for the destruction of media freedom — constitute a breach of the APS values and the APS code of conduct.

At least now we know what Pezzullo was doing while his department was the single most incompetently run agency in the Commonwealth. On Pezzullo’s watch, the Department of Immigration, and then Home Affairs as it became, has delivered:

• the Paladin contract scandal, which was exposed in 2019;
• a major review concluding our migration system was no longer fit for purpose;
• the Cape Class patrol boat debacle;
• appalling processing of citizenship applications;
• losing control of Australia’s borders to an organised illegal migrant scheme under Peter Dutton;
• over 100 people unlawfully detained by Home Affairs;
• a scathing secret review revealing major weaknesses in Home Affairs’ visa systems being exploited by criminals;
• a breach of caretaker conventions by the department;
• major bribery allegations in relation to payments made to Pacific politicians.

It’s become clear since the establishment of Home Affairs under Pezzullo in late 2017 — Pezzullo long championed the creation of the super-department — that as an entity it is simply not fit for purpose. Under Pezzullo, its senior management has been in constant churn — nearly 50 senior executive service (SES) positions in the department’s monumental org chart are currently listed as “acting” — a problem that has characterised Home Affairs since its inception. And this is the streamlined version: one of Labor’s first acts was to move the AFP, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and AUSTRAC out of Home Affairs and back to the Attorney-General’s Department.

While such a huge department might be beyond any one person to effectively manage, Pezzullo has devoted his precious time to penning bizarre letters to his SES, hyping the threat of war (despite that issue being entirely outside his portfolio), and warning of the end of the world. Only now do we learn that he was also devoting his time to playing political games with a Liberal powerbroker and offering his own advice on ministerial appointments.

What’s all the more ironic is that the Morrison prime ministership (which these texts pre-date) was characterised, in public service terms, by a philosophy that public servants were to be seen and not heard, that politicians decided what would happen and the only task of public servants was to implement it as quickly and effectively as possible. It turns out that Morrison was quite happy to have, as one of his most powerful bureaucrats, a man whose philosophy of the public service was to be heard very loudly, on both policy and political matters, including who should be sent to his portfolio.

Neither, it turns out, were displaying good judgment.

Since publication, Prime Minister Albanese’s office has produced the following statement:

This morning, the Home Affairs minister asked the secretary of her department, Michael Pezzullo, to stand aside while an Australian Public Service Commission investigation is undertaken into the allegations reported overnight. 

Mr Pezzullo has agreed to step aside pending the independent review. 

Former Australian Public Service commissioner Lynelle Briggs will be conducting the inquiry. 

Stephanie Foster will act as the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs.