Let’s not muck around here: unless the thousand-plus messages that Home Affairs Department secretary Mike Pezzullo reportedly sent to Liberal powerbroker Scott Briggs are forgeries, he’s gone a million.
Pezzullo is an agency head as defined by the Public Service Act 1999, the law that primarily governs the conduct of Commonwealth public servants. The act starts with the “APS values”, which agency heads are required to uphold and promote. Value No. 5: “The APS is apolitical.”
Then there is the Australian Public Service (APS) code of conduct, to which agency heads are bound. Among other things, it requires them to: behave honestly and with integrity; maintain appropriate confidentiality about dealings they have with any minister or ministerial staff; avoid any conflict of interest; not improperly use inside information or their duties, status, power or authority to seek to gain a benefit or advantage for anyone or to seek to cause detriment to anyone.
The code is backed up by a tonne of guidance material for public servants, including a 70-page guide explaining in exhaustive detail how the principle of being apolitical is supposed to work in practice. Underlying all this are the ancient conventions of the public service: fearless, impartial, independent advice to the government of the day, rendered with no regard to political preference. Mandarins sit above the fray.
Pezzullo’s behaviour is to be measured against these standards. From what the Nine newspapers have dropped so far, his dealings with Briggs — not a member of Parliament, just a Liberal Party operative and close friend of former PM Scott Morrison — included the following:
- actively lobbying for his personally preferred choice of minister to be appointed to head Home Affairs, with his stated desire being for “a right winger” but not “a moderate”;
- denigrating ministers (and demanding some of them be sacked or demoted) including Marise Payne, Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop, George Brandis and Michael Keenan (all of whom happened to be Liberal moderates);
- engaging directly in the manoeuvring around the challenge to Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership and replacement by Morrison;
- agitating for Tony Abbott’s ministerial career to be revived;
- making direct representations to the prime minister (Turnbull) at the request of Briggs (who was apparently passing them on from Morrison);
- undermining other senior public servants;
- criticising opposition spokespeople and the Senate estimates process;
- discussing Labor Party political tactics and how the Liberal government could meet them;
- offering advice on polling and campaigning to the Liberal Party;
- pushing for a new media censorship regime to be legislated, while canvassing his personal negative opinions about various journalists and the possibility of “turning” them for the government’s political benefit;
- asserting that he had used his department’s power and authority to help make the push for greater press freedom “a dead duck”.
In short terms, how all this paints Pezzullo is as a highly active partisan for the Liberal Party, who drew no effective boundaries between his role as an apolitical department head and his personal interest in both the political fortunes of the party and the careers of individual politicians based on whether they were or were not aligned with his inclinations. Further, he saw himself as a direct player in the political machinations that run in parallel with the implementation of government policy.
Our system of government is built and absolutely dependent on the separation of powers and the checks and balances that entails.
Because the executive arm of government is headed by politicians — the ministers who are members of the ruling political party — there is an inbuilt conflict of interest between their duty to the public and loyalty to their party. That is balanced by the public service that sits below them, performing the work of the executive arm. The theory is that public servants have no interest whatsoever in the politics of the day, and just go about their work.
The contrast between this fundamental principle (and the behavioural values it necessitates — apolitical, independent, impartial, selfless and disinterested), and Pezzullo’s conduct, is brutally clear. His actions, betrayed in his own words, cannot be reconciled with the requirements of his role.
With any luck, this revelation might trigger a deeper reflection on what brought us here, because it’s not just one rogue egomaniac who was maintained as the most powerful public servant in the country despite an appalling record of mismanagement and intentional cruelty in his bloated department. Nor is it traceable only to Morrison’s corruption of the principles of public service and ministerial responsibility during his term.
Pezzullo was made possible by a long-term project, pursued by both major parties, that has gutted the public service, outsourced government to consultants who return the favour in donations and tailored advice, rewarded political partisans and punished the truly independent advice-givers, muddying and all-but obliterating the boundaries between politics and governance for the collective benefit of the professional political class that now rules Canberra.
It is as well that the government has forced Pezzullo to stand aside and expedited an investigation by a former public service commissioner — anything less would have been laughable. But there is such a thing as summary dismissal, and there are times when procedural fairness is not offended by its wielding. Unless this case is the fraud of the century, I don’t see why that shouldn’t have already been the outcome.
Were Pezzullo’s messages a shock, or just more same old political skulduggery? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
