Mike Pezzullo, one of Canberra’s most powerful and certainly most controversial public servants, cannot survive the revelation of the trove of text messages showing him blatantly inserting himself into the political process.
Pezzullo, the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, has been stood aside while his extraordinary behaviour, exposed by Nine Entertainment, is scrutinised by a former public service commissioner, Lynelle Briggs. But the end of the story is predictable.
In the tsunami of encrypted texts, running over five years and sent to Scott Briggs (no relation to Lynelle Briggs), a Liberal insider and confidant of prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, Pezzullo repeatedly lobbied for his departmental interests and his views.
