Pezzullo, the "hawk's hawk" left out of AUKUS lead up

 Mike Pezzullo and the trashing of the Australian Public Service.

On security matters, he's the hawks' hawk. When in the Defence Department, he was lead author of the Rudd government's 2009 defence white paper, which raised the hackles of China. Earlier, he was a senior staffer to Kim Beazley when Beazley was opposition leader. His primary interest is defence — he would have liked nothing better than to head the Defence Department. 

Home affairs boss Michael Pezzullo was kept out of secret AUKUS deliberations even though he'd previously warned of ‘beating drums of war’.  It was obvious well before that Australia was preparing to refurbish and expand its own drum set in the face of an assertive China already targeting Australia economically. 

Pezzullo said in April 2021 in his Anzac Day speech – titled The Longing for Peace, the Curse of War​​ – that free nations “continue still to face [the] sorrowful challenge” of militaristic aggression and “tyranny’s threat to freedom”.

“In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat – sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer,” he said.

“We must search always for the chance for peace amidst the curse of war, until we are faced with the only prudent, if sorrowful, course – to send off, yet again, our warriors to fight the nation’s wars.”

Pezzullo noted the “sorrow of Europeans after the horror of the First World War” but said their “revulsion at the thought of another terrible bloodbath” had meant they “did not heed the drums of war which beat through the 1930s – until too late they once again took up arms against Nazism and Fascism”.

“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war.”

Pezzullo said Australia should reduce the likelihood of war through “preparedness of arms, and by our statecraft … but not at the cost of our precious liberty.

“War might well be folly, but the greater folly is to wish away the curse by refusing to give it thought and attention, as if in so doing, war might leave us be, forgetting us perhaps.

“The least that we can do for the host of the dead whom we remember today is to be prepared to face equivalent challenges with the same resolve and sense of duty that they displayed in years past.”

The comments came just days after the then new defence minister, Peter Dutton, warned of possible war with China over Taiwan, part of an escalation of rhetoric that Australia could be drawn in to a war over China’s territorial disputes with regional allies. Pezzullo’s call for greater preparedness also came weeks after the head of the defence force, Angus Campbell, warned outbreak of a war over Taiwan would be “disastrous” for the region, indicating Australia would keep pushing for peaceful dialogue.

The home affairs minister at the time, Karen Andrews, backed Pezzullo.

However, we are led to believe that  Pezzullo was only briefed about AUKUS on the day Morrison announced the deal. Despite the emphasis on cyber and emerging technologies, the Department of Home Affairs – a key national security agency with responsibility for domestic cybersecurity – appears to have not played any significant role in landing the AUKUS pact.

Now it turns out that while Home Affairs has been involved in scandal after scandal,  its secretary Mike Pezzullo was busy playing political games with party powerbrokers.

Mike Pezzullo now stands revealed as one who thought that it was appropriate to be exchanging a large volume of political texts with a Liberal powerbroker.

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.

Pezzzullo loves secrets, it seems. In the latest revelations, a series of text messages show that Pezzullo sought to convince political leaders to introduce a system of “D-Notices” to allow government agencies to pressure media organisations not to publish stories deemed damaging to national security. Pezzullo also reportedly had a secret proposal to allow the nation’s external intelligence agency to spy on Australians.

1. So we are to accept that "hawk's hawk", ex-Defence, "drums of war", incessant influencer, promoter of secrets but otherwise very loud Pezzullo had nothing to do with AUKUS. Really?
   
   
2. And are we to accept that he never got the mere whiff of AUKUS plans from his former Defence colleagues nor had anycontact at all with the US arms industry lobbyists? Really?
   
   
3. And are we to believe that Pezzullo's relationship with Liberal Party powerbroker Scott Briggs - the man Pezzzullo was apparently in regular contact with and  a close friend of former prime minister Scott Morrison. - was not known to Scott Morrison?  Morrisson apparently made a point of leaving Pezzullo (and presumably Briggs) out of the AUKUS loop, probably because Scott Briggs represented the French "Naval Group" submarines contract.
   
   Recall that Liberal party donor Briggs, one-time deputy state director of the Liberal Party, and a director of the Cronulla Sharks, where Morrison is the No.1 ticket holder, was once part of the consortium to bid for a $1 billion contract from Home Affairs to privatise Australia’s visa processing system. Also recall that the Department of Home Affairs approved an $80,000 contract with a company led by Briggs to explore a private system to run quarantine services for people coming into Australia during the pandemic. The company, Australian Quarantine Services, sought commercial partners to set up the scheme with help from Pezzullo’s department. 
   
   Also recall that the previously reneged arrangement with the French involving submarines was with "Naval Group" once represented by DPG Advisory, the lobby shop headed by Scott Morrison’s mate David Gazard, Morrison’s former senior adviser Sasha Grebe and - surprise, surprise - long-time man about Parliament Scott Briggs.  Briggs has a long history of using his connections to the prime minister to pursue business interests. His connection with Morrison became an issue in 2020 when it was alleged he donated $165,000 to the Liberal party at the same time as he was vying to win the government’s $1 billion visa privatisation contract. Briggs is a registered lobbyists through DPG Advisory Services, who offer “unique access to the highest levels of government and the opposition”. DPG represents several foreign companies, including Facebook. Briggs is also a registered lobbyist with Public Policy Solutions, which represents British American Tobacco. Both Blackrock and Vanguard are major shareholders of:
   - Facebook
   - British American Tobacco
   - the builders of the AUKUS Virginia Class submarines  General Dynamics Electric Boat Division and Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc.
   - Raytheon who makes the Tomahawk Missiles on board the Virginia Class submarines
   - Lockheed Martin who designs, develops and integrates the submarine combat systems.
   
   DPG Advisory's website states that "The DPG partnership includes director and long-term political operative, lawyer and investment banker Scott Briggs, who has assisted multiple blue-chip domestic and international firms achieve their commercial objectives with government. "
   
   

This is Game of Mates writ large.

I somehow doubt that Public Service Commission investigators (looking into a public service code of conduct and its requirement that he “maintain appropriate confidentiality” and “avoid any conflict of interest”  as well as not sharing any inside information improperly) will even go near those questions.

And now we read that Pezzullo sought to privately cultivate now opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, who Pezzullo invited to his house for a discreet dinner. Confidential communication records and multiple sources commenting on the condition of anonymity reveal that, in addition to his dealings with businesspeople, Pezzullo frequently messaged frmer Labor minister Stephen Conroy and other influential Labor and Liberal figures who were considered national security hawks to advance his national security agenda and influence the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security. The committee provides rigorous oversight of the national security regime that Pezzullo helped to lead until he was stood down on Monday. On at least two separate occasions in 2018 and 2019, Pezzullo attempted to influence Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who was the then chair of the committee. 

“Someone needs to engage with Hastie as Chair of [the security committee] encouraging them not to wander off into unrealistic grounds,” Pezzullo messaged a confidant in 2019. After Hastie sensationally used parliamentary privilege in May 2018 to expose influence activities directed by Beijing, Pezzullo made a concerted effort to shape Hastie’s public stance on national security. At the time, Hastie was under attack for being too publicly hawkish on China.

Pezzullo’s messages show he claimed he could influence Hastie because the pair were “friends”. Pezzullo intended to host Hastie for dinner at his Canberra house as part of what the departmental chief viewed as his special “role in assisting members on both sides of the aisle to realise their potential in the national security space”.“No one else should know we are having dinner,” Pezzullo texted to a contact before dining with Hastie. “I have a good relationship with Hastie and I don’t want to compromise it.”

Pezzullo is considered a hawk on China, but in 2018 appears to have been cognisant of the need to manage public statements that risked angering Beijing or Australia’s allies.Hastie declined to comment, but current committee member, Liberal senator James Paterson, likened Pezzullo’s contact with his colleague as one of several clumsy attempts by a range of Canberra players “to manage us [Hastie and other outspoken politicians] to accept the cosy status quo” on China.

Integrity expert Clancy Moore of Transparency International called on the Australian Public Service Commissioner to expand its investigation into the suspended Home Affairs secretary in light of the new revelations. 

Pezzullo is also facing scrutiny over his department’s decision in May to second the deputy secretary at Home Affairs, Marc Ablong, to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in a move that allowed Ablong to retain his departmental senior executive-level salary of $460,000 a year. Like many think tanks, the policy institute requests government agencies pay for (typically mid-career) public servants to undergo visiting fellow secondments. They are usually paid between $150,000 and $250,000 a year. Ablong is a 30-year public service veteran and long-term colleague and friend of Pezzullo, who worked closely with him at the Defence Department prior to becoming his deputy at Home Affairs. Taxpayers will pay a total of $920,000 for Ablong to spend two years as a “visiting senior fellow” at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. By the time he completes his stint, Ablong will have become the highest-paid think tank fellow in Australia. He will have earned $320,000 more than the institute’s chief executive, who is highly respected former senior public servant and Coalition national security adviser Justin Bassi. Two think tank sector insiders told this masthead that while Ablong was a highly respected policy expert, the decision to appoint and fund someone so senior and highly paid was unprecedented.