It has been revealed that Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo, through Liberal powerbroker and lobbyist Scott Briggs, spent years seeking to shore up power, undermining political and public service enemies, and promoting the careers of conservative allies. On Monday afternoon, Pezzullo agreed to step down amid an investigation.
The kind of factional power play Pezzullo is accused of is what we may reluctantly expect from elected politicians mired in the dirty world of politics, but is antithetical to the notion of an apolitical and impartial public service.
As one of the top mandarins in the country, Pezzullo is obliged to comply with public service values mandated in the Public Service Act 1999, which states that public servants are to be apolitical, impartial, and act with integrity and in a professional manner. The APS code of conduct reiterates these requirements. Engaging in back-channel dealings to advance partisan causes clearly subverts these requirements.
Pezzullo has been referred to the Australian public service commissioner for the hundreds of texts to Briggs seeking to advance political issues.
Why does this challenge the Westminster system?
The modern Westminster ministerial advisory system is built on the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report in Britain. In the 18th and early 19th century, it was difficult to be appointed to a UK government office unless you were an aristocrat with the right connections to a very small elite.
The Northcote-Trevelyan report rejected appointment based on patronage. It concluded that a permanent and apolitical body of public servants who were subordinate to ministers was necessary for effective government administration.
This report forms the basis of the Westminster public service today. Public servants are expected to be neutral and apolitical, and recruited and promoted on the basis of merit.
Over time, several changes have occurred that have significantly weakened the Australian bureaucracy.
The heyday of the mandarin is over. Departmental secretaries in the 1950s and 1960s had permanent tenure. By contrast, recent governments have been in the habit of sacking departmental secretaries and installing their allies in the positions.
In 1996, the newly elected Howard government terminated the contracts of six departmental secretaries, one-third of the total, as soon as the government was sworn in — an event known as the “night of the long knives”. This exercise was repeated, less dramatically, by other incoming governments. Senior bureaucrats on fixed-term contracts fearful of losing their jobs are less likely to provide frank and fearless advice to ministers.
In addition, in the past 40 years, ministerial advisers have become a powerful force in executive government. They are partisan advisers to ministers, who have significant influence in media and political advice, and are their “eyes and ears”. As ministers increasingly relied on their trusted partisan advisers, the influence of the public service has correspondingly waned.
In this context, Pezzullo’s political machinations undermine the tripartite system where ministers and ministerial advisers have explicitly political roles, while public servants are to be impartial and act in the public interest.
Politicians and their partisan advisers are subject to the incentive structures of winning the next election, and the short-termism and tunnel vision that comes with it. On the other hand, bureaucrats should be impartial and act in the public interest, and also insulated from short-term political manoeuvring. This is more likely to result in better long-term outcomes for the nation.
The High Court in Banerji has previously come down hard on a public servant who lost her job posting critical comments about her department on an anonymous Twitter (now X) account. The High Court emphasised that the impartiality of the public service is fundamental to the proper functioning of the system of representative and responsible government.
While the judgment has been rightly criticised, as it has the potential to silence public servants from expressing their personal political views even anonymously, it is true that a lack of impartiality by the public service will undermine the trust of ministers, who expect neutral, professional and apolitical advice, untainted by party political machinations. It will also undermine public trust in the bureaucracy.
The need for reform
The weaknesses of our system of public administration were recently extensively ventilated in the robodebt royal commission, where it was revealed that senior public servants sought to hide the likely illegality of the robodebt scheme for four years, in order to please their political masters. The commissioner was scathing of the public service and lambasted their handling of the scheme as an “extraordinary saga” of “venality, incompetence and cowardice”.
We have thus come to a point where there needs to be reform in our system of public administration. We need to enhance the professionalism, impartiality and integrity of the public service, to be a bulwark against the partisanship and short-termism of politicians and ministerial advisers. Without that, we face the potential of more dismal failures of public policy and large-scale public disasters.
What does the Pezzullo affair say about the state of the public service? Let us know your thoughts 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.
Again, so much of this started with John Howard’s henchman Max “The Axe” Moore-Wilton, who trashed the conventions of “frank and fearless” advice, sneering about how that reminded him of “Frank-n-Furter”(I never quite understood how that was supposed to be funny). And under Howard, instead of keeping ministers informed, public servants’ role became supplying plausible deniability – as in ministers claiming they were never told refugees weren’t dunking their children in the ocean. Undermine public service independence and you hollow out ministerial responsibility at the same time – enduring achievements of Howard the Great White Ant and his amply rewarded henchmen.
Of course Max the axe was followed by his daughter, Jane the glasses with plausible deniability.
Yes Max the Axe eh? The guy who ran Sydney Airport and was resentful he had to make all these extra security provisions, like cameras in the understairs baggage carousels for Christ’s sake, which threatened to cruel his and Howards chances of selling it off.
Also known as S-H-I-T happens! Remember the Austereo prank call affair?
Started with?
You’d have to look a bit further back to the Hawke/Keating neo-liberalisation of the public service.
Howard and his stooges would have been impotent without the previous decade of trashing the public interest.
If Pezullo breached the Code, strip him of his luxury PSS or CSS super. At some point there has to be adequate sanctions in place to deter these people from their ratbaggery.
And so, who do you think leaked these texts between two people?
The one stood down for naivety and stupidity or the political power broker with an axe to grind and a payback to achieve?
Dunno. Both at the exact time like a shoot out in a Tarantino film. If the ALP had any guts or detrmination it would look at some kind of conspiracy charge against the political power broker.
Howard had a huge bunch of lackeys in his office and over 1600 across the govt. Scotty had 50 in his office. They neutered the public service.
And we pay for that – twice.
As reported by Transparency International, once a government has an inbuilt tolerance for corruption over time, the cost to us (the tax payers) is a 30% increase in the costs of everything.
Mike Pezzullo got his fiefdom and what a completely useless department it has been for everyone dealing with it, except the owners of the companies in receipt of all those massive contracts, which didn’t go to tender.
Was it original, unlikely? Both Oz and UK appear to have followed the US GOP strategy from the ’80s, later described by Thomas Franks in ‘The Wrecking Crew’ (2008):
‘Frank argues that certain elements of the Republican Party intentionally dismantled the government by many means, including turning public policy into a private-sector feeding frenzy. Frank describes the state of the federal government of the United States as analogous to a large group of privatized pigs feeding at the public trough, which was brought on by the privatization schemes engineered by the Republicans’ (Wiki)
What would or could it lead to with right wing leadership? Heritage Foundation’s (Koch) Daily Signal are mooting ‘Project 2025’ for a potential Trump or GOP Presidency:
‘Project 2025 is a far-right plan to purge and reshape the U.S. Federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 United States presidential election’
Pezzollo surely needs to go, as his deputy Roman forgotten his surname got short shrift for getting his girlfriend a job!
That said, Morrison told public servants they were there to do as he told them, not offer advice, so maybe pezzollo was just trying to do as he was told.
The former head of the Custom’s service who thought that all Custom’s officers shouldn’t have to carry a gun?
The DHA was carefully engineered by Pezzullo, he jumped from Customs (see https://www.9news.com.au/national/mike-pezzullo-confirmed-as-customs-ceo/0a6fc3b9-7b6f-41cc-b091-cf939c490365 if you enjoy irony) to the more influential Immigration, a critical point in his carefully crafted takeover of all federal law enforcement. The pollies involved didn’t demonstrate much free will, in the case of Dutton the black uniforms, shiny medals and automatic weapons were probably irresistible.
Dutton probably had a black uniform made. Just for around the house of course.
The Nine Pubishing article simply provides evidence for what we should have known all along. The Pez was always a mongrel and now we know he is a dodgy mongrel.