When I first met Michael Pezzullo I was a reasonably small-business owner, full of ideas and struggling to get the Australian government to work on them. To deal with him as secretary of the Department of Home Affairs was to be in a pressure cooker, but one where the best idea had a chance of winning. It was a place moving forward where do nothing wasn’t an option for people who wanted to stay long in his good books.

Very quickly he circulated our ideas in the White House, and they became the basis of a good part of the federal government’s Ransomware Disruption Taskforce. And he also got us into the White House as part of the administration’s counter ransomware initiative. There is no other place in the Australian national security space that moves like this.