How chief of border control’s career was cut short
As Commissioner of Australian Border Force, Roman Quaedvlieg held one of the more high-profile public service jobs and had the ear of government and senior bureaucrats. But in his new book he details how, when he advised his Minister and Department Secretary of changes in his personal life, they turned their backs on him.
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I was tired as I headed up to see (Immigration Minster Peter) Dutton for a regular operational meeting in late May 2017. I had just returned from an exacting tour of South-East and South Asia where I had visited eight countries in not many more days.
At the end of the meeting I told him I had separated from my wife earlier that year and was in a new relationship, and was giving him a courtesy heads-up in advance of a full written declaration.
He asked me whether the new relationship was with someone in the department and I said my new girlfriend worked for the ABF in Sydney. He said, ‘That’s a bit untidy, isn’t it?’ I told him that Sarah was a casual ABF officer at the lowest level in the organisation and was based at Sydney Airport, so there was no direct line of command or any issues of conflict. I said I would lodge a written declaration with him with the details.
I returned to the office and went to see (Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection Mike) Pezzullo, to let him know as well. His hostile reaction surprised me. He told me he had already heard about it from other people and had been sitting on the information for a while. His hostility appeared to stem primarily from his concern that my relationship issues would jeopardise the establishment of a Homeland Security department.
We had an increasingly tense ongoing conversation on the issue over the next two days. I was concerned about how many times the issue of the pending Homeland Security department came up in these conversations. He said he was concerned that I hadn’t declared the relationship early enough and hadn’t managed the conflicts well enough, especially in regard to Sarah’s employment with the ABF, and intimated that I had possibly rorted travel allowances. He told me he had commissioned an immediate internal review to determine whether these allegations were supported by evidence.
I thought some of his concerns and actions were fair enough based on what he had been told, irrespective of them being unfounded, but I took exception to his belligerent manner, and told him so.
Falling into the old habits of a police officer, I wrote comprehensive notes of my conversations with Pezzullo during this period. I could sense I would need a record of our discussions. When he asked me to come to his office to formally read me a letter advising me of the things he intended to do to manage this issue, including commissioning a formal departmental investigation, I knew the road ahead was going to be long and rough. There were many conversations and I wrote a lot of notes.
The Saturday afternoon after my meeting with Dutton, I got a call from Pezzullo to tell me he’d been speaking to the minister about the issue. The message was unequivocal: I was to
take voluntary leave while the departmental investigation of my alleged involvement in getting Sarah a job was under way, or Dutton would forcibly stand me down.
I thought it was cowardly of Dutton not to ring me himself to have this difficult discussion. It also struck me
as incongruous that Pezzullo would recommend this course of action to Dutton despite not possessing any more information, other than confirmation of my private status, than what he’d already been ‘sitting on’ for some time. If it was such a serious matter now, why had he not acted in the same peremptory manner when he first heard of the allegations?
None of it made any sense to me, but I reluctantly conceded to going on voluntary leave for up to a week while Pezzullo oversaw internal inquiries. I was confident of being cleared.
The forecast week turned into two weeks. Pezzullo went overseas and left the department in charge of one of his deputies, who rang me and suggested I take further leave as the inquiries were taking longer than expected. I agreed, but asked her to tighten up their operational security because I had been contacted by two middle managers, one in the department and one in the ABF, the latter who was, oddly enough, none other than Matt Stock. Stock’s messages of support continued to come in from time to time over the next six months but eventually they stopped, I suppose because he knew at some point that I wasn’t coming back.
Pezzullo finally rang to tell me the departmental inquiries had been finalised and he had been in contact with the ACLEI (Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity) commissioner. He felt the allegations were of such a nature that they fell under the definition of corruption, and he intended to refer the case formally to ACLEI.
To Pezzullo’s surprise, I agreed to this. I didn’t want a mere secretary of the department clearing me — it would be better if an independent anti-corruption body cleared me. I was still confident I would be cleared, even though, based on my experience of ACLEI’s competency, I was worried about how long it would take.
I asked Pezzullo, when he cancelled my access pass to the departmental buildings, if I could continue to have access to the ABF gym; I knew the process would take some time, and
I would need exercise to manage the stress. He took the question on notice and came back
to me with a no: ACLEI was worried I would influence its investigation somehow by talking to people at the work gym.
It was becoming ridiculous, this implication that I would attempt to interfere with an investigation, not least because Pezzullo constantly described his conversations with ACLEI as having ‘spoken to the competent authority’ when he and I both had a close relationship with the integrity commissioner, Michael Griffin.
The formality was ominous.
Three months rolled by while I remained on forced leave. I spent time in Sydney to be with Sarah and to get out of Canberra so I wouldn’t bump into people I knew while simply out buying groceries.
I wasn’t in a frame of mind to talk about the situation and was getting highly irritated with the wide knowledge of it.
Sensitive details of the allegations started appearing in newspapers and on social media, and I complained. I received the usual glib assurances of privacy and confidentiality, but I wasn’t swallowing them. Those assurances were made to look hollow when, without warning and therefore without giving me the opportunity to tell my family or friends, Justice Minister Keenan put out a media statement confirming I was under investigation.
I was angry and speared in several hostile messages to Pezzullo about the lack of confidentiality, courtesy and professionalism. He could only offer me a languid apology, saying Keenan had had no choice.
I called bulls---. It looked to me as if either there was a leak somewhere or someone was talking loosely. Journalists started to contact me, inviting me to tell my story. I resisted, even when two of them told me they had Sarah’s name and wanted to talk
to her. She was still at work at Sydney Airport, her identity as my girlfriend unknown except by a few close colleagues, and she managed to cope by doing her job and avoiding the wildfire gossip.
I had my suspicions where the information was coming from, and told Pezzullo in no uncertain terms that it was coming from one or more of the department, ACLEI and the minister’s office. It needed to stop and should be referred to the AFP, I said. He agreed and told me he would refer it. I calmed down at this assurance, knowing that the very act of referring the complaint often has a dampening effect on leaks, even if in most cases the AFP didn’t officially investigate or didn’t find the perpetrator.
Months later, I found out that the matter hadn’t been referred to the AFP and no one had bothered to let me know. I was furious and referred them to the AFP myself. I also made a formal complaint about Pezzullo’s inaction to the Australian Public Service Commission, but that went nowhere.
Despite the matter not being referred to the AFP at the time, I think my noise about the leaks hit the mark anyway because they stopped. Well, for a while, anyway.
Even at this early point in the investigation I suspected I may have been the target of a government leak-and-smear strategy designed to soften up the public, and me, before the axe came down. I’d seen this type of subversive operation, and while I couldn’t anchor a motivation for it, I couldn’t rule out this strategy being in play with me as the target.
Maybe there was a bit of moralising going on due to the fact that my relationship was with a much younger woman?
I knew Dutton was, ostensibly at least, very conservative, as were other senior members of the government, such as Scott Morrison. However, Morrison apparently had no issue with me. At 8.30 p.m. on 18 July 2017, he sent me an unsolicited text message: ‘Hang in there Roman. Here are some new training manoeuvres for ABF when you return.’ Attached was a video of a tactical assault team climbing the wall of a stronghold with impressive technique.
This was not atypical of my experience of Morrison — he liked to maintain a rapport with operational officers and often sought out their camaraderie. I replied and told him I was annoyed with the media reporting but confident of exoneration, and had some thoughts about the motivation for the complaint. He finished the conversation with ‘All the best Roman, ScoMo.’ At least I still seemed to have Morrison’s support.
I hadn’t heard from Dutton at all since the conversation we’d had just before I was stood down, and was never to hear from him again on his own initiative. I ran into him on a plane to Brisbane at the end of 2017 when I was travelling with my daughter to visit family in Queensland; he was with his wife and children.
I had seen him in the lounge but he’d avoided me, presumably not remembering I was from Queensland but realising I was probably on the same plane.
I boarded first and was at the front of the Economy cabin when he boarded. He appeared to look at me nervously and I gained the impression he sought to keep his back turned while he and his wife settled into their Business Class seats. When we landed, I stood quickly and watched him overtly — we were only several seats apart — until he was forced to look at me. He nodded and said, ‘Commissioner,’ as a perfunctory greeting. I played the game and nodded back, saying, ‘Minister,’ and held his eye until he looked away.
I knew he would disembark first but would have to wait just off the aerobridge for his children, who were seated at the back of the plane. Sure enough, when I disembarked he and his wife were standing there. I walked over to shake his hand and sincerely wish him a merry Christmas, which he reciprocated with all the authenticity of a used-car salesman.
We were to have several text exchanges in the lead-up to my sacking, but that was the last personal interaction I had with him prior to a later ugly public stoush that included an extraordinary personal attack by him on my character while he hid behind parliamentary privilege.
The media leaking was to resume and get worse, but not before I was asked to come in
to see Pezzullo and Elizabeth Kelly, who was a deputy secretary at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), at the end of August 2017. Pezzullo behaved out of character at the meeting, displaying none of his usual confidence and bravado. He didn’t shake my hand at the start or at the end, his speech was halting and, most unusually for him, he read off prepared notes. I had never seen him so nervous.
It wasn’t much of a discussion.
He simply told me that ACLEI had provided a large amount of material to him that justified a public service code-of-conduct investigation, and that he was recusing himself from doing the investigation by handing
it over to Martin Parkinson, the head of PM&C. He handed me a letter outlining the allegations, with an added one relating to the improper
use of my work phone. He outlined the process and in effect said that unless I resigned by the following week, he would initiate the handover of the investigation to Parkinson.
I asked if I could see the material ACLEI had provided and he gave me
a blunt no. I walked out of the meeting wondering how I had ended up in a position where I was being asked to consider resigning on the basis of a short allegations letter without supporting information. Pezzullo had told me during the meeting that he had read all of the supporting material before recusing himself, which I thought was curious, but he was seemingly emotionally animated about whatever he had read.
I thought long and hard about where this was going and went back to Pezzullo within days to ask whether we were able to conditionally negotiate the terms of my resignation. I didn’t want to resign, but did want to know my full options as I wasn’t being given anything more at that point than a summarised set of allegations.
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Extract from Tour de Force by Roman Quaedvlieg , photography by NA, published by Viking on 2 June 2020, RRP $34.99
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