After the AFP raids politicians must choose a side

Either our elected officials want investigations like those of Annika Smethurst’s to happen, whatever the consequences, and are brave enough to cop the heat — or they get their staff under control, writes Claire Harvey.

The police raids on journalists this week triggered a storm Scott Morrison and his Cabinet did not see coming.

Behind the scenes, the government’s protest to the media this week has been: “This is not us. This is the AFP. They’re independent.”

Well, the Australian Federal Police might be independent. But the Department of Defence is not, and nor is Home Affairs.

For it was Defence — via secretary Greg Moriarty — that referred The Sunday Telegraph and the ABC to the AFP for investigation, after the publication of stories embarrassing to Defence: in our case, Annika Smethurst’s scoop about an expansion of ­spying powers, and for the ABC a series of stories about alleged war crimes.

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Home Affairs, too, is up to its neck in it. Its secretary, the all-powerful Mike Pezzullo, responded to Annika’s original story by telling a Senate committee the story was all wrong (although he wouldn’t detail exactly how or why it was wrong), then suggested it would all be sorted out in the AFP investigation.

Home Affairs, the department managed by Peter Dutton, is up to its neck. Picture: AAP/Dan Peled

Defence and Home Affairs are the most powerful arms of executive government: they are the incarnation of Canberra’s power.

“The government” is not a bunch of blokes (with the odd token lady) sitting around in the joint party room. It’s the departments and all their tens of thousands of staff who administer the government’s will.

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Public servants spend most of their time attempting to impress, outwit, outsmart or undermine the minister, depending on whether they think he/she’s an idiot to be played or a hardhead to be feared. Public servants usually have a laser-focused assessment of the latest politician to be hoisted in to the big office, because they get to see this individual in the raw, attempting to hold his/her own among the subject-matter experts who’ve been working in the ministry for years.

Linda Reynolds now has the task of pulling the Department of Defence into line. Picture: Roslan Rahman/AFP

If you show up on day one to your new portfolio with no idea what’s new in infantry fighting vehicles or how activity-based funding works, you’re screwed.

This is a delicate game because if the minister — and, more importantly, the minister’s staff — decides you’re an uppity bureaucrat with too many big ideas, you’re on the next plane to Honiara unless you’ve managed to sandbag yourself with the right internal allegiances.

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The most toxic of all the departments are the ones with weaponry and epaulets. Defence is notoriously — and proudly — well beyond the control of mere politicians.

This is a portfolio that chews up and spits out ministers for fun. Every couple of years, some new poor sap MP is appointed to the portfolio everyone dreads. It’s the Prisons Department of the federal portfolios: a muddy trench of seething hatreds and power struggles with only one uniting cause: vaporising the fresh-faced politician who’s just been sent over the wire.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has tried to distance his government from the raids. Picture: AP/Yong Teck Lim

It looks like Home Affairs — featuring Mike Pezzullo and the army of Border Force storm troopers — is shaping up as the new Defence: armed to the teeth and ready to blow stuff up.

I’m not suggesting Peter Dutton or Linda Reynolds, in Defence, are unable to control their ministries.

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I do, however, think the politicians must choose a side. Either they want these investigations to happen, whatever the consequences, and they are brave enough to cop the heat — or they get their bureaucrats back under control.

Ultimately, remember, the politicians have the whip hand. Only they can change the legislation under which the bureaucrats, and the police, operate.

Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.