The most powerful mandarin in our 'extended' security state

Michael Pezzullo is by far the most powerful public servant in Australia. He created and runs the ever-expanding Home Affairs Department, he oversees a ceaseless avalanche of draconian new laws and he gives public speeches about what he sees as the global “duality of good and evil”.

“Nothing less than the transformation of the state itself" ... Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the Department of Home Affairs.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Home Affairs already includes ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, Border Force, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Transactions and Analysis Centre, Immigration, and many other bodies. New laws make it a criminal offence to cause “intangible” damage to Australia's international relations, without explaining how anyone could know they were having an “intangible” effect. Another new criminal offence is to receive "inherently harmful information", regardless of whether it’s classified.

In a speech in Canberra this month that sparked remarkably little alarm, Pezzullo said responding to the problems created by global forces required “nothing less than the transformation of the state itself, and the state’s relationship with society”.

He wanted what he called an “extended state” consisting of the “entire apparatus” of all Australian governments, the business sector, the scientific and industrial research establishment, not-for-profit and community organisations including charities, and households as required for security and other purposes. Pezzullo wanted a “closer integration of security, economic and social policy”.

His October 13 speech then outlined more than 25 serious risks that might materialise over the coming century, including pandemics and climate change as well as many national security threats. “This is an apocalyptic list to be sure,” he said, before adding there are arguable cases for other scenarios including “a humanity-killing synthetic virus, super volcanic eruptions which block the sun, the Terminator AI threat, a nuclear apocalypse and, yes, the killer asteroid”.

In a speech on March 13 last year, Pezzullo listed only seven threats, none of which included white supremacists. Two days later an Australian white supremacist killed 51 people in a Christchurch mosque. Oddly, his latest speech still did not mention white supremacists.

Pezzullo’s speeches often refer to his background reading. In this case, he said: “At one level, security dilemmas reduce logically to human difference and alterity, whether one reads Hobbes, Foucault, Schmitt or Heidegger, or for that matter Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche or Derrida, to name a few of the relevant thinkers.” Sartre and Kierkegaard crack a mention elsewhere in the speech.

In a speech to the Trans-Tasman Business Circle in Canberra on October 13, 2017, he said the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes had a central role in creating the model of the “protector state” that prevailed until undermined by globalisation. Hobbes famously argued that, unless people cede all power to the state, their lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

Although Pezzullo doesn’t say so, another 17th century philosopher, John Locke, has been more important than Hobbes. Widely seen as the founder of modern liberalism, Locke had a strong influence on the US Declaration of Independence, including its insistence that governments should only derive their powers from the “consent of the governed”. In stark contrast, Hobbes argued the state and monarch must be absolute.

Despite globalisation, Pezzullo still sees a need for a strong state. He told his Trans-Tasman business audience: “The state has to embed itself invisibly into global networks and supply chains and the virtual realm, in a seamless and largely invisible fashion, intervening on the basis of intelligence and risk settings, increasingly over a super scale and very high volumes.”

A devout Catholic, Pezzullo stresses that everything the Australian state does must be lawful and subject to outside scrutiny. Nevertheless, he gave a dismissive explanation of how this can be achieved when questioned by a parliamentary committee in October 2018 about the lack of a warrant before government agencies notify tech companies they must give them access to encrypted cryptic data.

Pezzullo said: “If we were to say to you that a notice is a warrant and through an incantation and a sprinkling of some magic dust on it, all of a sudden greater oversight is achieved ...” He explained that the attorney-general would utter the incantation and sprinkle the magic dust.

One problem is that the attorney-general is a partisan government minister, not an independent judicial figure. Pezzullo seems comfortable with that.

Brian Toohey is the author of Secret: the Making of Australia’s Security State.

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