No minister, Labor or Liberal, will ever be able to trust Pezzullo again

The problem with Mike Pezzullo has always been that he doesn’t understand limits.

Obviously, from the revelations in this masthead, he does not understand the limits of a public servant’s role and the need not to cross the boundary between being an adviser to government and a political player.​

But that is not the only limit he doesn’t appear to understand.

He doesn’t appear to understand the boundaries between the elected government and the public service: hence his remark in one encrypted message: “We need to build a meritocracy by stealth and run government through the bureaucracy, working to 4-5 powerful and capable ministers.” It wasn’t only individual ministers Pezzullo was undermining, it was the very concept of an apolitical public service answerable to the elected government.

Nor does he understand the functional boundaries within the public service itself, which allocates different roles and functions to different departments. How else could he write of his desire “to put the Attorney-General’s Department to the sword”? The core role of the AGD is to ensure the legality of the conduct of all other government departments and agencies.

Nor does Pezzullo understand the most fundamental boundary in a parliamentary democracy: between the different roles of the executive government and the parliament. How could someone who does understand the way the Westminster system works possibly say, as Pezzullo said in another encrypted message: “Estimates is actually a concern for our democracy”? It could only be a concern for someone who refuses to accept Parliamentary scrutiny – of which the Estimates committee system is by far the most effective vehicle.

In fact, Pezzullo doesn’t appear to accept that there are limitations on executive government at all. Hence his embrace of the Hobbesian view that an all-powerful state is necessary to safeguard citizens from harm, and loss of liberty is the price they have to pay for that protection: a theory of government which is antithetical to the liberal-democratic tradition of limited government ruling by the consent of the governed. When I referred to Pezzullo’s articulation of that Hobbesian view as the “philosophical context” for the creation of the Department of Home Affairs in an article for the Herald and The Age last month, I had no idea of the revelations that were coming.

Mike Pezzullo’s candid exchanges with Scott Briggs cannot be dismissed as a kind of political locker-room talk that means nothing. They are a spontaneous declaration of his state of mind and his attitude to his role. Political parties attract parasites like Briggs like iron filings to a magnet. What we do not yet know is how many other spivs, who big-note themselves with claims to influence in the inner circle, Pezzullo was communicating with. Not to mention how many journalists he was briefing.

One of the many reasons the national security agencies were so deeply resistant to being placed under Pezzullo’s jurisdiction in the Department of Home Affairs is that their leaders – Duncan Lewis at ASIO and Andrew Colvin at the AFP – understood that the effectiveness of their work depended on a high level of public trust. For ASIO in particular – which, as a covert agency cannot have the same degree of public scrutiny as other government agencies – this was a particular worry. Lewis understood that it is critical for ASIO’s effective operation that the public have implicit faith that it would not abuse its power.

And this was another boundary Pezzullo failed to grasp: that there is a critical balance between empowering national security agencies to enable them to do their job, and not so over-reaching that trust in them is lost. Finding the right fulcrum of that balance is what I tried to achieve as attorney-general – much, as it is now revealed, to Pezzullo’s frustration. He thought that national security policy should be as hawkish as possible. The true test of national security policy is that it should be as effective as possible. Pezzullo failed to understand that it is possible to compromise effectiveness by over-reach.

Whatever happens to Pezzullo now – his position is plainly untenable, since no minister, Labor or Liberal, will ever be able to trust him again – one good outcome of this sorry affair would be to reverse the policy error of the Turnbull government to remove ASIO from the attorney-general’s portfolio, where it has historically lain. Having the agency which can, by its nature, be least open to public scrutiny within the department of government whose core function is to protect the rule of law, is a sensible and logical fit.

The Pezzullo revelations show, with appalling clarity, how important it is not just for our democracy, but for our national security as well, that the public be confident that those who exercise covert power understand the importance of limits.

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George Brandis is a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor in the practice of national security at the ANU’s National Security College.