For some time, former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo has been engaged — primarily via News Corp papers — in a campaign of Nixonian rehabilitation, posing as a magisterial geopolitical thinker, prepared to utter the strategic truths others will not.
To be fair, this pose suits Pezzullo far better than his previous career. After his disastrous period at the helm of the immigration and then Home Affairs departments, one has to conclude he’s better suited to musing about the threat of China than actually running anything. There was the disastrous loss of control of Australia’s borders that occurred under the Coalition, which saw organised crime exploit Australia’s visa system; there’s the Paladin scandal, the stench of which still lingers over Canberra even now; there’s the spectacular failure of regulation of migration agents; there’s the hopeless bungling of maritime surveillance contracts costing taxpayers hundreds of millions; there’s the extended list of disastrously mismanaged procurement exercises and contracts.
All on Pezzullo’s watch, while he composed bizarre rants to his staff. It’s worth recalling, though, that Pezzullo wasn’t sacked for any of this, but for multiple breaches of the Public Service Code of Conduct. In the words of the Australian Public Service Commission, Pezzullo “breached the Australian Public Service Code of Conduct on at least 14 occasions in relation to five overarching allegations, those allegations being that he:
- used his duty, power, status or authority to seek to gain a benefit or advantage for himself
- engaged in gossip and disrespectful critique of ministers and public servants
- failed to maintain confidentiality of sensitive government information
- failed to act apolitically in his employment
- failed to disclose a conflict of interest”
Maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive government information was a particularly curly one for Pezzullo given he once called for leakers to be jailed and journalists to be censored. Industrial-grade hypocrisy from the self-styled hard man of the security establishment.
But no-one, surely, could have anticipated that Pezzullo would take his cue on rehabilitation as much from Tom Gleeson as Richard Nixon. In the Weekend Australian, Pezzullo channelled Gleeson with an extraordinary demand for Australians to be patriotic — hard!
Hard patriotism has a necessarily martial quality … Hard patriotism challenges us to ask of ourselves: what is to be defended, to the last if necessary, and are we prepared to pay that price? Hard patriotism cannot be solely expected of our armed forces … In the event of having to defend the nation, hard patriotism would be required of all. Sacrifice and commitment would be expected from all, subject only to age or incapacity. Hard patriots would need to be found not only in the armed forces but also across a mobilised and resolute population.
Hard. Mobilised. Resolute. But for what, Mike? “The Eurasian axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea”. Pezzullo sees a world in which “China would rule the waves of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and its military bases would be in our sea-air approaches … free to impose its will on Australia … Local quisling political and business leaders would emerge who would urge their fellow Australians to ‘adjust’ to the new reality of Chinese supremacy.”
Is this Pezzullo’s pitch for a role in a Dutton government (preferably not in a position where he has to actually run anything, like Dutton’s national security adviser)? In which case, he might want to have a word with his former boss, who has now ditched the “Manchurian Candidate” stuff and talks of his fondness for China.
And what does being patriotic — hard! — entail? Pezzullo wants to:
Ask all citizens, perhaps aged 18 to 65, to affirm annually a pledge of service, where we would all be asked to register the kind of national service that we would be willing to render in the event of a military emergency involving the defence of the nation. This would not be limited to being willing to take up arms. It would include other categories of service such as medical, construction, logistics and so on. Establishing such a register, perhaps as a prelude to establishing an Australian national service scheme…
He also wants a “war book” (not prepared just by Defence, of course, but by Home Affairs as well) and to treat “national security like the national budget (through an annual, prime-time, national security statement to the nation).”
“A harder patriotism would,” Pezzullo concludes (for some reason, one imagines in the voice Jim Hacker used to do when feeling Churchillian) “build steadily as the people began to appreciate the stakes and the potential sacrifices that might have to be made to protect all that we cherish about Australia.”
One of the things we cherish about Australia, of course, is that disgraced public servants who leaked confidential information and thought they were a political heavy-hitter rather than a bureaucrat can be given a platform for their fascist fantasies about conscription, forced labour and Chinese invasions. Long may it remain so.
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