Government prepares for findings on senior public servant

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Ministers in the Albanese government are preparing for a report to recommend whether Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo should be removed from his role over covert dealings with lobbyists and secret efforts to gain and exert political influence during the terms of the Turnbull and Morrison governments.

Four government sources, including senior ministers who spoke on background to discuss sensitive details before the report’s release, confirmed Public Service Commissioner Lynelle Briggs had finalised an eight-week investigation into whether the divisive and powerful department chief breached the public service code of conduct.

Mike Pezzullo has been one of Australia’s most powerful public servants.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Briggs was commissioned to probe Pezzullo’s dealings with Liberal powerbroker and lobbyist Scott Briggs after The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes revealed a cache of messages between the pair. Lynelle and Scott Briggs are not related.

The government will receive and respond to the report within days.

The impending report also comes with Labor and the Home Affairs Department, including its acting chief Stephanie Foster, facing intense pressure to deal with the release of criminals from immigration detention after a recent High Court ruling.

One of the sources, a minister in the Albanese government who asked not to be named so they could discuss the confidential matter, said the expectation across government had been that the investigation would recommend Pezzullo go.

They said the independent investigation had taken longer than expected, and stressed that Lynelle Briggs had conducted the probe at arm’s length from government.

The source said the report would also be used to sharpen the government’s political attack on Opposition Leader Peter Dutton over his handling of the sprawling department during his time in government.

“Of course this will place pressure on Dutton, it was him and Pezzullo who created this giant department,” the source said.

A second minister said that “you wouldn’t think it was tricky” for Lynelle Briggs to make a recommendation for Pezzullo to go following the leaking of the thousands of messages between Pezzullo and Scott Briggs.

“The writing is clearly on the wall. Maybe a few messages he could have survived, but this was just so many messages [between Pezzullo and Scott Briggs that were leaked],” the minister said.

This masthead attempted to contact Pezzullo for comment.

The inquiry into Pezzullo was launched in September after The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Sixty Minutes revealed the cache of encrypted messages between Pezzullo and Scott Briggs.

The powerful Home Affairs boss, who served in senior public service roles for successive Labor and Liberal governments for decades, has remained on his salary package worth more than $900,000 while the investigation has been conducted over the past eight weeks.

The messages revealed how the Home Affairs secretary had utilised the influential Coalition lobbyist as a political back channel to Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison in an attempt to undermine political and public service enemies, promote the careers of conservative politicians he considered allies and lobby to muzzle the press.

Leaked messages and other confidential documents also revealed Pezzullo’s dealings with Labor-aligned lobbyist Chris Fry. Pezzullo helped arrange for one of Fry’s clients, British American Tobacco, to access a senior departmental official.

But it was Pezzullo’s dealings with Scott Briggs that plunged the public servant into the centre of a major scandal.

Scott Briggs is a lobbyist, businessman, former vice president of the NSW Liberals, and was a close confidant of former prime minister Turnbull and his successor Morrison. Until his recent suspension, Pezzullo was the public servant in charge of Home Affairs, a department whose creation he championed and which Turnbull appointed him to lead in late 2017.

The messages show that after seeking out Briggs in 2016, Pezzullo used him to conduct a brazen, years-long effort to influence political machinations within the highest offices of the land, including during Liberal leadership spills.

“I don’t wish to interfere but you won’t be surprised to hear that in the event of ScoMo [Scott Morrison] getting up I would like to see Dutton come back to HA [Home Affairs]. No reason for him to stay on backbench that I can see,” Pezzullo wrote at 9.40pm on the night before the leadership spill against Turnbull in August 2018.

Political and constitutional experts who have reviewed some of the encrypted messages say they reveal Pezzullo was operating well outside the Westminster system and rules for senior public servants.

The Australian Public Service Code of Conduct requires public servants to be apolitical, independent and “open and accountable”.

In a 2018 speech Pezzullo himself said it was “important for the public servant to absent oneself from any partisan discussions and avoid exposure to raw politics”. Departmental secretaries had “a particular obligation to protect the boundary between the political and the administrative”, he said.

But in conversations involving more than 1000 messages over five years, mostly using encrypted messaging apps WhatsApp and Signal, Pezzullo bad-mouthed and undermined senior Coalition ministers and public servants, particularly those he viewed as impediments to his ambition to build a powerful Home Affairs Department.

He was advising from the sidelines during politically sensitive moments, including the 2018 Liberal leadership spill, and he covertly told the Coalition how to overcome resistance from Labor and then shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus on a number of policies.

The departmental secretary criticised journalists who reported on national security reforms or his favoured ministers and boasted of his efforts to make press freedom a “dead duck”, and repeatedly lobbied Briggs to convince Morrison to introduce a media censorship regime. He also ridiculed the Senate estimates committee process – one of the key means of holding senior public servants and their ministers to account.

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