Our reporters have uncovered a cache of messages, sent by Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo to a Liberal powerbroker, where he tried to protect his allies and denigrate his enemies.
that Pezzullo “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” because, unbeknown to Pezzullo, he had resolved to leave politics “more than a year before that message”. More importantly, the conversations were out of bounds for a public servant.
“Keenan … needs to get with the program,” Pezzullo wrote in another message. “He needs to lift his sights and his horizons, rather than getting stuck on questions of status and prestige.”During the August 2018 three-way battle for the Liberal Party leadership between Peter Dutton, Morrison and Turnbull, Pezzullo repeatedly sought to use Briggs’ influence with two of the candidates to have a conservative installed as his minister.
During the turbulence, Briggs also hit up Pezzullo for a favour: “Mate request from Scott [Morrison] – we need you to recommend to the pm [Turnbull] that Scott stays in the [Home Affairs] role for next week.” When Briggs said it had become clear the leadership contest would come down to Morrison versus Dutton, Pezzullo wrote: “Then hopefully unite after that, whomever wins. We need them both on the field – not for Liberal Party’s sake but for the country’s sake. A grand coalition??”
Constitutional lawyer George Williams said Pezzullo’s messages were “exactly the sort of things you would not want a [public service] secretary involved in ... it left me very uneasy ... and I think it’s really concerning, given how we expect our Westminster system to operate”. Pezzullo suggested to Briggs he take over from Parkinson as the most senior public servant in the country. If Morrison “wants a driver in there, I would do it for him. It’s not a job that I’ve ever been interested in but if he needs a finisher in there I would of course answer the call,” Pezzullo wrote.
In July 2017 he wrote that: “As long as Labor doesn’t snipe at HA , I would be happy to explain the intellectual basis of HA in policy and strategy terms.” “[Mark] Dreyfus might be the only obstacle remaining,” Pezzullo wrote, “but I don’t think that he would have any weight internally when it comes to raw political calculations”.
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