Mike Pezzullo sacked years too late: FLASHBACK 2023

On Monday night's episode of 7.30, former Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo admitted that he “made mistakes” and “let people down”.

In this article from 2023, Dr Abul Rizvi highlighted some of the more atrocious scandals and abuses of power that have tainted Pezzullo's legacy.

*Also listen to the audio version of this article on Spotify HERE.

IT WILL BE no surprise to anyone that Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo has been sacked.

In the more than 40 years since I first joined the public service, I cannot recall a senior departmental secretary being sacked for breaching the code of conduct. His text messages with powerbroker Scott Briggs highlighted how arrogant Pezzullo had become — no longer a public servant but a political player.

But that was the least of his mistakes.

From the time he was appointed Secretary of the new Department of Immigration and Border Protection with Scott Morrison as Minister, Pezzullo made it very clear his priority was border protection and that the days of using immigration for nation-building were over. Dark uniforms, guns and security threat alerts became the order of the day. Pezzullo imposed his dark worldview on the Department in a way that firstly Morrison and subsequently Peter Dutton loved.

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The most extraordinary thing is that the dark uniforms did not make a jot of difference to border protection. Pezzullo presided over the biggest labour trafficking scam, as well as the largest reduction in immigration compliance activity, in Australia’s history. As former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon said, that enabled the unscrupulous to run riot with Australia’s visa system. The uniforms and guns were just for show.

Pezzullo’s dark worldview led to a massive exodus of senior immigration staff whom he allegedly called “care bears”. Because Pezzullo considered himself a military genius, losing these senior staff and the corporate knowledge they took with them did not concern him. They were just baggage in his agenda to reform immigration policy.

Pezzullo’s dark worldview enabled him to convince the Coalition Government to create the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) with its over-arching national security agenda. From an immigration policy and administration perspective, that was a total disaster.

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Under Pezzullo, there was scandal after scandal including:

A lengthy delay in re-settling boat arrivals (for purely political reasons) that unnecessarily cost the taxpayer billions of dollars and his extraordinary advice to the Morrison Government to re-open the Christmas Island Detention Centre after the Medevac legislation because he said this legislation would lead to a flood of boat arrivals. There were none and all that was achieved was a highly expensive prime ministerial photo opportunity for Scott Morrison.
Illegal limits on partner visas that were applied when Dutton was Home Affairs Minister. Even if the limits were Dutton’s idea, Pezzullo had an obligation to advise Dutton that such limits were illegal. I advised the Howard Government of the same in 1996 when it wanted to limit partner visas.
The biggest labour trafficking scam abusing the asylum system in our history. This air arrivals scam was at its height in 2017-18, exactly when Pezzullo was telling Briggs that if Dutton wasn’t re-appointed Home Affairs Minister, the people smugglers would be watching and the boats would re-start. Pezzullo’s obsession with boat arrivals contributed to his negligence on labour trafficking by air.
The most significant scaling down of immigration compliance activity ever that left the visa system extraordinarily vulnerable to unscrupulous operators. This is clearly highlighted by Christine Nixon in her report on integrity in the visa system.
A visa system that has been described by current Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil as thoroughly “broken” with massive backlogs and a complete abandoning of the concept of client service. How could the visa system have reached such a state? I wrote on the appalling state of the visa system in 2021, before Labor won government and commissioned its various reviews.

In order to try and explain the appalling state of affairs described in the Parkinson and Nixon reports, Pezzullo tried to tell Senate Estimates that visa integrity had actually improved under his watch because refusal rates had increased. Even the most junior immigration officer could have told him that refusal rates do not indicate anything about visa integrity because they do not explain if the right or wrong people were refused.

That explanation was the response of a man who knew that on immigration policy and administration, he had been out of his depth for years.

*This article is also available on audio here:

Dr Abul Rizvi is an Independent Australia columnist and a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration. You can follow Abul on Twitter @RizviAbul.