The next Pezzullo will be harder to spot — and harder still to cut out

If there’s something that’s always been clear about Mike Pezzullo, it’s that he is a man of many convictions but very little courage. He has spent the past few decades swanning about Canberra as a cross between Malcolm Tucker, Frank Grimes and a police dog — an operator and enforcer who has managed to shape the defining policies of successive governments simply by being present and persistent. He is the inevitable result of decades of hands-off politicking, left to thrive like black mould.

Pezzullo is the perfect personification of the overweening loserdom of contemporary Australian politics, where the unchecked and the unremarkable walk the barren wastes of the body politic like mighty Uruk-hai. Here is a man who managed to carve himself out a large and deadly fiefdom with little more than WhatsApp and wankery, and little to no public pushback or scrutiny from a press he swiftly moved to punish and a system unsure what to do with a man as ill-tempered as he is zealous and unelected. 

Despite being described as an “empire-building Canberra mandarin with a Manichean view of the world”, Pezzullo has repeatedly shown he’s little more than a jumped-up powerbroker, allowed to help chart successive prime ministers through the paramilitarisation of our borders and our parahumane refugee policies. Malcolm Turnbull and the likes let Pezzullo, just another dagger in Canberra’s coterie of cutthroats, convince them to do what their remaining morsels of conscience would not, and as such outsourced the dark reasoning within their unsteady and illogical policymaking. 

This class of shadow-politician is now vital to Canberra’s irradiated ecosystem. The blurring of public servant, consultant, frontbencher and lobbyist is a design feature, not a flaw — one which Pezzullo should get full credit for spearheading. Within this murkiness, the general directionlessness of the politics of the day is given an air of well-intended adventurism, as opposed to what it is: the sorry meanderings of the town drunk lost in a pea-soup fog. 

Much like Kathryn Campbell was with robodebt, Pezzullo is functional as both point man and putz for governments in constant need of both. It is handy to keep someone around who is full-tilt and fall guy, an in-house Joe Pesci who can kneecap problem cases but be dissolved in a vat of acid as soon as his “Who should I kneecap next, boss?” texts leak. Someone like Dutton — who can’t afford to appear any more rabid than he is for fear of an Atticus Finch-type no-scoping him at a press conference — understands the innate value of a Pezzullo: a fellow egotist with the means and schemes to aid with a big heist, but with the bonus of disposability. 

Anthony Albanese also, probably, understands the value of a man as of little value as Pezzullo. There is a sense that, quietly, his prime ministership is kept plodding along by many such figures, most of whom most likely lack Pezzullo’s fatal overdose of personality. These wishy-washy actors are vital in maintaining the wishy-washy governing that presides over us, and heaven knows the private messages the Pezzullos of our time are sending to their preferred branch stackers and privatisation peddlers. 

Modern Australian politicians have demanded we see them as anything but that, wanting to appear instead as something between a casual babysitter and door-to-door salesperson. Is it any surprise that this brand of bellyacher is susceptible to the guileless charms of a bloke like Pezzullo? Which one of these dillweeds could manage him, let alone keep him in check?

By depoliticising the very idea of the politician, ours have given ample room for the politicised public servant to not only pop up but flourish in Canberra’s otherwise barren soil.  

It is what it is. These are the men that 25 years of rot and stagnancy give you. The next iteration will be harder to spot, and harder still to cut out.