The Home Affairs boss had clear instructions for public servants pushing personal agendas. He has not followed that advice, so the government must act quickly.
Pezzullo’s repeated counselling of Liberal powerbroker Scott Briggs to convey to Coalition prime ministers and others his personal suggestions about who should be in ministerial portfolios amounts to improper conduct that directly breaches the Public Service Act, which requires all public servants to act apolitically.
The Public Service Act requires federal public servants to behave at all times with integrity and apolitically. These values and the statute were referenced by Pezzullo in speeches to the Institute of Public Administration Australia in 2018 and November 2022.In 2018, he declared: “An apolitical public service is one of the key institutions in our Westminster system … What is important for the public servant is to absent oneself from any partisan discussions and avoid exposure to raw politics.
And last November, he told the institute he would need to “tread very carefully so as to avoid the appearance of expressing any view whatsoever on the conduct of politics”.
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