Why cabinet needs the two Mikes – Pezzullo and Burgess

As head of ASIO he has been forthright about the risks the country faces and unafraid to enter the political fray. He has made some pointed criticisms of the Coalition for politicising national security during last year’s election warm-up.

His allegations at Stanford came the same day as the US again tightened the screws on the big semiconductor companies’ legal requirement to desist from selling advanced chips to China and its proxies.

The chip war is all about limiting China’s access to America’s artificial intelligence advantage, amid the Pentagon’s consensus that this is where the battle for next-generation supremacy will be played out.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands control key advanced chip technologies and fabrication, and have now been roped into Washington’s sophisticated play to choke China from easy access to US know-how –especially when it comes to military use of AI.

China pays more for chips than oil and the struggle for silicon supremacy is easily the biggest, and arguably the most important, battle in the current US-China fight for global power, economic control and strategic influence.

In Canberra, Burgess is known as a player mandarin, publicly throwing his weight around as part of his brief to be an independent adviser on national security.

So too is the other Mike – Mike Pezzullo. The equally hawkish Home Affairs secretary is notionally Burgess’ boss. But he has been stood aside, on full pay, after The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published lawfully obtained private messages he exchanged with Liberal lobbyist and influencer Scott Briggs.

Pezzullo’s fate is in the hands of the no-nonsense former Medicare boss, Lynelle Briggs, who will, without lawyers, determine the outcome in a much-awaited code of conduct review. It is the latest in a conga line of code reviews of former secretaries. The others have stemmed from the robo-debt royal commission.

Force of nature

Pezzullo is a force of nature, and was widely criticised two years ago for his public drums-of-war warnings. That was before the Ukraine invasion and now Gaza.

Decidedly old-school, Pezzullo is certainly not your modern mandarin, and his agencies have been wracked with reports of malcontent and poor cultures. In last year’s staff census, fewer than half of the Home Affairs staff (49 per cent) said they would recommend the agency as a good place to work, 20 percentage points below the Australian Public Service average.

Bureaucratically blunt, with a withering tongue, the ambitious and erudite Pezzullo has long been a classic Machiavelli-like player at the big end of government. No one doubted that he was the source of scathing characterisations of both senior ministers and his fellow secretaries.

Hubris is the original and worst of the seven deadly sins, but not a sackable public service offence. Pezzullo’s integrity is not in question and he is part of a long pedigree of tough-minded bureaucratic leaders who have ruled the national capital after World War II.

As Burgess showed this week, playing real-time on the world stage is not for the faint of heart, and Australia would be worse off if forceful, brilliant, albeit flawed characters such as Pezzullo were forced to take up full-time golf.

Many officials are privately scathing of their peers and ministers – often with good reason. Pezzullo is obviously being hung for being caught out, rather than any substantive misdemeanour of not being nice and playing politics. In Canberra!

I have many times seen and heard similar and worse take-downs from otherwise highly capable senior bureaucrats.

Whatever his personal failings, the government needs the sort of frank and fearless advice that Pezzullo and his fierce warrior class such as Burgess bring to the cabinet table.