Barely anyone in Canberra can remember a time when Mike Pezzullo wasn't around.

His lugubrious visage has dangled from lanyards from the Defence graduate programme (1987) to Keating's Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to foreign minister Gareth Evans' office, to opposition leader Kim Beazley's, then back to defence for a good long stint, thence to customs and ultimately to a long and formidable period as the Stop The Boats generation's jump scare of choice at the apex of Home Affairs.

He's lived so long, and survived so much, that a senior bureaucrat infamously observed in 2019 that: "If there was a nuclear strike on Canberra, only two things would survive: the cockroaches and Mike Pezzullo". This week, however, the Australian government located a can of Mortein large enough to take the big guy down.

He'd been stood aside in September, as you may recall, over a series of compulsively readable but organisationally imprudent text messages sent over the years to Scott Morrison confidant, businessman and Liberal Party bustler-about, Scott Briggs.

Pez has been at home on full pay ($930K per annum!) since, moodily playing Poleconomy and waiting for a verdict.

 

The government sacked Home Affairs boss Mike Pezzullo this week. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

Last Friday, in an ominous development, the Remuneration Tribunal signed off on changes to sacked secretaries. DEIRDRE CHAMBERS! Under the new rules, the Pez may not be paid out for the remainder of his contract, which he would have been otherwise.

For a party that was very critical of the Morrison government's sneakiness around formal announcements, Labor has nonetheless adopted some of the signature tactics.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neill held a press conference at 9am on Monday, in which there was no indication of the Scud missile already airborne and heading Pezwards. The PM's office announced the sacking thirty minutes later.

(This is not the first instance of distinct trickiness. Two weeks ago, with the prime minister on one of his regular excursions to the US, the government waited a full hour after Anthony Albanese's final press conference to announce a Chinese warship had injured Australian Navy personnel. Mmm, transparency.)

Now, as any viewer of suspense films knows all too well, once you pick a fight with a multi-tentacled and powerful enemy, you really need to nail that sucker once and for all if you want to avoid a blood-drenched sequel.

And it's a bit early to say with confidence, as defence correspondent Andrew Greene writes here, whether the mounting collection of horrors from the Pezzullo years (unbelievable amounts of public money spent on overpriced offshore detention shonks, abuse of the visa system) will be enough to extinguish him — or whether some kind of force will emerge to wreak havoc in revenge.

Either way, with the High Court mowing down various elements of this nation's immigration detention habits, it is — to adapt the immortal words of Leslie Nielsen — a helluva week to quit sniffing glue.

The Home Affairs Department has literally been in foster care since September: former deputy secretary Stephanie Foster was put in charge when Pez went on leave and on Tuesday was appointed to the position full-time.

This makes her a perfect fourth for the "Clean That Up, Would You, Love?" bridge dream team of new Qantas chief Vanessa Hudson, RBA Governor Michele Bullock and X's new CEO Linda Yaccarino.

High Court happenings

As mentioned above, the government is having a shocker with the High Court.

Last month, it ruled that the government's ambitious citizenship-stripping powers — conceived during Peter Dutton's stint in Home Affairs, under the approving eye of Pez — were unconstitutional. (A point that was wearily made in cabinet at the time they were planned, by boring lawyer types including George Brandis, Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull.).

Keen not to appear Soft On Citizenship, and of course smarting from the allegation that it's allowed unbraceleted foreign offenders to roam the streets, the Albanese government has proposed new legislation.

You wouldn't call it a "citizenship stripping law", exactly. Probably more of a "citizenship shimmying-about-provocatively-in-a-flesh-coloured-G-string" type thing. Basically the proposed laws allow for citizenship to be removed from alleged perps, but ask judges rather than ministers to do the actual stripping. We'll see.

 has been that of the Rohingya man known as NZYQ, in which the High Court overturned the practice of indefinite detention, releasing a series of erstwhile prisoners, unleashing the unholy policy scramble of recent weeks. Will they have to wear ankle bracelets? How many of them? What if we can't find them to put the ankle bracelets on, and so on.

Home Affairs is now buffeted, as David Speers writes, by the "who's tougher?" political pro-wrestling fixture to which we have become so accustomed in this country over the years.

This nation is tough on ankles, and the causes of ankles.

This week, and I'm not making this up, the parliament hosted an argument about who out of the major political parties disapproves more of paedophiles.

Here, for your interest, are the High Court's full reasons for its decision.

And here is the government's announcement of a quarter of a billion dollars to be spent monitoring non-citizens who have been convicted of crimes but completed their custodial sentences (who, if they were Aussies, would be known by the local term, "people who have paid their debt to society").

And here is Brett Worthington's account of JUST how potty the last few weeks have been, and how it could have been avoided.

Not tonight, Murray-Darling

As you know, thanks to the excellent and reliable sense of humour of the Australian voting public, the government does not have the numbers in the Senate. So it's obliged to go fishing for votes on tricky bills in the increasingly eco-diverse waters of the crossbench.

Take the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. It's the largest and most vicious triffid in the environment portfolio bouquet Albanese handed to his colleague and Left faction rival Tanya Plibersek after the 2022 election, rather than the education ministership she'd been expecting/exhaustively trained for.

WATCH

Duration: 9 minutes 13 seconds9m

 

Tanya Plibersek speaks to 7:30 about Labor's deal with the Greens on the Murray-Darling Basin plan.(Sarah Ferguson)

This week, Plibersek cut a deal with the Greens on the plan, after negotiations with her Greens counterpart Sarah Hanson-Young.

But she still needed two votes.

So … David Pocock was won over. The Independent from the ACT. Good at sport. Interested in water.

But also: David Van! The independent senator — who's been on the crossbench since an unfortunate series of events made it uncomfortable for him to remain in the Liberal Party — is the final vote Plibersek secured to extend the Murray-Darling Basin Plan's deadline and allow the Commonwealth to use water buybacks.

It also removes a cap on the amount of water that can be purchased from farmers and ensures new water-saving infrastructure projects can be delivered to meet environmental targets.