The editorial authorities at The Australian newspaper have splendid senses of humour if their indulgence of the laugh-a-line contributions of Peter Jennings, Greg Sheridan and Henry Ergas are anything to go by.

Jennings, who boasts his writings are “piquant”, recently said Donald Trump’s idea about clearing people out of Gaza “has about as much chance as a snowflake in Khan Younis.” High octane piquancy to be sure.

Ergas, who imagines an equivalence between Trump’s Gaza “redevelopment” and moving people from Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake and others from New Orleans after Cyclone Katrina, reckons dismissing Trump’s policy, in a manner of speaking, is “a crime against humanity.”

Sheridan, whose columns froth with indignant unrestraint bordering on piquancy, says, “Trump’s real estate developer view of the world is inherently benign”. Ah, if more countries were governed by real estate developers, the world would be a better place. In the words of the famous song, they could pave “Paradise and put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.”

In our much-troubled times the crackling flow of funnies from the Murdoch empire is a balm for a fretful citizenry. Contrary to the abrupt message on Grace Tame’s T-shirt, a grateful nation should say “Thank you, Mr Murdoch. Where would we be without you?”

And there’s more, for the Comedy Company has its cake iced by regular long epistles from the deposed former secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, who may be the most rib-tickling contributor in the Murdoch stable.

On 7 February 2025 he was at our funny bones again in an article titled “10 Steps Australia Must Take to Avoid a Terror Attack”.

Pezzullo’s starting point is ASIO’s prediction last August of a 50% chance of a terrorist attack in the next six months. Although we appear to come out on the happy side of that prediction, Pezzullo is concerned about mass terror casualties and he asserts that within government security agencies “the assignment of roles and responsibilities lacks clarity.” He complains that moving the Federal Police and the ASIO from the Home Affairs portfolio to the Attorney-General’s has caused a “blurring of responsibilities” that has “unravelled the clarity and unification of effort” that once existed when all were in the bosom of Home Affairs. These assertions are unevidenced.

Nevertheless, Pezzullo wants to bring back the Home Affairs portfolio, bigger and brighter (sic) than ever and he wants it done immediately.

In detail he would like:

• The minister for Home Affairs to be responsible for counter terrorism.
• ASIO and the AFP to report directly to that minister.
• A “National Terrorist Situation” to be “fully activated”.
• The Commonwealth to take over “full strategic leadership of the overall antisemitism effort”.
• To establish a “multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional task force” led by the Commonwealth whose “battle rhythm” would be daily reports to the Home Affairs minister that “should be suitably classified.”
• A “National Crisis Committee” of the Commonwealth and the states that would meet weekly or more often.
• The creation of a National Co-ordinator to draw up a “community engagement program”.
• The Antisemitism Envoy to be “the principal strategic adviser” to the Task Force and the Co-ordinator “in all regards”.
• An AI powered “dragnet” to fossick out “anti-Semitic content”.

And so on.

Pezzullo doesn’t pause for a moment to reflect on the catastrophic policy and administrative failures of the old Home Affairs as graphically portrayed in the Parkinson and Nixon reviews and numerous reports of the auditor-general. That is to say, he wants to re-establish a beast experience has condemned. He says Australia was “safer” under the Home Affairs of his day, an extravagant and unsupported claim most likely to be believed by a person involved in the birth of the Home Affairs portfolio, but few others.

Nor does Pezzullo provide any analysis of how the working of the existing security administration is inadequate, including through Cabinet and its committees, the primary means of co-ordination of government functions.

Then while getting on his high horse about machinery of government, Pezzullo neglects to consider fundamental related principles that haunt his Home Affairs dreams. For example:

• Government agencies should be composed as much as possible of like functions – the major Home Affairs functions of immigration, customs and excise and domestic security are notably unalike.
• Police agencies should be kept separate from organisations whose activities they are most likely to investigate – that is to say, the AFP is better placed with the attorney-general than the Home Affairs minister.
• Information and intelligence gathering agencies should be kept separate from related policy functions lest policy imperatives bias related collections as happened, for example, when the CIA was pressured by determined policy to put together a bag of lies to justify the US invasion of Iraq – that is to say, the right place for ASIO is with the attorney-general.

The latest articulation of Pezzullo’s ambitions appears to have been spurred by the caravan containing explosives found in New South Wales. “Had the caravan plot succeeded”, he says, “it would have been an attack on Australia, not an attack on an individual state.” Goodness only knows what these arcane distinctions mean but, by way of irony, on the same day Pezzullo’s article appeared in The Australian, that newspaper also contained a report from Geoff Chambers saying:

”NSW Premier Chris Minns’ description of a caravan containing decades-old explosives and details of Jewish Australians and a synagogue as a potential ‘mass casualty event’ and terrorism is yet to be stood up by investigators, amid expectations the incident will not be labelled an act of terror.”

It might be wondered how Pezzullo’s integrated, singular security organisation with an inbuilt political hunger for terrorist news might have taken this turn of events, especially after the prime minister had said the caravan incident was a terrorist matter.

In the first century AD, a Roman courtier to Nero, Gaius Petronius, Arbiter, is said to have written that, “I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency, confusion and demoralisation.”

In the proverbial nutshell that’s the story of the Home Affairs portfolio Pezzullo now wants to repeat. As that can’t be taken seriously, it’s better to laugh than cry – that’s all this revisited gratuitous empire building deserves. The interests of citizens in domestic security are sorely in need of better friends and advocates.