The sacking of Mike Pezzullo was inevitable once Nine media published his correspondence with a Liberal party lobbyist and powerbroker.

So far, however, the Public Service Commission and the government is doing altogether too much to avoid detailing the circumstances that provide chapter and verse of the numerous improprieties that covered the correspondence, or the Pezzullo management style and his relationship with the Coalition government setting that made them possible.

Pezzullo was the most interesting and controversial federal public servant of the past decade.

It was not merely a matter of being located where the Coalition was working hard to confect a sense of crisis and of the prospect of an uncontrolled foreign invasion by aliens.

It was that once in power he set out to exploit it, both by the expansion of his control over national and internal security matters, and that his domination of the field involved undermining anyone who stood in his way.

When he became........

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