Just now, his department is setting up a branch focused on cyber security. But those who monitor positions vacant will regularly find intelligence and security jobs in almost any field one can think of. These are not jobs inside agencies falling under the Home Affairs umbrella, such as ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Crime Commission or Austrac. Nor are they, strictly, to assist the functions of Border Force. They are much more for the political purposes and bureaucratic war-fighting capacity of top management.

After all, there are so many action bodies in the portfolio, having some security or intelligence functions, that it is necessary to have a secondary bureaucracy to knit them all into a single national security blanket. Otherwise we cannot be sure that no terrorist, no foreign spy, no saboteur, and certainly no paedophile can penetrate our defences.

Coordination is the new name of the game in this field. At least for empire builders. It is nearly always an embuggerance for everyone else and certainly never promotes efficiency, effectiveness or clarity of purpose.

There is so much coordination going on by so many agencies that those who are being coordinated must wonder how their work can get done. It is almost reminiscent of those glory days during the Gillard government when the Commonwealth and each state and territory had coordinators-general for both infrastructure and Indigenous programs, causing such blockages that I was calling for an uber coordinator-general to coordinate them all.

Though some of these constituent agencies, such as ASIO, and, supposedly, the federal police, are independent agencies exercising their statutory functions and duties completely independently of political direction, one of the great advantages of having such bodies centrally located in the same portfolio is that masterful bureaucrats can seek to "coordinate them", get them "singing from the same hymn-sheet", and have them all in agreement about the nature of the security and crime environment, and about the priorities to be put to keeping the nation safe and the minister happy.

This is in part in pursuit of the notion that terrorist incidents such as the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon might have been averted had a wealth of intelligence, located in a host of different agencies, been instead read at a single desk, instead of, in jigsaw pieces, by agencies and analysts jealous of each other and uninclined to share facts or conclusions. How much better it would have been had all functions been centralised, the jurisdictional disputes swept away, with the nuggets of important clues lying on the ground just waiting to be seized and assayed.

There's some superficial plausibility in the idea of the need for close coordination, but it is not self-evidently true. The bigger the operation, for example, the more bits of information are being gathered, and weighed measured and counted, inevitably at hundreds of desks. Even if, in theory, there is a process funnelling potentially useful information for further analysis, honest opinions will differ on what seems important.

The more information, the more difficult it is, even with computers and other aids, to recognise nuggets in all of the rock and the dirt. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the East German state had pretty much half of the population spying on the other half – an aspiration Pezzullo could not reach, even if he tried. The American national security establishment had more than 100,000 men and women closely studying every piece of information that could be gathered, or deduced, about the state of politics local, regional, and national behind the Iron Curtain. Yet none of these foresaw the rebellion that ended the Cold War, even a few days before. The Soviet Empire collapsed without their help and advice. Perhaps each needed a few more coordination agencies.

Moreover, the best centralised agencies, whether in intelligence, security or law enforcement, operate as an academy of ideas, in which bright public servants are encouraged to debate conclusions, have developed opinions of their own, and can differ from the views or conclusions of more senior officials. Perhaps even the secretary. Home Affairs is not famous for being such an environment, and it is, on that account as well as the developed culture of paranoia and suspicion about leaking, heterodoxy and cloning of management that many of the best brains would not think of working for it.

It goes without saying that the department intelligence effort is not primarily a production for external "clients" – as, say, the work of ASIO, or, in the criminal sphere, the AFP or Austrac is. Nor is the intelligence in question primarily about, say, planned or feared people-smuggling operations, or mutinies by the people in our overseas immigration concentration camps. That sort of information gathering, whether from open or clandestine sources, has long been a part of the functions of the department.

Increasingly, instead the new functions are ones designed to give Home Affairs a place at the table when the big boys – sometimes girls – are making the big and important decisions about international events, and the activities of terrorists and spies. Some agencies within Home Affairs – such as ASIO – will be at the big boys' table in their own right, as will, from time to time, the AFP.

Mike Pezzullo has long claimed a place at the table because he thinks national security is his specialty area. He has a way of describing almost anything as though it were a national security matter, and a critical and urgent one at that. His dominating manner at all levels of the bureaucracy – and the reluctance of any of his peers to put him in his place – has made him probably the most significant public servant of our time. But he is far from the most influential, except among a certain class of politicians, and far from the most admired.

Home Affairs is by no means the only bureaucratic empire closely involved in coordinating, centralising, servicing and organising the servicing of security and intelligence information.

A major security review a bit more than a year ago recommended an Office of National Intelligence to coordinate intelligence going to government, a function that was once supposed to belong to the Office of National Assessments. It became operational on December 18, subsuming ONA, and with somewhat wider functions, if by no means guaranteed the same level of independence from government.

When Pezzullo's campaign for a centralised agency under his control succeeded, he was able to wrestle a division or two of public servants from the Attorney-General's Department. Along with them came branches with functions as diverse as complicating and making worse any natural disasters (how come they are not being deployed to Menindie?). Home Affairs also got physical security of buildings and ministers; the national security hotline and the provision of "whole-of-government situational awareness to inform national decision making and co-ordinate Australian government physical assistance during" in events such as the Lindt cafe siege.

Heaven only knows how Pezzullo might have handled that crisis better than the hapless NSW Police, but one can be sure the field marshal himself would have been present, calming the panickers, and reprimanding the inconstant.

So we now have a much depleted national security and crime area in Attorney-General's? Not on your nelly. AG's may have lost a battle, but is still very much in the war, and with an undiminished propensity to push its own agendas, whether the government agrees with it (or, in the case of former attorney-general George Brandis, even understands it).

The continuing remit in the machinery of government provisions may be vague: "to sustain our collaboration and engagement with regional countries and traditional partners to build capacity to minimise threats; cooperation with international organisations; developing strategies, policies, programs, activities and tools to counter violent extremism and engage with jurisdictions on intervention and diversion programs and community referral pathways". But there is no way by which it defers to Mike Pezzullo, or his department, in claiming primacy of advice over national security or crime legislation.

Naturally, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet also has a security division, of unlimited scope, to advise the prime minister on national security matters, and to "coordinate" all opinions, advice and jurisdictional squabbles of bodies inside the Australian Intelligence Community, and hangers-on.

Strictly, there are six members of the Australian Intelligence Community, (or seven when one counts the new "co-ordinating" office of national intelligence: ASIO, ASIS, ASD, DIO, the AGO and ONA. But the "community" now informally includes the AFP, Border Force, the Criminal Intelligence Commission, Austrac, as well as folk such as the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee, the National Intelligence Collection Management Committee, the centre of counter-terrorism, the cyber security centre and so on. So many, indeed, that we probably need some bodies, outside of home affairs, to coordinate them.

And of course other departments which claim, like home affairs to be central policy agencies providing "co-ordinated strategy and policy leadership" on security and intelligence matters have bureaucratic divisions containing phrases such as "national security" and "terrorism". Defence and Foreign Affairs and Trade have such divisions, and so, if on smaller scale, do the agencies that control the spending. The administrative functions of such bodies do not, usually, have anything much to do with actual security agencies inside the portfolio umbrella. Such agencies – ASD or defence intelligence, or ASIS, have their own warriors, advocates and agents waging bureaucratic warfare on the Canberra chessboard. The extra added ingredient from the public service is to guarantee departmental secretaries a place at the table, and a slice of the pie.

I think there are about 7000 women and men inside the AIC as narrowly defined, and (depending on how many one thinks are doing intelligence work) perhaps another 4000 in the wider security community, such as the federal police. It is hard to establish how many ordinary public servants are supping at the national security trough – because the modern, agile and transparent APS no longer reports how many people are assigned to which functions, and many departments do not even publish organisational charts. There would be at least 1000.

Most of these have high-level, well paid jobs, on average, for example, higher than the median ASIO officer or ONA analyst. They are engaged in "policy work" rather than actual intelligence collection and analysis. Their advice, once filtered through ministerial advisers, is what helps politicians to decide what to include in new legislation, what new national security crises can be confected, how supposedly independent officials can be verballed into supporting political agendas, preferably on occasions surrounded by flags, and how everything can be politicised and used to wedge opposition parties. Luckily, opposition shadow ministers in the national security field know the game, which they themselves have previously played from the government side, and the only folk flummoxed by what goes on is usually the odd civilian.

In theory the Australian Intelligence Community – wide or narrow – and the war against crime is subject to what the government, and the agencies, insist to be rigorous and searching accountability requirements. Thus we have the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security and the mysterious, secretive and unaccountable Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity.

But the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security has no brief or direct power to investigate alleged malfeasance, nonfeasance or misfeasance by an office in the national security division of PM&C;, Attorney-General's, Home Affairs, Defence or Foreign Affairs and Trade, or within any other area of the public service performing functions involved with national security. And the Commissioner for Law Enforcement Integrity has no power over most public servants, unless, like most Border Force officials, their functions are specifically included. (It is not clear to me that every corrupt decision on, say, a visa matter or excise charge by a departmental officer necessarily falls into the ACLEI orbit.)

It is hard to establish what the ACLEI does with its money, powers and resources. But the thin public record of its work has never pointed to the possibility of an abuse of power by someone not formally inside the "law enforcement community", or the risk that people performing bureaucratic functions alongside such people might be exposed to the risk of corruption.

Nor, generally, do these bodies answer to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on intelligence and security, unless, as sometimes happens, they are there supporting some legislative proposal. Not one of these agencies has a function, or powers or responsibilities, spelt out by law.

With intelligence and security, the usual cry is who will guard the guardians. But we must also ask who will coordinate these coordinators? Or cull them if one doubts that they add value: there's probably $500 million to be saved that could build a hospital or two. Or even a warship.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com