If it survives until then, the Department of Home Affairs will celebrate its seventh birthday on 20 December. That’s seven years too long for an organisation that has been an epicentre of political, policy and administrative failure.
Perhaps sidetracked by “great man” notions of history, some have been inclined to blame the department’s troubles on its first head, Michael Pezzullo. With him off the scene it’s thought the department can glide into the sunlit uplands of its finest hours. That is unfair to Pezzullo and at odds with reality.
Legitimate questions can be asked about Pezzullo’s period of suzerainty, but Napoleon Bonaparte couldn’t have made Home Affairs work. Pezzullo’s replacement, Stephanie Foster, and the latest minister, Tony Burke, have been given jobs in which success will elude them, just as it did for their recent predecessors.
Notwithstanding this prospect, the Public Service Commission kicked off a “capability review” of Home Affairs led by a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Ian Watt, assisted by Liza Carroll, Maree Bridges and Mark Buzzacco. Their report, released in May, is a dismal, formulaic document — impressionistic, generalised and crawling with clichés.
The report drew on two letters from Foster, one from the head of the Border Force, interviews with staff “at all levels” and other “stakeholders,” nine workshops and a staff survey. That is to say, it gathered evidence mainly by speaking to people. That’s all very well, but all that talking has left the report long on opinion and weak on analysis. When it draws, too infrequently, on solid facts, it tends to make a mountain of them. For, example it grumbles that Home Affairs has an annual senior staff turnover of 18.8 per cent compared to a public service–wide figure of 16.9 per cent. Is that a big deal?
The review contrasts strikingly with the auditor-general’s forensic examinations of Home Affairs’s performance. Those reports, often stinging, receive a mere six-line mention from Dr Watt and his colleagues in their fifty-page report, leaving an invaluable source of independent evidence effectively by the wayside.
The department’s supposed achievements, meanwhile, are summed up in in one brief and unilluminating paragraph. What can be made of bald claims that Home Affairs seized 4.78 tons of cocaine and “facilitated” seventeen million airline travellers arriving from overseas? Assessing capability without closely measuring results is rather like selectors of Australia’s Olympic team picking its members by judging how fit they look while neglecting how fast they can run, swim or walk. If this is typical of the Public Service Commission’s capability reviews, we need a review of the capability review methodology.
These methodological weaknesses didn’t inhibit the review from marking Home Affairs against eighteen capabilities with gradings of “leading, embedded, developing, emerging.” Despite some elaboration in the report, it’s hard to know what these mean, but let’s say they are credit, pass, lower pass and fail. On that basis, Home Affairs gets one pass, fourteen lower passes and three fails.
The review’s suggestions for lifting these unimpressive ratings are vague and bereft of particulars. The department is urged to “set the vision,” “bridge… the current division between Border Force and the rest of the department,” “develop and articulate a new purpose and strategic direction,” develop a “comprehensive workforce strategy,” “drive cultural change,” “prioritise building collaboration,” “establish an executable vision,” “require an uplift in leaders’ collective effort,” and so on and unhelpfully on. How this is to be done is largely left in the mists.
Ms Foster appears to have lapped this up. Responding to Watt and his colleagues, she thanked staff for “leaning into” a review whose report will be “driving our agenda” in a “strong strategic policy direction.” Now she’s released a document titled “Transformation-on-a-Page,” a “high level road map for our Home Affairs transformation agenda.” She promises to “embed one-Home Affairs behaviours,” “offer industry a ‘single window’ and the community no ‘wrong door,’” “modernise our border to drive economic outcomes” and “develop a sophisticated foresighting capability.”
Map? Good luck to anyone who can find their way find through this thicket of platitudes.
Yet even if Dr Watt’s report and Ms Foster’s response were exemplars of right-thinking clarity, Home Affairs remains — except around the edges, and even with the best “foresighting capability” — more or less unimprovable. True, the government has removed the Federal Police and the ASIO from the portfolio. That mitigates the agony but leaves too much still to go around.
The department was the product of political and bureaucratic empire-building. That is to say, it was constructed for the wrong reasons. More significantly, it combines unlike functions whose co-location are mutually degrading. Elements of national security, the customs and excise responsibilities of the Commonwealth and the immigration and settlement of immigrants have virtually nothing in common, invocations of “border protection” notwithstanding. Their proper performance demands different styles and methods of operation that can’t be provided effectively under the unified management of a single organisation. These inbuilt flaws and how they might affect an “executable vision” escaped the attention of the capability review.
The most tragic consequence of the creation of Home Affairs has been the damage it has done to immigration policy and administration, a vitally important federal government program that immensely affects the shape and character of Australian society.
The Chifley government created an immigration department in 1945 to seek out people to come to Australia and help them settle in. It provided a focus for the country’s immigration interests and helped maintain the broad community support and social cohesion without which those interests would not have been well served.
After the department became a subordinate part of Home Affairs in 2017 its functions became distorted by obsessive security concerns and other pressures. The flow of immigration continued but the departmental focus was distracted by a perceived need to keep out undesirables. Vast visa-decision backlogs were allowed, the number of “temporary migrants” rose to close to two million, and absurd measures were adopted to make it more difficult for new arrivals to get citizenship and so be able to participate properly in the life of the country.
As last year’s review of Home Affairs by former prime minister’s department secretary Martin Parkinson concluded, “the migration program is no longer fit for purpose” and “tangled and lengthy pathways to permanent residence” were undermining “democratic resilience and social cohesion.” As an aside, it’s not evident that Dr Watt and his colleagues took into account Parkinson’s review or another last year by Christine Nixon.
Now the opposition leader Peter Dutton is booting immigration around like a political football. His calls for all people in Gaza to be prohibited from coming to Australia precisely fit the definition of racism, that is, discriminating against a race or ethnic group rather than considering individuals on their merits. As a former immigration department deputy secretary Peter Hughes has pointed out, “Australia has always found a way to bring in people suffering in conflict zones — when it wants to.” But Mr Dutton is more interested in tawdry appeals to base instincts that undermine the community cohesion essential for successful immigration. It’s trite to say so, but immigration cannot work when antagonistic community feeling against migrants is rife.
Immigration will continue to have a critical influence on what Australia is. From 1945 to 2017 that responsibility was underpinned by a stand-alone department. After it was abolished and tucked into Home Affairs, Dr Parkinson was able to come to the gloomy conclusion that the immigration program was “no longer fit for purpose.” That wasn’t coincidental. How much more evidence is needed?
If the political imperative to not appear weak on national security requires it, the government could retain a Home Affairs department composed of compatible functions. Immigration, however, is not compatible with other functions now in Home Affairs and is being debased by them.
“Sophisticated foresighting capability” isn’t needed to appreciate what should be done. The government should re-establish a freestanding immigration department containing all related policy and administration, including settlement, asylum and visa decision-making and all compliance functions. Such an arrangements worked well for more than seventy years.
Does the country need to wait for Home Affairs to reinforce failure and deliver the next immigration crisis and associated ministerial sackings? •
