Bit by bit, the Department of Home Affairs is slowly being uncreated. In the weekend reshuffle, the prime minister casually revealed that, in addition to Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles making way for Tony Burke, ASIO was being moved back to the Attorney-General’s Department — from where it was removed, along with the Australian Federal Police, in late 2017. Labor moved the AFP back to the Attorney-General’s Department when it was elected; now Anthony Albanese has completed the job he should have done in 2022.
Home Affairs was always a security bureaucrat fantasy, the idea of a super-department of anything remotely connected to safety, a public service homage to the cliché that Big is Beautiful. It was peddled by the now discredited Mike Pezzullo and seized on by the ambitious Peter Dutton, who fancied himself then, and perhaps still now, more as the nation’s policeman-in-chief than any political leader.
Turning Immigration into a security super-department always carried the same risks that the Defence portfolio exemplifies every day: a giant bureaucracy spending giant sums of money beyond the effective control of anyone, even a rigid taskmaster like Pezzullo. Trying to dictate staff clothing decisions was one thing; it turned out to be quite another ensuring that proper procurement processes were followed and that staff processed visa applications properly, and preventing any of the many, many scandals and bungles that the auditor-general exposed at Home Affairs. Nor has the pace of “scathing” Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) reports slackened under Labor — which gave the portfolio $100 million in the May budget just so it could do the public service’s “core functions” better.
Like Defence, Home Affairs has also proved highly resistant to accountability — savage reviews and inquiries that would have seen smaller departments ripped apart and senior executives sent packing now pass almost without notice politically, despite the colossal sums of taxpayer money involved.
Burke’s appointment to Home Affairs — he was immigration minister in the last days of the previous Labor government, charged with implementing Kevin Rudd’s decision that no-one who arrived by boat would ever be settled in Australia — is unlikely to do anything to fix the department, any more than Pezzullo’s departure was going to. The only positives are that Burke is a relentlessly aggressive and experienced performer, and that now, with domestic intelligence-gathering returned to the Attorney-General’s Department, he can concentrate more on fixing fundamental problems in immigration, like its (non)regulation of migration agents.
But that benefit may be offset by the way Labor is now requiring Home Affairs to be an active manager of migration, through effective control of the visa system, in a way that it hasn’t before. The pressure to reduce migration, and especially foreign students, means the immigration areas of Home Affairs — which demonstrably lost control of Australia’s visa system to organised crime and people smugglers under Dutton — has to undertake an unfamiliar level of regulatory complexity in its handling of the visa system and supporting regulatory requirements, such as in relation to educational institutions.
And if “stop the students” doesn’t have quite the political imperative of “stop the boats”, the ability to achieve a marked reduction in immigration in a system that is primarily demand-driven will be crucial to the government’s reelection narrative, especially with the opposition promising large, though unclear, migration reductions.
But this is a department that leaves its ministers in the dark and fails to plan for legal outcomes it doesn’t want, so the chances that Home Affairs will provide a trouble-free run to the next election for Burke and Albanese are small.
