News

With the Coalition stepping up attacks on the immigration minister, Home Affairs insiders spoke to The Saturday Paper about much-needed reforms to the department. By Karen Barlow.

What is happening in Home Affairs following Mike Pezzullo’s departure

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles in parliament this week.

Credit: AAP Image / Lukas Coch

As the opposition homes in on Andrew Giles in the hope of claiming its first scalp of the Albanese government, work is afoot to fix dysfunction within Immigration and the sprawling Home Affairs portfolio.

There’s no indication of Giles being ousted, with the prime minister putting a high value on Labor stability, but the controversy and missteps that have followed the High Court decision on indefinite detention last year have given the Coalition its first sniff of genuine crisis in the Albanese government.

This week Giles, under pressure in the theatre of Question Time, was focused on addressing his contentious direction 99, which requires the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) to consider community ties when reviewing deportation appeals, so visa cancellations for individuals, including sex offenders, have been overturned.

Giles promised that a revised ministerial direction will “make sure that the protection of the Australian community outweighs all other considerations”.

In Question Time, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “We continue to refuse and cancel visas on character grounds. We continue to deport people who have no right to be here. Since coming to government, we’ve deported over 4200 individuals from immigration detention.”

The Saturday Paper understands the new ministerial direction to the tribunal is expected to meet two tests, one of the national interest and the other of what is deemed “common sense”.

Former Department of Immigration deputy secretary Abul Rizvi suspects the seriousness of some of the cases is “overplayed”. He insists there are laws in place if a tribunal member has got it wrong. There is also the issue of natural justice for people who have served their sentences, no matter how awful their crimes. It is a political minefield, but a feature of Australia’s justice system.

The redraft may make the situation worse with “receiving” nations such as New Zealand, Rizvi says. “If Australia behaves like a bunch of arrogant so-and-so’s, the cooperation of our receiving countries will start to dry up. They don’t have to cooperate with us.”

Direction 99 is not the only direction currently used to re-cancel visas – there are other Dutton-era ones – but Giles admits it has “not been working as intended”.

Also this week, Giles has had to “clarify” advice he says was provided by his department that led to his erroneous statement in an interview last week that drones were used to monitor murderers and sex offenders released in the community by the High Court decision.

The shadow immigration minister, Dan Tehan, wants to see that advice. “I think while you’ve got ministers who want to throw the department under the bus at every occasion, that’s not going to change the working environment of the department,” he tells The Saturday Paper.

He sees the department as taking the fall and suggests more experience is needed in the very difficult portfolio.

“Ultimately, in the end, reform has got to start with the ministers themselves. Now they’ve had two years in charge,” he says. “I think the prime minister at some stage is going to have to admit that he got it wrong.”

The Turnbull-era super domestic security Department of Home Affairs is an operational department, likened to running a small navy or air force. There are now more than 15,000 employees, almost half of whom work for the supercharged customs service, Australian Border Force, and it is also the second largest revenue collector in government, bringing in $22 billion a year.

It is not one workplace culture but several. In its creation, Immigration was watered down, becoming a section rather than a department for the first time since 1945. It is still not a cabinet position in the ministry. Giles is the junior minister to Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil.

Now the “boats and borders” portfolio of Home Affairs faces a comprehensive restructure following the termination of departmental head Mike Pezzullo and revelations that it is the most undesirable workplace culture in the public service.

Insiders, not named by The Saturday Paper to allow them to speak freely, say a lot of work has been done but a “really big” rebuild is required. Year after year there have been problems with Home Affairs. They have included visa scams, visa backlogs, Red Notice bungles and a scandalously outdated IT system.

“It’s poorly resourced,” Rizvi tells The Saturday Paper. “It’s trying to manage volumes of cases that are just extraordinary with a staffing level that had, under Pezzullo, shrunk dramatically. Now the current government is trying to restore that, but that’s got a long way to go.”

Rizvi speaks of morale broken by Pezzullo’s authoritarian leadership. “The message was clear. He dressed a lot of people up in very dark uniforms. He introduced guns. And having done all of that, it led to a massive exodus of senior staff from the department.”

Home Affairs heaved from the start. Encouraged and driven by Pezzullo, the portfolio at its launch in December 2017 took in Border Force, the Australian Federal Police, ASIO, AUSTRAC, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, cybersecurity, immigration and multicultural affairs. (The AFP went back to the Attorney-General’s Department when Labor took office, while the recently established National Emergency Management Agency was added to Home Affairs to deal with national crises and disasters.)

Then Coalition attorney-general George Brandis and foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop objected to its size but lost. As two very senior Liberals, they sensed too much power for Dutton and were against moving police and intelligence gathering functions in with policy areas such as immigration.

The hard edge was the perfect fit for both Dutton and Pezzullo. According to the last Coalition home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, Pezzullo ran the department with an “iron fist” for six years.

“The department wasn’t without making errors. No department is. But one thing with Pezzullo was that if you raised something, he would fix it straight away. Straight onto it,” she tells The Saturday Paper.

“I think he also would have been alert to the consequences of some of the actions. Now, whether the ministers of the day were prepared to listen to it, I think he would have been forthright in saying, ‘Well, these are the consequences of doing that.’ He’s hawkish on a whole range of things.”

She was, however, highly critical of the former secretary when his dealings with a visa processing scandal, revealed in explosively leaked messages with Liberal Party powerbroker and lobbyist Scott Briggs, were exposed. He lost his job, and any prospect of moving to the Defence Department, and was found to have breached the public service code of conduct on 14 occasions.

As the Australian Public Service Commission recently noted, Home Affairs handles a “difficult and complex set of responsibilities, which are subject to sudden shocks and crises”.

In its recent capability assessment of Home Affairs, the APSC praised staff for having a “ ‘can-do’ attitude” and being “confident in their ability to meet challenges head on”. However, it found “room for improvement in the department’s relationships with ministers and their advisers”.

Insiders say it is “odd” that notifications of judgements from any court or the AAT appear to have failed to get through to the immigration minister. These cases require the minister to decide whether or not to use his special ministerial powers to intervene.

Some point to the Home Affairs legal group, which manages the cases, being stretched after the two recent controversial High Court cases covering indefinite immigration detention. The division is also dealing with the flow-on preventative detention legislation from the cases and the pressure to re-detain individuals who have committed a crime or who pose a risk to the community.

It is understood there are about 18,000 current litigation cases against Giles. It is a quirk of the system that the minister himself is named as the defendant, but insiders say there has been a “massive gear up” in the legal division, including the appointment of Clare Sharp as lead counsel.

The Home Affairs secretary, Stephanie Foster, admits her department broke protocol in failing to keep Giles informed of cases.

“We are absolutely seized as we try to understand what has been happening with the absolute urgency of throwing all of our resources at pulling out the cases which need to get to the minister immediately and doing so,” she told Senate estimates.

Foster, who was an associate secretary in charge of the immigration section before her appointment to succeed Pezzullo in November 2023, puts the failure down to a resourcing problem.

Insiders say the visa cancellation area and the legal division are known as the most well-resourced and highly experienced areas of Home Affairs. It is also a sensitive departmental duty to revoke a visa when required, warranting extra attention and continued staffing.

Rizvi has sympathy for Foster, who has a defence background and who came into Home Affairs from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. O’Neil did not reject reports in March that she reduced Foster to tears after an “incredibly robust” discussion in the ministerial wing. The minister insisted she had a “very warm and collaborative relationship” with the secretary.

“I think she’s a capable public servant, but she’s been dropped in a complex portfolio where she has no background,” Rizvi says. “And she has no staff with much of a background.”

Home Affairs has a particular problem with staff morale that has glared in each annual confidential public service staff survey known as the APS census. Ranked against all the main agencies, the department is near the bottom of the pile on measures of bullying and harassment, leadership, whether staff would recommend their agency as a good workplace, and if they felt satisfied with their pay and benefits packages.

The Home Affairs minister has embarked with Foster on a reform agenda targeting culture and a departmental focus that O’Neil has said was “too narrow”.

As for leadership, the department acknowledged it had a high senior executive turnover and “risks losing key skills and capabilities”. There are significant workforce gaps and inadequate planning to deal with the shortcomings. “Notwithstanding positive recent changes, staff are concerned about the department’s culture. The department needs to lift training and development in all areas and at all levels,” the report found.

Moreover, a recent audit by the Australian National Audit Office into the department’s regulation of registered migration agents found there was no effective regulation of what is widely regarded as a troubled sector with dodgy operators.

No ministerial statement of expectations. No current compliance plan. No data to inform a risk assessment. Overall, it found the department could not effectively determine whether registered agents were “fit and proper” to give immigration assistance and were “persons of integrity”.

Karen Andrews agrees the Home Affairs agency is “siloed” and in need of reform. She says the public servants in the department need to be more empowered to give advice and to raise issues.

“There needs to be greater responsibility given to the deputy secretaries to be able to manage their areas,” she says.

If the Coalition were returned in the last election, Andrews says, it would have separated Border Force out of Home Affairs and left the AFP in, while tying it more to ASIO. The Border Force commissioner already sits outside Home Affairs.

“Quite frankly, that actually led to some of the issues with what happened with people who were coming across the border,” she says.

“It worked in a loose fashion, but it didn’t have a clear chain of command.”

She also says the ASIO boss, director-general of security Mike Burgess, would have been her top pick as a successor to Pezzullo.

“He’s got ASD [Australian Signals Directorate] experience and he’s also an engineer,” she says. “It’s a particular way of thinking that I think was very well suited to dealing with the Department of Home Affairs. I think he could have been the stand-out.”

Home Affairs observers say Burgess, whose term soon expires, is unlikely to want the job and is likely better suited as an agency head. The Saturday Paper sought comment from the director-general of security but the offer was declined.

Foster points to “significant challenges” as she embraces the “ambitious transformation agenda” for a Home Affairs rebuild.

“We’re putting a huge effort into rethinking our approach to integrity, to replacing processes and rules with principles and accountability,” she said.

Culture change is typically slow and difficult in the public service. That said, Home Affairs is not a typical agency – not least as it has a political blowtorch blasting nonstop over its operations, with an election on the horizon.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 8, 2024 as "What is happening in Home Affairs following Pezzullo's departure".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Send this article to a friend for free.

RELATED READING